Eithne Kavanagh

YouTube video by Cardiff Babylab Baby headcams reveal how babies encounter faces during development

🎉 Big milestone!

Over the last two years, with the incredible support of so many wonderful families, we’ve recorded nearly 38 million headcam video frames, capturing young children’s everyday experiences.

www.youtube.com/shorts/dsF4Z...

One more month to apply for this! Please forward to any potential students (UK-only)

Physiological health outcomes of dominance hierarchies in team-based contexts Find out more about this fully funded PhD studentship opportunity.

Interested in the evolution of social behaviour? We have a fully-funded PhD opportunity on human social hierarchies, nonverbal behaviour and health! Supervised by myself, @bridgetwaller.bsky.social and @ellamcloughlin.bsky.social.
Informal enquires encouraged!
www.ntu.ac.uk/study-and-co...

BBS article on mechanisms of group cohesion in primates (Robin Dunbar), with our commentary proposing facial expression as one of those key mechanisms! @eithnekavanagh.bsky.social @jamiewhitehouse.bsky.social

www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Enhancing welfare through cognitive assessment of parenting skills in captive managed animals Find out more about this PhD opportunity funded by BBSRC, hosted through the NTU fully funded studentship scheme.

Fully-funded PhD position with Yuri Kawaguchi at NTU, associated with her BBSRC Fellowship on parenting in rhesus macaques. Join us! @yurikawaguchi.bsky.social @ntupsychology.bsky.social (note - open to UK students only)

www.ntu.ac.uk/study-and-co...

Physiological health outcomes of dominance hierarchies in team-based contexts Find out more about this fully funded PhD studentship opportunity.

Interested in the evolution of social behaviour? We have a fully-funded PhD opportunity on human social hierarchies, nonverbal behaviour and health! Supervised by myself, @bridgetwaller.bsky.social and @ellamcloughlin.bsky.social.
Informal enquires encouraged!
www.ntu.ac.uk/study-and-co...

Physiological health outcomes of dominance hierarchies in team-based contexts Find out more about this fully funded PhD studentship opportunity.

Fully funded PhD studentship on human dominance hierarchies and non-verbal behaviour, with lead Eithne Kavanagh. Join us at NTU! @eithnekavanagh.bsky.social

www.ntu.ac.uk/study-and-co...

Indirect genetic effects among neighbors promote cooperation and accelerate adaptation in a small-scale human society Social effects on fertility promote population growth and the evolution of flexible cooperation in a small-scale human society.

I'm very excited to share the central paper from my PhD out now in Science Advances. We investigated how social effects among neighbors shape the evolution of reproductive cooperation and the pace of adaptive population growth among the Indigenous Tsimane of Bolivia.
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

(PDF) Faking It Isn’t Making It: Research Needs Spontaneous and Naturalistic Facial Expressions PDF | Facial expressions play a pivotal role in shaping social interactions. However, the conceptualization of facial expressions as direct readouts of... | Find, read and cite all the research you ne...

@bridgetwaller.bsky.social www.researchgate.net/publication/...

Our #study finds that #male #dominance isn't the norm among #primates, and starts to unravel what shapes flexibility in intersexual power

paper (OA) https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2500405122

press release https://www.mpg.de/24986976/0630-evan-beyond-the-alpha-male-150495-x?c=2249

We are looking for a Research Assistant to contribute to our ongoing analysis of dolphin acoustic data from West Wales - collaboration between @wtsww.bsky.social @bristolbiosci.bsky.social 🐬
Deadline is 29th June - please share widely!
www.bristol.ac.uk/jobs/find/de...

Do chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) mentally represent collaboration?: Action-learning and communication in a partnered task Non-human primates engage in complex collective behaviours, but existing research does not paint a clear picture of what individuals cognitively represent when they act together. This study investigat...

New paper alert 👇 We present a new two-action sequential coordination task designed to investigate co-representation non-human primates. In collaboration with @drelizabethwarren.bsky.social and Josep Call and out now, fully #openaccess in PLoS One! (1/4)
journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

connecting-humanity.org
These are doing great work

Interested in biology and comparative psychology, and working in an interdisciplinary project and research team? I’m advertising two PhD positions on the evolutionary origins of cooperative sociality and communication (start 1.10.) at the University of Konstanz👇 links below!

We asked how behavioral diversity & agonistic behaviors relate to group size in wild capuchins. We analyzed >65,000 behavioral scans collected over 15 yrs on 214 capuchins (8 groups) & controlled for # inds sampled. We found behavioral richness, diversity & agonism was higher in larger groups.

Alisa Balabanova runner up in the student talk prize at EHBEA for her talk on facial expressivity and popularity! Well done Alisa! @ehbea2025.bsky.social @ntupsychology.bsky.social

Can I join please !

CE Job Alert 🚨 - 2 year postdoc at LSE to develop empirically informed models of reputation dynamics on evolving social networks, as part of Leverhulme project on Reputation and the Reproduction of Social Inequality.

culturalevolutionsociety.org/jobs/two-yea...

Extensive compositionality in the vocal system of bonobos Compositionality, the capacity to combine meaningful elements into larger meaningful structures, is a hallmark of human language. Compositionality can be trivial (the combination’s meaning is the sum ...

🚨New in @science.org🚨
With Simon Townsend (@nccrlanguage.bsky.social) and Martin Surbeck, we have investigated whether wild bonobos can combine calls in complex combinations, similar to how humans combine words into sentences 🧪
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

#ScienceResearch #AnimalCommunication

Have you every found yourself wondering whether the most widely used measures of social cognitive ability measure what they are supposed to measure?

Professor, Senior Lecturer/Lecturer and Lecturer posts - Glasgow City (GB) job with University of Glasgow | 12838283 University of Glasgow College of Medical, Veterinary and Life Sciences  School of Psychology & Neuroscience Professor in Cognitive Neuroscience/Psy...

We’re recruiting for 5 faculty positions in cognitive neuroscience, psychology & animal neuroscience!
Exciting science going on @UofG, Glasgow is an amazing and green city with the friendliest people, and you’ll have the stunning highlands on your doorstep!
tinyurl.com/mbn6yf56
Please repost!

🐳 UPCOMING BOOK ALERT 🐬
The Evolution of Cetacean Societies

Edited by @darrencroft.bsky.social @andrewfoote.bsky.social @ellengarland.bsky.social and myself

Preorder available now
press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo...

#whale #dolphin #animalbehaviour

Positions available - Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology

@mpi-eva-leipzig.bsky.social are seeking a PhD candidate in the field of psychology focusing on self-awareness in nonhuman great apes drawing from different methods such as touch screens experiments, playback experiments, eye tracking, and behavioural experiments www.eva.mpg.de/career/posit...

Maternal care predicts facial expression processing in macaques Facial expressions are common across mammals and are essential for social communication. In humans, a rich early social environment is important for t…

New paper from Olivia O'Callaghan's PhD on ERC project FACEDIFF www.facediff.co.uk, macaque facial expression processing gets better with age and good maternal care, so more flex than previously thought? @jamiewhitehouse.bsky.social @erc.europa.eu @ntupsychology.bsky.social
doi.org/10.1016/j.is...

New paper on macaque facial muscles with @clarekimock.bsky.social @jamiewhitehouse.bsky.social and others! Macaques don’t show the same extreme variability in facial musculature as humans… anatomypubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

1/3

Tutorial on exploring ecological momentary assessment data is online at AMPPS, with:
- Accessible ways to visualize data for better understanding
- Models to get some first insights
- Further reading boxes for more advanced topics
- Reproducible pipeline you can run over your own data

MacaqueNet: Advancing comparative behavioural research through large‐scale collaboration We present MacaqueNet, a global community of macaque researchers who developed the first publicly searchable, standardised database on affiliative and agonistic behaviour. This cross-species database...

So exciting to see MacaqueNet out into the world! 🤩

Learn about our global community & database centralizing standardized affiliative & agonistic data from 61 populations across 14 macaque species: doi/10.1111/1365...

Explore >600 networks & request data: macaquenet.github.io/database/

Congrats!

Expressive Faces Make People More Likable Facial expressions do far more than just broadcast emotions

Read about our research on the social bonding function of facial expressivity, here in our Scientific American article! www.scientificamerican.com/article/expr...
@jamiewhitehouse.bsky.social @bridgetwaller.bsky.social