SUMMARY Summary Social cognitive abilities underpin successful social functioning. They enable humans to fine-tune their behaviour to that of others and to guide behaviour within social relationships. Basic social cognitive abilities emerge during early childhood, but the more elaborate forms continue to develop into adulthood. Understanding how social cognition impacts upon social behaviour is...

In an interspecific cooperative context, individuals must be prepared to tolerate close interactive proximity to other species but also need to be able to respond to relevant social stimuli in the most appropriate manner. The neuropeptides vasopressin and oxytocin and their non-mammalian homologues have been implicated in the evolution of sociality and in the regulation of social behaviour acro...

There have been many attempts to reduce the amount of waste packaging through open dumping and burning, recycling, landfill, incineration, etc. However, there has been little attention paid to reuse as the simplest way to reduce waste. In order to motivate consumers to perform reuse behaviour, it is essential to understand how this behaviour can be influenced and what variables predict it. This...

Disparities between the health of Indigenous and non-Indigenous populations continue to be prevalent within Australia. Research suggests that Indigenous people participate in health risk behaviour more often than their non-Indigenous counterparts, and that such behaviour has a substantial impact on health outcomes. Although this would indicate that reducing health risk behaviour may have positi...

The social environment individuals are exposed to during ontogeny shapes social skills and social competence in group-living animals. Consequently, social deprivation has serious effects on behaviour and development in animals but little is known about its impact on cooperation. In this study, we examined the effect of social environment on cooperative predator inspection. Predator inspection b...

Robots offer new possibilities for investigating animal social behaviour. This method enhances controllability and reproducibility of experimental techniques, and it allows also the experimental separation of the effects of bodily appearance (embodiment) and behaviour. In the present study we examined dogs' interactive behaviour in a problem solving task (in which the dog has no access to the f...

What is altruism? Altruism is a type of social behaviour. From an evolutionary point of view, a behaviour is social if it has consequences for both the actor and another individual — the recipient. Social behaviours can be categorized according to whether their consequences for the actor and recipient are beneficial, increasing fitness, or costly, decreasing fitness (Figure 1). Altruism is when...

The fundamental ability to form attachment is indispensable for human social relationships. Impairments in social behaviour are associated with decreased quality of life and psychopathological states. In non-human mammals, the neuropeptides oxytocin (OXT) and arginine vasopressin (AVP) are key mediators of complex social behaviours, including attachment, social recognition and aggression. In pa...

The present study employed constructs from self-determination theory, social-identity theory, and the theory of planned behaviour to examine the combined effects that social identity and perceived autonomy support exerted on attitudes, intentions and health behaviour. A prospective design was employed measuring constructs from the theory of planned behaviour, group norms, group identification, ...