Social Cooperative Behavior Research Articles

Parental care shapes the evolution of molecular genetic variation.

Cooperative social behaviors, such as parental care, have long been hypothesized to relax selection leading to the accumulation of genetic variation in populations. Although the idea has been discussed for decades, there has been relatively little experimental work to investigate how social behavior contributes to genetic variation in populations. Here, we investigate how parental care can shape molecular genetic variation in the subsocial insect, Nicrophorus vespilloides. Using whole-genome sequencing of populations that had evolved in the presence or absence of parental care for 30 generations, we show that parental care maintains levels of standing genetic variation. In contrast, under a harsh environment without care, strong directional selection caused a reduction in genetic variation. Furthermore, we show that adaptation to the loss of care is associated with genetic divergence between populations at loci related to stress, morphological development, and transcriptional regulation. These data reveal how social behavior is linked to the genetic processes that shape and maintain genetic diversity within populations, and provides rare empirical evidence for an old hypothesis.

An eco-epidemiological model with social predation subject to a component Allee effect

Allee effect plays important roles in social species’ survival, invasion and evolution. The dynamical characteristics of populations incorporating component Allee effect and infectious disease remain unclear. In this paper, we propose an eco-epidemiological model of prey and predator interactions with assumptions that (1) The predator has cooperative social behavior in hunting prey; (2) The predator experiences component Allee effect generated from limited mating; (3) The disease can spread among predators. Our proposed model is novel to study the joint effects of cooperative behavior, mating limitation and disease in predator. We first investigate the dynamics of the disease-free model in four cases based on whether predators have mate limitation or cooperation as well as one- and two-parameter bifurcations. Analytical results show that the introduction of mate limitation generates a strong Allee effect and Hopf bifurcation. It is found that increasing mate limitation in a reasonable region stabilizes the system, but excessive limiting strength would lead the coexistence equilibrium to go extinction. We also study the dynamics of the predator-prey model in presence of disease. The theoretical result shows that the model always has a predator-extinction equilibrium which is always locally stable. We then explore how mate limitation affect the transmissibility of disease among cooperative predators. The results show that mating limitation can save the predator from disease-driven extinction and lead the disease to disappear from the system when the cooperation coefficient is large, while it drives the predators to die out if the cooperation coefficient is small. Our results indicate that the proposed model incorporating component Allee effect exhibits rich and complex dynamic behaviors. The interesting findings provide more perspectives on protection and disease control of populations in complex communities.

Genetic basis of chemical communication in eusocial insects.

Social behavior is one of the most fascinating and complex behaviors in humans and animals. A fundamental process of social behavior is communication among individuals. It relies on the capability of the nervous system to sense, process, and interpret various signals (e.g., pheromones) and respond with appropriate decisions and actions. Eusocial insects, including ants, some bees, some wasps, and termites, display intriguing cooperative social behavior. Recent advances in genetic and genomic studies have revealed key genes that are involved in pheromone synthesis, chemosensory perception, and physiological and behavioral responses to varied pheromones. In this review, we highlight the genes and pathways that regulate queen pheromone-mediated social communication, discuss the evolutionary changes in genetic systems, and outline prospects of functional studies in sociobiology.

An Agent-Based Model of Task-Allocation and Resource-Sharing for Social Internet of Things

The things in the Internet of Things are becoming more and more socially aware. What social means for these things (more often termed as “social objects”) is predominately determined by how and when objects interact with each other. In this paper, an agent-based model for Social Internet of Things is proposed, which features the realization of various interaction modalities, along with possible network structures and mobility modes, thus providing a novel model to ask interesting “what-if” questions. The scenario used, which is the acquisition of shared resources in a common spatial and temporal world, demands agents to have ad-hoc communication and a willingness to cooperate with others. The model was simulated for all possible combinations of input parameters to study the implications of competitive vs. cooperative social behavior while agents try to acquire shared resources/services in a peer-to-peer fashion. However, the main focus of the paper was to analyze the impact of profile-based mobility, which has an underpinning on parameters of extent and scale of a mobility profile. The simulation results, in addition to others, reveal that there are substantial and systematic differences among different combinations of values for extent and scale.

The interplay of emotional and social conceptual processes during moral reasoning in frontotemporal dementia.

Cooperative social behaviour in humans hinges upon our unique ability to make appropriate moral decisions in accordance with our ethical values. The complexity of the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying moral reasoning is revealed when this capacity breaks down. Patients with the behavioural variant of frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) display striking moral transgressions in the context of atrophy to frontotemporal regions supporting affective and social conceptual processing. Developmental studies have highlighted the importance of social knowledge to moral decision making in children, yet the role of social knowledge in relation to moral reasoning impairments in neurodegeneration has largely been overlooked. Here, we sought to examine the role of affective and social conceptual processes in personal moral reasoning in bvFTD, and their relationship to the integrity and structural connectivity of frontotemporal brain regions. Personal moral reasoning across varying degrees of conflict was assessed in 26 bvFTD patients and compared with demographically matched Alzheimer's disease patients (n = 14), and healthy older adults (n = 22). Following each moral decision, we directly probed participants' subjective emotional experience as an index of their affective response, while social norm knowledge was assessed via an independent task. While groups did not differ significantly in terms of their moral decisions, bvFTD patients reported feeling 'better' about their decisions than healthy control subjects. In other words, although bvFTD patients could adjudicate between different courses of action in the moral scenarios, their affective responses to these decisions were highly irregular. This blunted emotional reaction was exclusive to the personal high-conflict condition, with 61.5% of bvFTD patients reporting feeling 'extremely good' about their decisions, and was correlated with reduced knowledge of socially acceptable behaviour. Voxel-based morphometry analyses revealed a distributed network of frontal, subcortical, and lateral temporal grey matter regions involved in the attenuated affective response to moral conflict in bvFTD. Crucially, diffusion-tensor imaging implicated the uncinate fasciculus as the pathway by which social conceptual knowledge may influence emotional reactions to personal high-conflict moral dilemmas in bvFTD. Our findings suggest that altered moral behaviour in bvFTD reflects the dynamic interplay between degraded social conceptual knowledge and blunted affective responsiveness, attributable to atrophy of, and impaired information transfer between, frontal and temporal cortices. Delineating the mechanisms of impaired morality in bvFTD provides crucial clinical information for understanding and treating this challenging symptom, which may help pave the way for targeted behavioural interventions.

Differentially altered social dominance- and cooperative-like behaviors in Shank2- and Shank3-mutant mice

BackgroundRecent progress in genomics has contributed to the identification of a large number of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) risk genes, many of which encode synaptic proteins. Our understanding of ASDs has advanced rapidly, partly owing to the development of numerous animal models. Extensive characterizations using a variety of behavioral batteries that analyze social behaviors have shown that a subset of engineered mice that model mutations in genes encoding Shanks, a family of excitatory postsynaptic scaffolding proteins, exhibit autism-like behaviors. Although these behavioral assays have been useful in identifying deficits in simple social behaviors, alterations in complex social behaviors remain largely untested.MethodsTwo syndromic ASD mouse models—Shank2 constitutive knockout [KO] mice and Shank3 constitutive KO mice—were examined for alterations in social dominance and social cooperative behaviors using tube tests and automated cooperation tests. Upon naïve and salient behavioral experience, expression levels of c-Fos were analyzed as a proxy for neural activity across diverse brain areas, including the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and a number of subcortical structures.FindingsAs previously reported, Shank2 KO mice showed deficits in sociability, with intact social recognition memory, whereas Shank3 KO mice displayed no overt phenotypes. Strikingly, the two Shank KO mouse models exhibited diametrically opposed alterations in social dominance and cooperative behaviors. After a specific social behavioral experience, Shank mutant mice exhibited distinct changes in number of c-Fos+ neurons in the number of cortical and subcortical brain regions.ConclusionsOur results underscore the heterogeneity of social behavioral alterations in different ASD mouse models and highlight the utility of testing complex social behaviors in validating neurodevelopmental and neuropsychiatric disorder models. In addition, neural activities at distinct brain regions are likely collectively involved in eliciting complex social behaviors, which are differentially altered in ASD mouse models.

Breaking the limits of executive functions: Towards a sociocultural perspective

Executive functions refer to the neurocognitive processes that enable conscious control of goal-directed behaviour. Executive functions lay the neural and cognitive foundation for civilisation and culture with its far reaching effects in day-to-day planning, problem-solving, creativity, self-regulation, empathy and cooperative social behaviour. Though a celebrated area of research for cognitive scientists, contemporary studies find that most of the interventions that target executive functions promote academic achievement in children, but fail to transfer to real-life interpersonal situations. This suggests the need for breaking its cognitive shell and conceiving executive function development in the larger sociocultural context. Thus, the present paper inquires into the cultural space that provides collaborative learning experiences for young children to become efficient problem-solvers and empathetic social beings. After reviewing certain theoretical perspectives and research findings, it is concluded that the early experiences of scaffolding by more competent individuals, specific to the social context and culture, are the crucial determinant of positive executive function development and its expression in everyday situations. The process of such sociocultural influences seems to be mediated by learning appropriate rules that guide executive functions. The paper puts forth the need for culture-specific value-based training for children that can potentially improve the internally motivated execution of control in practical situations. Revival of activities inherent in cultures is also found to be a promising option for devising effective training methods.

It’s not fair, I don’t want to share: When child development and teacher expectations clash

Promoting cooperative social behavior is a major task of preschool teachers. Children are taught to be nice, be fair, and share. This mandate, however, runs up against the fact that young children are naturally egotistical and unable to appreciate the perspective of others. This leaves teachers with questions about how strongly they should push the be-nice agenda when it meets with resistance. Joan Goodman and Maya Rabinowitz explore how teachers of young children can reconcile their goals both to respect children’s natural development and to socialize them.

Process research in early intensive intervention in autism spectrum disorder: Sensitivity to change of the autism behavior coding system.

The development of sensitive measures to capture changes in core autism symptoms is crucial in early intervention research. The study examines the sensitivity to change of the Autism Behavior Coding System (ABCS), a video‐based instrument to assess core autism symptoms during therapist‐child interaction. Video sequences of 40 young children treated in the Frühintervention bei Autistischen Störungen center were analyzed with regard to the question of whether short‐term changes during an 18 day period of early intervention could be captured, and whether these results are reflected in an independent clinical assessment (Developmental Disorders‐Child‐Global Assessment Scale [DD‐C‐GAS]). ABCS results showed statistically significant improvements on behavioral domains such as “expression of wishes” and “social cooperative behavior” (P < 0.01), less pronounced on “eye contact.” Improvements on the DD‐C‐GAS were highly significant on all subdomains. Both scales showed high correlations within their subdomains, yet no significant correlations between the changes in both instruments' scores were found. An additional analysis between the DD‐C‐GAS scores at day 18 and the changes in the ABCS scores showed statistically significant associations in the expected direction between the changes in the variable “eye contact” and all DD‐C‐GAS subdomains. The correspondence of the two levels of assessment is low, but the specifics of this relationship deserve further study. The ABCS may prove useful in addition to standard assessment tools, especially in early intervention research settings, as it allows reliable analysis of core behavioral elements in young children with autism. Autism Res 2019, 12: 1817–1828. © 2019 The Authors. Autism Research published by International Society for Autism Research published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc.Lay SummaryThe study examined the sensitivity of an autism‐specific video coding system (ABCS) in assessing changes after an 18 day period of intensive early intervention. Video sequences of therapist‐child‐interaction of 40 young children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) were analyzed. Children's behavior improved in expression of wishes, social cooperativity and eye contact. A therapist‐based global assessment scale also showed important improvement after 18 days, yet both assessment instruments showed weak correlations between their respective changes. We showed that the ABCS may prove useful in capturing short‐term changes in autism‐related behaviors, especially in early intervention research.

Duets recorded in the wild reveal that interindividually coordinated motor control enables cooperative behavior

Many organisms coordinate rhythmic motor actions with those of a partner to generate cooperative social behavior such as duet singing. The neural mechanisms that enable rhythmic interindividual coordination of motor actions are unknown. Here we investigate the neural basis of vocal duetting behavior by using an approach that enables simultaneous recordings of individual vocalizations and multiunit vocal premotor activity in songbird pairs ranging freely in their natural habitat. We find that in the duet-initiating bird, the onset of the partner’s contribution to the duet triggers a change in rhythm in the periodic neural discharges that are exclusively locked to the initiating bird’s own vocalizations. The resulting interindividually synchronized neural activity pattern elicits vocalizations that perfectly alternate between partners in the ongoing song. We suggest that rhythmic cooperative behavior requires exact interindividual coordination of premotor neural activity, which might be achieved by integration of sensory information originating from the interacting partner.

Model Pembelajaran Bahasa Arab di Ma’had Al-Jami’ah Walisongo Semarang

This study discusses the models of Arabic teaching in Ma’had Al-Jami’ah Walisongo Semarang. The analysis based on the Richard Arend’s theory, which is mentions that the teaching models has 4 components are theoretical basis, instructional goals, syntax, and learning environment. This study aims to know each component of it in ma’had. The study result shows that the theoretical basis of teaching includes behavioral theory, social learning theory, the psychological theory of meaningfull verbal learning, the idea of cognitive pshycology, experiential learning theory, and information processing theory. The Instructional goal includes the learning to acquire the factual and declare knowledge, mastering of social cooperative behaviors, and acceptance between groups. The syntax be distinguished by the type of teaching models, include: a) Direct teaching, consists of the orientation, presentation, structured practice, the practice under guidance, and self-practice, b) Presentation teaching, consists of presenting advance organizer, task presentation and strengthening cognitive processing; c) cooperative learning, consists of presenting the goal and establishing set, presenting and organizing information, distributing some students into groups, supporting the team work and teaching, testing the material learning and giving a testing; 4) learning environment in ma’had, includes: in the direct, the teacher structures the environment stricty to maintain the academic focuses and hopes the tudents will be a good observer, listener and participant; b) in the presentation: the teacher distributing, some students into a group and in each gropu, there is two role, presentator and listener; c) cooperative: the environment organized based on task structure and reward cooperatively neither competitively.

Giving others the option of choice: An fMRI study on low-cost cooperation

Successful social relationships require a consideration of a partner's thoughts and intentions. This aspect of social life is captured in the social mindfulness paradigm (SoMi task), in which participants make decisions that either limit or preserve options for their interaction partner's subsequent choice. Here we investigated the neural correlates of spontaneous socially mindful and unmindful behaviours. Functional magnetic resonance data were acquired from 47 healthy adolescents and young adults (age 16–27) as they completed the SoMi task. Being faced with socially relevant choices was associated with activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, anterior cingulate, caudate, and insula, which is consistent with prior neuroeconomical research. Importantly, socially mindful choices were associated with activity in the right parietal cortex and the caudate, whereas unmindful choices were associated with activity in the left prefrontal cortex. These neural findings were consistent with the behavioural preference for mindful choices, suggesting that socially mindful decisions are the basic inclination, whereas socially unmindful responses may require greater effort and control. Together, these results begin to uncover the neural correlates of socially mindful and unmindful choices, and illuminate the psychological processes involved in cooperative social behaviour.

Social behavior in bacterial nanonetworks: challenges and opportunities

Molecular communication promises to enable communication between nanomachines with a view to increasing their functionalities and open up new possible applications. Due to some of the biological properties, bacteria have been proposed as a possible information carrier for molecular communication, and the corresponding communication networks are known as \textit{bacterial nanonetworks}. The biological properties include the ability for bacteria to mobilize between locations and carry the information encoded in Deoxyribonucleic Acid (DNA) molecules. However, similar to most organisms, bacteria have complex social properties that govern their colony. These social characteristics enable the bacteria to evolve through various fluctuating environmental conditions by utilizing cooperative and non-cooperative behaviors. This article provides an overview of the different types of cooperative and non-cooperative social behavior of bacteria. The challenges (due to non-cooperation) and the opportunities (due to cooperation) these behaviors can bring to the reliability of communication in bacterial nanonetworks are also discussed. Finally, simulation results on the impact of bacterial cooperative social behavior on the end-to-end reliability of a single-link bacterial nanonetwork are presented. The article concludes with highlighting the potential future research opportunities in this emerging field.

Pragmatic Naturalism and Social Cooperation

ABSTRACT A profound sense of biological explanations and the social nature of our species were appreciated by Chauncey Wright and American classical pragmatists. Inquiry was understood in the context of social cooperation. One achievement in the evolution of cephalic function is the development of social cooperative behaviors, the cornerstone of our cultural productivity. Classical pragmatism is linked to an expanding sense of human capability, tied to the deepening of human experience. While pragmatism is open-ended, the limits of human function put our advances into a perspective in which the evolution of function is just as apparent as the devolution of function.

Individual behavior and social wealth in the spatial public goods game

Group interactions on structured populations can be represented by the public goods game on networks. During the evolutionary games, selective investment mechanism fosters social cooperative behavior. First we focus on star-like graphs to provide some light on why selective investment mechanism can promote collective cooperation. Then we implement public goods game with this mechanism on scale free networks to investigate behavior properties of individuals within different social environments. We indicate that high-degree nodes are predominantly inert owning largely to their satisfaction with their status, while low-degree nodes are very active due to their strive towards higher prosperity. Besides, we introduce the Gini coefficient to describe social inequality and find that large multiply factor r favors social fairness. Our work is applicable for community supervision and social wealth regulation.

Cooperation, Quorum Sensing, and Evolution of Virulence in Staphylococcus aureus

The virulence and fitness in vivo of the major human pathogen Staphylococcus aureus are associated with a cell-to-cell signaling mechanism known as quorum sensing (QS). QS coordinates the production of virulence factors via the production and sensing of autoinducing peptide (AIP) signal molecules by the agr locus. Here we show, in a wax moth larva virulence model, that (i) QS in S. aureus is a cooperative social trait that provides a benefit to the local population of cells, (ii) agr mutants, which do not produce or respond to QS signal, are able to exploit the benefits provided by the QS of others ("cheat"), allowing them to increase in frequency when in mixed populations with cooperators, (iii) these social interactions between cells determine virulence, with the host mortality rate being negatively correlated to the percentage of agr mutants ("cheats") in a population, and (iv) a higher within-host relatedness (lower strain diversity) selects for QS and hence higher virulence. Our results provide an explanation for why agr mutants show reduced virulence in animal models but can be isolated from infections of humans. More generally, by providing the first evidence that QS is a cooperative social behavior in a Gram-positive bacterium, our results suggest convergent, and potentially widespread, evolution for signaling to coordinate cooperation in bacteria.

Feedback between Population and Evolutionary Dynamics Determines the Fate of Social Microbial Populations

Author SummaryThe fact that rapid evolution within a species can cause dramatic ecological changes has only recently begun to be appreciated. In particular, it has often been assumed that population dynamics, controlled by ecological circumstances such as the presence of predators or disease, occur at such different timescales compared with evolutionary dynamics that they are effectively de-coupled. Recent studies, however, have found that evolution can occur over ecological timescales and thus may have important effects on ecological dynamics. Here, we demonstrate the presence of a tight coupling between population dynamics and the evolutionary dynamics of a “social” microbial gene, which allows a laboratory population of budding yeast to cooperatively break down sucrose and grow on the simpler sugars released from it. In such cooperative populations, evolution may favor non-cooperative, or “cheater” individuals that do not contribute to the public good (in this case, the products of sucrose break down), but still use that public good to grow at the expense of the individuals that do cooperate. Our study shows that a population of cooperators that is invaded by cheaters does not collapse as a result of cheater proliferation but can evolve to a viable equilibrium. However, the coexisting population is less resilient to perturbations.

Social Aggression and Resource Conflict Across the Female Life‐Course in the Bolivian Amazon

This work explores sources of conflict among forager-horticulturalist women in Amazonian Bolivia, and applies life history theory as a tool for understanding competitive and cooperative social networking behaviors among women. In this study, 121 Tsimane women and girls were interviewed regarding current and past disagreements with others in their community to identify categories of contested resources that instigate interpersonal conflicts, often resulting in incidences of social aggression. Analysis of frequency data on quarrels (N = 334) reveals that women target several diverse categories of resources, with social types appearing as frequently as food and mates. It was also found that the focus of women's competition changes throughout the life-course, consistent with the notion that current vs. future reproduction and quantity-quality trade-offs might have different influences on competition and social conflict over resources within women's social networks across different age groups.

Social selection and the evolution of cooperative groups: The example of the cellular slime moulds

In social selection the phenotype of an individual depends on its own genotype as well as on the phenotypes, and so genotypes, of other individuals. This makes it impossible to associate an invariant phenotype with a genotype: the social context is crucial. Descriptions of metazoan development, which often is viewed as the acme of cooperative social behaviour, ignore or downplay this fact. The implicit justification for doing so is based on a group-selectionist point of view. Namely, embryos are clones, therefore all cells have the same evolutionary interest, and the visible differences between cells result from a common strategy. The reasoning is flawed, because phenotypic heterogeneity within groups can result from contingent choices made by cells from a flexible repertoire as in multicellular development. What makes that possible is phenotypic plasticity, namely the ability of a genotype to exhibit different phenotypes. However, co-operative social behaviour with division of labour requires that different phenotypes interact appropriately, not that they belong to the same genotype, or have overlapping genetic interests. We sketch a possible route to the evolution of social groups that involves many steps: (a) individuals that happen to be in spatial proximity benefit simply by virtue of their number; (b) traits that are already present act as preadaptations and improve the efficiency of the group; and (c) new adaptations evolve under selection in the social context--that is, via interactions between individuals--and further strengthen group behaviour. The Dictyostelid or cellular slime mould amoebae (CSMs) become multicellular in an unusual way, by the aggregation of free-living cells. In nature the resulting group can be genetically homogeneous (clonal) or heterogeneous (polyclonal); in either case its development, which displays strong cooperation between cells (to the extent of so-called altruism) is not affected. This makes the CSMs exemplars for the study of social behaviour.

Improvement of the noradrenergic symptom cluster following treatment with milnacipran

Depression has a major impact on social functioning. Decreased concentration, mental and physical slowing, loss of energy, lassitude, tiredness, and reduced self-care are all symptoms related to reduced noradrenergic activity. Depressed mood; loss of interest or pleasure; sleep disturbances; and feelings of worthlessness, pessimism, and anxiety are related to reduced activity of both serotonergic and noradrenergic neurotransmission. The importance of noradrenergic neurotransmission in social functioning is supported by studies with the specific norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor reboxetine. In healthy volunteers, reboxetine increases cooperative social behavior and social drive. A placebo-controlled study in depressed patients comparing reboxetine with the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) fluoxetine showed significantly greater improvement in social adaptation with reboxetine. Two recent studies have examined the effect of the serotonin and norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor milnacipran on social adaptation. A study in depressed patients found that at the end of 8 weeks of treatment with milnacipran, 42.2% patients were in remission on the Social Adaptation Self-evaluation Scale (SASS). Another study in depressed workers or homemakers found that mean depression scores were significantly reduced after 2 weeks, whereas the SASS scores were significantly improved after 4 weeks. A preliminary study comparing depressed patients treated with milnacipran or the SSRI paroxetine showed that milnacipran treatment resulted in a greater number of patients in social remission. The available data thus suggest that milnacipran may improve social functioning, with a possibly greater effect than the SSRI paroxetine. These preliminary data suggest further evaluation of social dysfunction and its treatment outcome in future trials of milnacipran.