Early-life social isolation has profound effects on adult social competence. This is often expressed as increased aggression or inappropriate displays of courtship-related behaviors. The social incompetence exhibited by isolated animals could be in part due to an altered ability to participate in communicatory exchanges. House mice (Mus musculus) present an excellent model for exploring this id...

Recent research has shown that 82% of adolescent pregnancies are unintended. Social marketing has potential to reduce unintended adolescent pregnancy but its effectiveness in this area has not been thoroughly evaluated. This article reviews the literature on social marketing and assesses its potential to reduce unintended adolescent pregnancy. We identified five communication principles as rele...

Health communication is a health education approach which attempts to change a set of behaviors in a large-scale target audience regarding a specific problem in a predefined period of time. Communication for Child Survival, or HEALTHCOh.1, is a world-wide research and development project grounded in the theory of health communication. The HEALTHCOhl Project relies on social marketing, behavior ...

Many animals use complex communication calls in social behaviors. In some species we know the features in the calls that elicit particular behaviors, but we do not understand how the auditory system encodes the calls. Nor do we understand the mechanisms underlying neural selectivity to calls. Our studies of the auditory midbrain of the Moustached Bat Pteronotus parnellii have revealed a neural ...

In Japan, national outbreak of novel influenza A (H1N1) triggered serious social disruption. The public perceived overwhelming fear and their behaviors were severely affected. Countless events were put off, with massive economic losses due to activity cancellations. The heightened fear may have been a mixture of risk communication consequences, geographic characteristics (island nation), and cu...

By designing socially intelligent robots that can more effectively communicate and interact with us, we can increase their capacity to function as collaborative partners. Our research goal is to develop robots capable of engaging in nonverbal communication, which has been argued to be at the core of social intelligence. We take a human-centric approach that closely aligns with how people are th...

BACKGROUND Social communication deficits are prevalent amongst children with anxiety disorders; however whether they are over-represented specifically among children with Social Anxiety Disorder has not been examined. This study set out to examine social communication deficits among children with Social Anxiety Disorder in comparison to children with other forms of anxiety disorder. METHODS P...