Katja Liebal

Several species rely on mechanisms to resolve conflicts and reduce their negative consequences, including reconciliation and third-party affiliation (i.e. post-conflict affiliative interactions between victims and aggressors, and between victims and third parties, respectively). Here, we studied reconciliation and third-party affiliation in two groups of wolves (n = 20) and three groups of wolves introgressed with dogs (i.e. second- or later-generation backcrosses of wolf-dog hybrids to wolves; n = 13), in captivity. We conducted behavioural observations of post-conflict affiliative interactions using continuous focal sampling for 2 minutes following an aggression, and during matched-control periods. Our results showed that both admixed and non-admixed wolves engaged in post-conflict affiliation consistent with reconciliation and third-party affiliation. Although we found no evidence that admixed wolves showed lower reconciliation or third-party affiliation than non-admixed wolves, social factors had different modulatory effects in admixed and non-admixed wolves. In particular, stronger social bonds promoted post-conflict affiliation in non-admixed wolves, whereas greater rank distance was associated with higher post-conflict affiliation in admixed wolves. Moreover, post-conflict affiliation was more likely following high-intensity aggression in both admixed and non-admixed wolves, and after unidirectional conflicts in the latter. These findings indicate that dog introgression may influence post-conflict behaviour in wolves and suggest that, while both admixed and non-admixed wolves engage in post-conflict affiliation, the mechanisms underlying them may partially differ.

To illustrate the potential risks of overlooking WILD (i.e., Worldwide, Insitu, Local and Diverse) approaches in developmental psychology, we examined possible cultural biases in child protection interventions across WEIRD (i.e., Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic) countries. Analyses of national statistics revealed that children from minority cultural backgrounds are consistently overrepresented in care systems. We argue that equitable policies must adopt WILD-informed frameworks that respect cultural diversity while ensuring children’s safety and well-being.

Gestures are one of the key components of primate communication and have been proposed to be important precursors of intentional communication and human language. Understanding how gestural communication varies across primate taxa is therefore important for reconstructing the evolutionary origins of intentional communication and making inferences about its socio-ecological drivers. In this study, we investigated gesture use in moor macaques ( Macaca maura ), a socially tolerant Sulawesi macaque species for which systematic studies of communication remain scarce. We conducted a 5-month observational study of a wild group of 27 individuals, in which we documented the gesture types and modalities (i.e., visual, auditory or tactile) used, the likelihood of accounting for recipients’ attentional states and receiving a response, and the effect of age and context of use on these variables. Moor macaques used a repertoire of 19 gesture types across affiliative, agonistic, play, and sexual contexts, producing gestures predominantly in the visual modality. Age did not significantly predict variation in gesture modality, sensitivity to recipients’ attention, or response probability. Instead, contexts strongly shaped patterns of gestural production. Visual gestures were more likely produced during resting than during activities related to group movement. Moreover, signalers were more likely to account for recipients’ visual attention in affiliative than other contexts, and gestures were more likely to elicit responses during affiliative and agonistic interactions than during sexual ones. These findings suggest that immediate social and ecological contexts may play a central role in shaping gestural production in this species. However, given the relatively limited sample size, these findings should be considered preliminary. Our study expands the comparative database on primate gestural communication and highlights macaques as valuable models for investigating how context might influence communication.

To date, research on gestural communication in species other than great apes has been quite limited, especially in their natural habitat, although including a broader range of species in different settings is essential for identifying evolutionary patterns and determining whether some of the fundamental characteristics of human communication are widely shared across primates. In this study, we specifically aimed to explore the use of gestural sequences in Geoffroy's spider monkeys ( Ateles geoffroyi ), a species for which research on gestural communication remains scarce. To this end, we conducted behavioral observations, recording focal video samples of a wild group of 54 individuals. From the videos, we coded all gestures ( N = 709), of which 182 occurred alone and 527 occurred within 125 sequences, which mostly consisted of 2–4 successive gestures. The odds of producing gestural sequences rather than single gestures were higher in the contexts of play, aggression and sexual behavior. In contrast, there was no significant effect of signaler's sex and age on the odds of producing a gestural sequence rather than a single gesture. Only three sequences (i.e., embrace‐pectoral sniff, push‐present climb, grab‐grab pull) occurred more than twice and were not mere repetitions of the same gesture type. Our results show that gestural sequences are used by platyrrhines in several different contexts, although more studies are needed to understand their function.

Nonhuman primates constitute an ideal model to study the evolutionary origins of human language, because of their close phylogenetic distance to humans and their reliance on complex communication systems that include different signal types. In this study, we investigated the vocal repertoire of Macaca maura (moor macaques), a highly tolerant primate species endemic to Sulawesi, Indonesia. We conducted detailed acoustic analyses on 1116 high‐quality vocalizations recorded from a well‐habituated wild group of 42 individuals. Using discriminant function and random forest analyses, we found that moor macaques show a graded vocal repertoire, with considerable acoustic overlap between several call types and a high number of acoustic parameters needed for accurate classification. These findings were supported by the failure of unsupervised clustering to detect robust categorical structures beyond a two‐cluster solution. Our findings provide novel insights into the vocal behavior of a yet understudied species, and provide preliminary evidence that moor macaques show graded communication systems.

Humans' moral views of animals vary in important ways across development. In many cases, adults display anthropocentric moral judgments that relate to the exploitation of animals as a resource. In contrast, children appear to have a more inclusive perspective regarding animals. In this article, we review and synthesize studies examining differences in how children, adolescents, and adults make moral judgments about animals. We consider how both cultural and individual differences may relate to this developmental trajectory.

This paper examines the methodological and ethical challenges of conducting remote research on child‐animal relationships across thirty communities in 17 countries during the COVID‐19 pandemic. It critically assesses remote research as a mode of collaboration informed by decolonial aspirations, highlighting the complexities of navigating temporal and geographical distances, mitigating global inequalities, and addressing political and methodological tensions at the intersection of psychological anthropology and cross‐cultural developmental psychology. By engaging with these challenges, the paper fosters critical dialogue on research ethics and methodologies between anthropology and psychology, advancing a broader intellectual engagement toward translocal equity.

In humans, mothers and infants often engage in face‐to‐face interactions, which are often considered crucial for the social transmission of information and the typical social and cognitive development of infants. In this study, we used a comparative developmental perspective to provide an assessment of mother–infant face‐to‐face interactions in several great and small ape species and to better understand which aspects of face‐to‐face interactions are shared by humans with other species. We conducted longitudinal behavioral observations on 48 mother–infant pairs from five different genera (i.e., Hylobates : N = 9; Homo : N = 10; Nomascus : N = 6; Pan : N = 18; Symphalangus : N = 5), when infants were 1, 6, and 12 months old. Generalized linear mixed models revealed differences across ape genera and through development in the probability that mothers and infants engaged in face‐to‐face interactions during the first year of the offsprings’ life. As predicted, these interactions were more likely when mothers and infants spent less time in physical contact, in communities usually characterized by more distal parenting styles (i.e., WEIRD humans), and when infants became older and thus motorically more independent. Overall, our findings suggest that face‐to‐face interactions were likely present in the common ancestor of humans and small apes, and likely serve a similar function across ape species.