Friendship is the single most important factor influencing our health, well-being, and
happiness. Creating and maintaining friendships is, however, extremely costly, in terms of …

It has long been assumed that social animals, such as humans, are born with a brain system
that has evolved to support social affiliation. However, the evidence does not necessarily …

It has been suggested that a key function of music during its development and spread
amongst human populations was its capacity to create and strengthen social bonds amongst …

Grooming is a widespread activity throughout the animal kingdom, but in primates (including
humans) social grooming, or allo-grooming (the grooming of others), plays a particularly …

This volume explores abductive cognition, an important but, at least until the third quarter of
the last century, neglected topic in cognition. The book aims at increasing knowledge about …

Communal eating, whether in feasts or everyday meals with family or friends, is a human
universal, yet it has attracted surprisingly little evolutionary attention. I use data from a UK …

Steroids and peptides mediate a diverse array of animal social behaviors. Human research
is restricted by technical–ethical limitations, and models of the neuroendocrine regulation of …

Although laughter forms an important part of human non-verbal communication, it has
received rather less attention than it deserves in both the experimental and the …

Referential models based on extant African apes have dominated reconstructions of early
human evolution since Darwin's time. These models visualize fundamental human …

Over our evolutionary history, humans have faced the problem of how to create and maintain
social bonds in progressively larger groups compared to those of our primate ancestors …