Psychobiology of partnership behaviour.

Abstract

Animal experiments demonstrate that it is not only the quality of transmitted and received social signals that is important, but also their frequency and the timing of the information transmitted. In order for progress to be made in the investigation of human social behaviour and its disorders, methods must be developed which allow the transmission of verbal and non-verbal information to be measured. Experiments carried out with healthy adults and healthy and disturbed children to investigate human eye contact and distance behaviour are reported, along with experiments on the influence of gaze and body posture on spoken communication. Finally, a report on the use of behaviour therapy for an autistic child is outlined in order to explore the psychobiological correlations between social behaviour and language, which concur with extensive experiments on brain stimulation. It is suggested that there is a cerebral representation for species-specific social behaviour and a vocalization system embedded in these brain structures which is a phylogenetically-patterned prerequisite for the development of human language.