In humans and non-human primates, male aggression and physical violence are common strategies in the struggle over power and are efficient in exerting…

In celebration of the first 25 years into the 21st Century, we invite review manuscripts for a special issue on A Quarter Century Review of Research on Infant Behavior and Development. Reviews should ...

Psychologists in the College of Arts and Sciences are monitoring the development of infants and toddlers whose parents have a sibling with autism.

Current Employees: If you are a current Staff, Faculty or Temporary employee at the University of Miami, please click here to log in to Workday to use the internal application process. To learn how to...

Automated behavioral measurement using machine learning is gaining ground in psychological research. Automated approaches have the potential to reduce the labor and time associated with manual behavio...

Maternal care is crucial for primate offspring development, particularly in species with prolonged developmental periods, such as humans and other primates. In this study, we used a cross-species and developmental approach to assess the role of mothers and infants in initiating bouts of affiliation (i.e., proximity and grooming) and visual engagement (i.e., unidirectional and mutual gaze) in humans (N = 10), great apes (N = 18) and small apes (N = 20). We observed mother-infant dyads when the offspring was 1, 6 and 12 months of age, using focal sampling. Our results showed that mothers were generally more likely than infants to initiate grooming, unidirectional and mutual gazes, but not proximity. As infants got older, mothers became even more likely to initiate unidirectional and mutual gazes, but infants also started to initiate proximity and unidirectional gazes more frequently, with infant-initiated mutual gazes peaking at around 6 months of age. Moreover, human mothers were more likely to initiate proximity than great ape mothers, and especially more than small ape mothers; in contrast, infants in great and small apes initiated proximity more frequently than human infants. These findings highlight important similarities between humans and other apes in the initiation patterns of affiliative interactions and visual engagement.

Primates -

Nature Communications - Abilities to distinguish between prosocial and antisocial actions are crucial for sustaining cooperative systems. Here, the authors show that human newborns with just 5 days...

New research from the Department of Psychology at the University of Miami looks at the efficacy of training adults to recognize sick faces.

New study provides “remarkable” glimpse into how the brain predicts potential infections

What contagious crying, comforting hugs and other cute behaviour in infants tells us about the roots of emotional connection