Journalists not only represent political leaders in terms of their policies and political competence. The personalities and private lives of leaders have also become an important component in mediated stories and narratives crucial for voter identification and interest. This chapter explores how the Swedish press reports on prime ministers’ social backgrounds, personal appearance and leadership...

It has been previously shown that the implicit affiliation motive - the need to establish and maintain friendly relationships with others - leads to chronic health benefits. The underlying assumption for the present research was that the implicit affiliation motive also moderates the salivary cortisol response to acute psychological stress when some aspects of social evaluation and uncontrollab...

In animal and human societies, social services such as protection from predators are often exchanged between group members. The tactics that individuals display to obtain a service depend on its value and on differences between individuals in their capacity to aggressively obtain it. Here we analysed the exchange of valuable social services (i.e. grooming and relationship repair) in the afterma...

The tendency to mimic the behaviour of others is affected by a variety of social factors, and it has been argued that such "mirroring" is often unconsciously deployed as a means of increasing affiliation during interpersonal interactions. However, the relationship between automatic motor imitation and status/power is currently unclear. This paper reports five experiments that investigated wheth...

Overview. The goal of my work is to detect implicit social ties or closely-linked entities within a data set. In data consisting of people (or other entities) and their affiliations or discrete attributes, we identify unusually similar pairs of people, and we pose the question: Can their similarity be explained by chance, or it is due to a direct (“copying”) relationship between the people? The...

OBJECTIVE The relation between social anxiety and alcohol consumption suggests aspects of both risk and protection, but most research has focused on late adolescents and emerging adults. METHOD We investigated the synergistic impact of social anxiety, a need for affiliation with others, and perceived peer alcohol use on drinking in a sample of more than 1,500 early adolescents from southern C...

Social conflict is mostly studied in relation to aggression. A more integral approach, including aggressive and affiliative behaviour as well as physiology, may however give a better understanding of the animals' experience during social conflict. The experience of social conflict may also be reflected in the spatial distribution between conspecifics. The objective was to assess the relationshi...

Graph sampling via crawling has become increasingly popular and important in the study of measuring various characteristics of large scale complex networks. While powerful, it is known to be challenging when the graph is loosely connected or disconnected which slows down the convergence of random walks and can cause poor estimation accuracy. In this work, we observe that the graph under study, ...

social imitation in autism [7], but further testing of the circumstances that drive children with autism to imitate would be valuable. Overall, our study leads to two important conclusions. First, studies of social interaction can examine the social component of imitation behaviour independent of the objectlearning component, and this can best be done using familiar objects. Second, children wi...