Emotion regulation skills are critical to young children's school readiness and later academic achievement, as well as educators' efficacy, stress, and job satisfaction. In this article, we ...demonstrate how the science of emotion regulation can be translated into practical steps for educating teachers and students in schools. We begin with the crucial role of supporting educators in developing their own emotion regulation skills. We also discuss concrete and accessible tools that can be used to support both educators' own skill development and that of their students. We demonstrate how educators can integrate the teaching of emotion regulation through direct instruction, its integration into existing curricula, and daily practices and routines. The examples we provide are part of RULER, an evidence-based, whole school approach to social and emotional learning (SEL) that was developed at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence. RULER is grounded in the theory of emotional intelligence, which emphasizes the critical role of emotion regulation in healthy development.
Examining the functional form of the relationships between arrest rate signal and perceptions of risk and reward among active young offenders previously adjudicated of a serious offense.
Generalized ...additive mixed models were used to analyze data from 745 individuals in the Pathways to Desistance study.
Increasing arrest rate had a positive but diminishing nonlinear effect on risk and a negative but approximately linear effect on rewards. A saturation point was observed in the influence of arrest rate on perceptions of risk, where further increases in arrest rate did not correspond to appreciable changes in perceptions of risk.
The findings suggest a potential upper limit to the effectiveness of increased arrest rate in deterring crime through increasing risk perceptions and underscore the need for policy strategies beyond increasing experienced punishment certainty. However, the findings also highlight potential methodological concerns of using arrest rate as a predictor of perceptions, especially among a sample with large variation in offending frequencies. Research should account for the nonlinearity between punishment and perceived risk and reward, especially in samples with heterogeneous offending experience.
•The relationship between arrest rate and perceptions of the risk of crime might plateau after a point of saturation.•The results highlight the importance of sample heterogeneity in driving discrepant findings around punishment and perceptions of risk.•There is a relationship between arrest rate and perceptions of rewards of crime, suggesting a need for theoretical development on perceived rewards.
The processes underwriting the acquisition of culture remain unclear. How are shared habits, norms, and expectations learned and maintained with precision and reliability across large-scale ...sociocultural ensembles? Is there a unifying account of the mechanisms involved in the acquisition of culture? Notions such as "shared expectations," the "selective patterning of attention and behaviour," "cultural evolution," "cultural inheritance," and "implicit learning" are the main candidates to underpin a unifying account of cognition and the acquisition of culture; however, their interactions require greater specification and clarification. In this article, we integrate these candidates using the variational (free-energy) approach to human cognition and culture in theoretical neuroscience. We describe the construction by humans of social niches that afford epistemic resources called cultural affordances. We argue that human agents learn the shared habits, norms, and expectations of their culture through immersive participation in patterned cultural practices that selectively pattern attention and behaviour. We call this process "thinking through other minds" (TTOM) - in effect, the process of inferring other agents' expectations about the world and how to behave in social context. We argue that for humans, information from and about other people's expectations constitutes the primary domain of statistical regularities that humans leverage to predict and organize behaviour. The integrative model we offer has implications that can advance theories of cognition, enculturation, adaptation, and psychopathology. Crucially, this formal (variational) treatment seeks to resolve key debates in current cognitive science, such as the distinction between internalist and externalist accounts of theory of mind abilities and the more fundamental distinction between dynamical and representational accounts of enactivism.
Although research on terrorism has grown rapidly in recent years, few scholars have applied criminological theories to the analysis of individual‐level political extremism. Instead, researchers ...focused on radicalization have drawn primarily from political science and psychology and have overwhelmingly concentrated on violent extremists, leaving little variation in the dependent variable. With the use of a newly available data set, we test whether variables derived from prominent criminological theories are helpful in distinguishing between nonviolent and violent extremists. The results show that variables related to social control (lack of stable employment), social learning (radical peers), psychological perspectives (history of mental illness), and criminal record all have significant effects on participation in violent political extremism and are robust across multiple techniques for imputing missing data. At the same time, other common indicators of social control (e.g., education and marital status) and social learning perspectives (e.g., radical family members) were not significant in the multivariate models. We argue that terrorism research would benefit from including criminology insights and by considering political radicalization as a dynamic, evolving process, much as life‐course criminology treats more common forms of crime.
•We offer a comprehensive review of the existing literature on over-imitation.•We discuss methodological issues affecting the behavior in experiments.•Different theoretical perspectives are ...contrasted and critically assessed.•Over-imitation is a contextually flexible and normally functional phenomenon.
After seeing an action sequence children and adults tend to copy causally relevant and, more strikingly, even perceivably unnecessary actions in relation to the given goal. This phenomenon, termed “over-imitation”, has inspired much empirical research in the past decade as well as lively theoretical debate on its cognitive underpinnings and putative role in the transmission of cultural knowledge. Here, we offer a comprehensive review of the existing literature to date, accompanied by a table including concise information on 54 published studies testing over-imitation in different species, age groups and cultures. We highlight methodological issues related to task and context that influence over-imitation rates and that should be carefully considered in study designs. We discuss the cognitive and motivational processes underlying and contributing to over-imitation, including normative action parsing, causal reasoning, motives of affiliation and social learning as well as their complex interplay. We conclude that despite the apparent irrationality of over-imitation behavior, recent studies have shown that its performance depends on the specific task, modeled actions and context variables, suggesting that over-imitation should be conceptualized as a contextually flexible and, in fact, a normally highly functional phenomenon.
This review paper systematically queries the Sustainability Transitions literature to unpack the concept of ‘experimentation’. We define an experiment as an inclusive, practice-based and ...challenge-led initiative, which is designed to promote system innovation through social learning under conditions of uncertainty and ambiguity. A distinction is made between various terms (niche experiments, bounded socio-technical experiments, transition experiments, sustainability experiments and grassroots experiments), each with their own theoretical backgrounds and discursive and empirical focal points. Observed patterns and trends in the literature are discussed, as well as promising lines of enquiry for further exploration of- and a reflection on experimenting for sustainability transitions in the context of the welfare state.
•‘Experimentation’ is a central concept in field of sustainability transitions.•Various types of experiments are identified and their genealogy is traced.•A comprehensive over-arching definition of an experiment is presented.•Critical reflection and a future research agenda on the study of experimentation are provided.
Honey bees use a complex form of spatial referential communication. Their "waggle dance" communicates the direction, distance, and quality of a resource to nestmates by encoding celestial cues, ...retinal optic flow, and relative food value into motion and sound within the nest. We show that correct waggle dancing requires social learning. Bees without the opportunity to follow any dances before they first danced produced significantly more disordered dances with larger waggle angle divergence errors and encoded distance incorrectly. The former deficit improved with experience, but distance encoding was set for life. The first dances of bees that could follow other dancers showed neither impairment. Social learning, therefore, shapes honey bee signaling, as it does communication in human infants, birds, and multiple other vertebrate species.
Social learning from the observation of knowledgeable individuals can allow behaviours, skills and techniques to spread across populations and transmit between generations, potentially leading to ...emergent cultures. An increasing body of research has not only evidenced the occurrence of cultural behaviour in nonhuman animals, but also hypothesized that such cultures could ‘evolve’ over time in a way that shares key characteristics with biological evolution, including through a process of selection on variance, inheritance and adaptation. Outside of humans, song and contact calls in birds provide by far the most comprehensive evidence for culture and cultural evolution. However, birds have often been considered ‘one-trick cultural ponies’, only exhibiting significant diversity in this single component of their behavioural repertoire. Recent studies have begun to challenge this view. Here, I review the evidence across multiple behavioural domains for wild cultures in birds. I then discuss the evidence in birds for four key concepts of cultural evolution: (1) variation, selection, inheritance, (2) adaptation, (3) geographical and demographic processes and (4) the accumulation of modifications. I incorporate the evidence from birdsong with other behavioural domains for each key concept and identify important gaps in knowledge. Finally, I discuss how taking a cultural evolution perspective can be informative for our understanding of cognitive ecology more broadly.
•Birds can show cultural behaviour across multiple behavioural contexts.•Evolutionary theory is a useful tool to examine cultural change over time.•I review key concepts of cultural evolution and discuss current knowledge in birds.
Social learning plays an important role in behavior learning among social animals. In contrast to individual (asocial) learning, social learning has the advantage of allowing individuals to learn ...behaviors from others without incurring the costs of individual trials-and-errors. This paper introduces social learning mechanisms into particle swarm optimization (PSO) to develop a social learning PSO (SL-PSO). Unlike classical PSO variants where the particles are updated based on historical information, including the best solution found by the whole swarm (global best) and the best solution found by each particle (personal best), each particle in the proposed SL-PSO learns from any better particles (termed demonstrators) in the current swarm. In addition, to ease the burden of parameter settings, the proposed SL-PSO adopts a dimension-dependent parameter control method. The proposed SL-PSO is first compared with five representative PSO variants on 40 low-dimensional test functions, including shifted and rotated test functions. The scalability of the proposed SL-PSO is further tested by comparing it with five state-of-the-art algorithms for large-scale optimization on seven high-dimensional (100-D, 500-D, and 1000-D) benchmark functions. Our comparative results show that SL-PSO performs well on low-dimensional problems and is promising for solving large-scale problems as well.
Abstract Evolutionary theory predicts that natural selection will fashion cognitive biases to guide when, and from whom, individuals acquire social information, but the precise nature of these ...biases, especially in ecologically valid group contexts, remains unknown. We exposed four captive groups of chimpanzees ( Pan troglodytes ) to a novel extractive foraging device and, by fitting statistical models, isolated four simultaneously operating transmission biases. These include biases to copy (i) higher-ranking and (ii) expert individuals, and to copy others when (iii) uncertain or (iv) of low rank. High-ranking individuals were relatively un-strategic in their use of acquired knowledge, which, combined with the bias for others to observe them, may explain reports that high innovation rates (in juveniles and subordinates) do not generate a correspondingly high frequency of traditions in chimpanzees. Given the typically low rank of immigrants in chimpanzees, a ‘copying dominants’ bias may contribute to the observed maintenance of distinct cultural repertoires in neighboring communities despite sharing similar ecology and knowledgeable migrants. Thus, a copying dominants strategy may, as often proposed for conformist transmission, and perhaps in concert with it, restrict the accumulation of traditions within chimpanzee communities whilst maintaining cultural diversity.
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