Biology subjects

Pallante, V.

Publications and source records attributed to Pallante, V..

4 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2023

Social tension in the aftermath of public conflicts: an ethological analysis in humans

In social mammals, conflicts are stressful events for the individuals involved. In the post-conflict context, it is possible to detect the emotional state of the former opponents through the expression of displacement activities and aggressive behaviours, which indicate an increase of social tension. In humans, stressful events also induce a physiological response which leads to increased social tension behaviours. However, the variation of such behaviours in the post-conflict conflict, has never been investigated. By conducting a video analysis of street fights recorded by Close Circuit Television cameras, we assessed the variation of behaviours associated with anxiety, aggression related anger and other behaviours possibly related to both anxiety and anger (body postures and talking with gestures) in human opponents. We compared the expression of social tension behaviours before and after the eruption of the conflict and found that displacement activities (related to anxiety), aggressive behaviours (related to anger) and talking with gestures (possibly related to anxiety/anger), but not body postures, increased in post-conflict context. Moreover, displacement activities and aggressive patterns showed a temporal variation, decreasing in the 10 minutes following the conflict. Finally, different from anger-related behaviours, the level of anxiety-related behaviours was more sensitive to aggression intensity, indicating that different social tension behaviours rely on different responses that might be separated. With our study we were able to highlight the importance of the ethological approach for the study of post-conflict social tension in humans, which show a variation in its expression as observed in nonhuman primates. Following a similar comparative approach, we encourage further studies to explore the role of social tension in affecting post-conflict social dynamics.

animal behavior and cognition↗

bioRxiv2023

An ethogram method for the analysis of human distress in the aftermath of public conflicts

Research on nonhuman animals has widely documented the behavioural expression of distress in a conflict context. In humans, however, this remains largely unknown due to the lack of direct access to real-life conflict events. Here, we took the aftermath of 129 video recorded street fights and applied the ethological method to explore the behavioural cues of people previously involved in a fight. Drawing on observations on nonhuman behaviour and inductively identified behaviours, we developed and inter-coder reliability tested an ethogram for the behavioural repertoire of distress. We further quantitively analysed the behaviours with a correlation matrix and PCA, that revealed that the behaviours we observed were not displayed in combination with each other, showing a variability in how people express distress. Since both human and nonhuman primates react to conflict situations with similar expressions of distress, we suggest a comparative approach to understand the evolutionary roots of human behaviour.

animal behavior and cognition↗

bioRxiv2020

Young chicks quickly lose their spontaneous preference to aggregate with females

It is not clear when and how animals start to discriminate between male and female conspecifics and how this distinction drives their social behaviour. A recent study on pheasants found that one-week-old chicks (Phasianus colchicus) preferentially aggregated with same-sex peers and this trend became more pronounced through development, suggesting that sexual segregation increases during ontogeny. However, it remains unclear whether this ability depends on experience or develops spontaneously. Using a similar experimental protocol, we investigated whether sex discrimination is present at birth in domestic chickens (Gallus gallus) by testing the aggregation preferences of young chicks with clutch mates. We measured the amount of time spent close to male and female conspecifics in visually inexperienced chicks. Soon after hatching, both males and females preferentially aggregated with females. To clarify whether the experience with conspecifics modifies the initial preference for females we used an imprinting procedure. We exposed chicks to conspecifics of the same sex, different sex or both sexes for three days and then tested their preferences to aggregate with males or females. No sex preference was observed after three days of imprinting exposure. The disappearance of the initial sex preference shows that, although chicks can discriminate between conspecifics of different sex, sex segregation does not influence aggregation in the first week of life. We suggest that the absence of sexual assortment in the first week of age can enhance the social cohesion of the flock.

animal behavior and cognition↗

bioRxiv2019

Conserved abilities of individual recognition and genetically modulated social responses in young chicks (Gallus gallus)

The ability to recognise familiar individuals and the motivation to stay in contact with conspecifics are important to establish social relationships from the beginning of life. To understand the genetic basis of early social behaviour, we studied the different responses to familiar/unfamiliar individuals and social reinstatement in 4-day-old domestic chicks (Gallus gallus) in three genetically isolated breeds: Padovana, Polverara and Robusta. All breeds showed a similar ability to discriminate between familiar and unfamiliar individuals, staying closer to familiar individuals. Social reinstatement motivation measured as the average distance between subjects, latency to the first step and exploration of the arena (a proxy for the lack of fear), differed between breeds. More socially motivated chicks that stayed in closer proximity, were also less fearful and explored the environment more extensively. These results suggest that modulation of social behaviour shows larger genetic variability than the ability to recognise social partners, which appears to be an adaptive ability widespread at the species level even for very young animals.

neuroscience↗