Sound doesnt fossilise. Language doesnt either.

Even when writing systems have developed, theyve represented full-fledged and functional languages. Rather than preserving the first baby steps toward language, theyre fully formed, made up of words, sentences and grammar carried from one person to another by speech sounds, like any of the perhaps 6,000 languages spoken today.

So if you believe, as we linguists do, that language is the foundational distinction between humans and other intelligent animals, how can we study its emergence in our ancestors?

Happily, researchers do know a lot about language words, sentences and grammar and speech the vocal sounds that carry language to the next persons ear in living people. So we should be able to compare language with less complex animal communication.

And thats what we and our colleagues have spent decades investigating: How do apes and monkeys use their mouth and throat to produce the vowel sounds in speech? Spoken language in humans is an intricately woven string of syllables with consonants appended to the syllables core vowels, so mastering vowels was a key to speech emergence. We believe that our multidisciplinary findings push back the date for that crucial step in language evolution by as much as 27 million years.

The sounds of speech

Say but. Now say bet, bat, bought, boot.

The words all begin and end the same. Its the differences among the vowel sounds that keep them distinct in speech.

Now drop the consonants and say the vowels. You can hear the different vowels have characteristic sound qualities. You can also feel that they require different characteristic positions of your jaw, tongue, and lips.

So the configuration of the vocal tract the resonating tube of the throat and mouth, from the vocal folds to the lips determines the sound. That, in turn, means that the sound carries information about the vocal tract configuration that made it. This relationship is a core understanding of speech science.

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After over a half-century of investigation and of developing both anatomical and acoustical modeling technology, speech scientists can generally model a vocal tract and calculate what sound it will make, or run the other way, analyzing a sound to calculate what vocal tract shape made it.

So model a few primate vocal tracts, record a few calls, and you pretty much know how human language evolved? Sorry, not so fast.

Modern human anatomy is unique

If you compare the human vocal tract with other primates, theres a big difference. Take a baboon as an example.

The vocal tract of a baboon has the same components including the larynx, circled in green as that of a person, but with different proportions. Photo: Laboratory of Cognitive Psychology (CNRS & Aix-Marseille University) and GIPSA-lab (CNRS & University Grenoble-Alpes), CC BY-ND

From the baboons larynx and vocal folds, which is high up and close to their chin line, theres just a short step up through the cavity called the pharynx, then a long way out the horizontal oral cavity. In comparison, for adult male humans, its about as far up the pharynx as it is then out through the lips. Also, the baboon tongue is long and flat, while a humans is short in the mouth, then curves down into the throat.

So over the course of evolution, the larynx in the human line has moved lower in our throats, opening up a much larger pharyngeal cavity than found in other primates.

About 50 years ago, researchers seized on that observation to formulate what they called the laryngeal descent theory of vowel production. In a key study, researchers developed a model from a plaster cast of a macaque vocal tract. They manipulated the mouth of an anaesthetised macaque to see how much the vocal tract shape could vary, and fed those values into their model. Then finally they calculated the vowel sound produced by particular configurations. It was a powerful and groundbreaking study, still copied today with technological updates.

So what did they find?

They got a schwa that vowel sound you hear in the word but and some very close acoustic neighbours. Nothing where multiple vowels were distinct enough to keep words apart in a human language. They attributed it to the lack of a human-like low larynx and large pharynx.

As the theory developed, it claimed that producing the full human vowel inventory required a vocal tract with about equally long oral and pharyngeal cavities. That occurred only with the arrival of anatomically modern humans, about 200,000 years ago, and only adults among modern humans, since babies are born with a high larynx that lowers with age.

This theory seemed to explain two phenomena. First, from the 1930s on, several (failed) experiments had raised chimpanzees in human homes to try to encourage human-like behavior, particularly language and speech. If laryngeal descent is necessary for human vowels, and vowels in turn for language, then chimpanzees would never talk.

Second, archaeological evidence of modern human behaviour, such as jewelry, burial goods, cave painting, agriculture and settlements, seemed to start only after anatomically modern humans appeared, with their descended larynxes. The idea was that language provided increased cooperation which enabled these behaviors.

Rethinking the theory with new evidence

So if laryngeal descent theory says kids and apes and our earlier human ancestors couldnt produce contrasting vowels, just schwa, then what explains, for instance, Jane Goodalls observations of clearly contrasting vowel qualities in the vocalizations of chimpanzees?

But that kind of evidence wasnt the end of the laryngeal descent idea. For scientists to reach an agreement, especially to renounce a longstanding and useful theory, we rightly require consistent evidence, not just anecdotes or hearsay.

One of us (L.-J. Bo) has spent upward of two decades assembling that case against laryngeal descent theory. The multidisciplinary team effort has involved articulatory and acoustic modeling, child language research, paleontology, primatology and more.

One of the key steps was our study of the baboon vowel space. We recorded over 1,300 baboon calls and analyzed the acoustics of their vowel-like parts. Results showed that the vowel quality of certain calls was equivalent to known human vowels.

A schematic comparing the vocal qualities of certain baboon calls (orange ellipses) with selected vowel sounds of American English, where the phonetic symbols / i u / represent the vowels in beat, bat, bot, bought, boot. Photo: Louis-Jean Bo, GIPSA-lab (CNRS & University Grenoble-Alpes), CC BY-ND

Our latest review lays out the whole case, and we believe it finally frees researchers in speech, linguistics, primatology and human evolution from the laryngeal descent theory, which was a great advance in its time, but turned out to be in error and has outlived its usefulness.

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Speech and language in animals?

Human language requires a vocabulary that can be concrete (my left thumbnail), abstract (love, justice), elsewhere or elsewhen (Lincolns beard), even imaginary (Gandalfs beard), all of which can be slipped as needed into sentences with internal hierarchical grammar. For instance the black dog and the calico cat keep the same order whether X chased Y or Y was chased by X, where the meaning stays the same but the sentence organization is reversed.

Only humans have full language, and arguments are lively about whether any primates or other animals or our now extinct ancestors, had any of languages key elements. One popular scenario says that the ability to do grammatical hierarchies arose with the speciation event leading to modern humans, about 200,000 years ago.

Speech, on the other hand, is about the sounds that are used to get language through the air from one person to the next. That requires sounds that contrast enough to keep words distinct. Spoken languages all use contrasts in both vowels and consonants, organized into syllables with vowels at the core.

Apes and monkeys can talk in the sense that they can produce contrasting vowel qualities. In that restricted but concrete sense, the dawn of speech was not 200,000 years ago, but some 27 million years ago, before the time of our last common ancestor with Old World monkeys like baboons and macaques. Thats over 100 times earlier than the emergence of our modern human form.

Researchers have a lot of work to do to figure out how speech evolved since then, and how language finally linked in.Thomas R. Sawallis is aVisiting Scholar in New College, University of Alabama and Louis-Jean Bo is Chercheur en Sciences de la parole au GIPSA-lab (CNRS) at Universit Grenoble Alpes

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

More:
Timeline for Speech Evolution Pushed Back 27 Million Years - The Wire

An observer watching the Beyonce Black St. James video. FG Trade/Getty Images

Video of St. James performing at the December 9th Home Away King County conference went viral, largely because of Christopher Rufo, a former Seattle City Council candidate and resident conservative gadfly, who posted a clip of the performance on Twitter, which was then picked up by right-wing media (and then mainstream media after that). Its been viewed over 1.5 million times.

Rufo spun this as a story about government spending. On Twitter, he wrote: For years, Seattle has claimed that it needs more resources to solve homelessness, but as the video shows, they find it totally appropriate to pay for a transgender stripper to grind on members of the region's homelessness nonprofits and taxpayer-funded organizations.

This false statement was echoed by right-wing (and Russian) media. On RT, the (trans) writer Sophia Narwitz wrote, Unless she's hiding another secret in her pants, it remains to be seen how using government funding to hire a chick with a d**k to sexualize what should be a professional event will cure the local homeless crisis. This is yet another negative mark against a city that's already wasting vast sums of funds to combat a problem it doesn't seem capable of solving.

Turns out, there was no funding involved, government or otherwise. The county did not respond to a request for comment but according to journalist Erica C. Barnett, St. James was not paid for her dance.

Still, its not hard to see why this story has gone viral. The video might not be shocking to anyone who has been to a burlesque show before, but the fact that it takes place in at a florescent-lit conference center with no alcohol in sight does make for an incongruent imageespecially when St. James sticks her tongue in an audience members mouth. The audience member, for the record, seems to enjoy it, although some others in the crowd look uncomfortable. According to the Seattle Times, attendees included nonprofit workers, government employees, and members of the faith community, and in a full video of the event posted on Barnett's website (which has since been made private) you can see one woman staring down at the table as St. James writhes around her, as though if she ignored if hard enough, the whole thing would just disappear.

Since this story broke last week, heads have begun to roll. Kira Zylstra, the director of Home Away King County, was immediately suspended pending investigation. Then, on Monday, she stepped down from her job. That may have been inevitable, considering this thing has clearly been a PR disaster for both the city and county.

Ive seen very few defenses of this choice of entertainment for a county-funded conference, although there are a few notable exceptions: On Monday, for instance, community activist, attorney, and former Seattle mayoral candidate Nikita Oliver tweeted: More Ppl are mad a trans burlesque dancer performed at a publicly funded conference about homelessness; an issue which deeply impacts trans & queer communities, artists & sex workers. Do people get this mad when gospel choirs are the cultural performance at non-Christian conferences?

If this hypothetical gospel choir tossed their robes off and started twerking in pasties, I suspect that, yes, people would have been mad about that, too. I wanted to ask Oliver why she thinks this event has caused such outrageand whether she would have supported, say, the Chamber of Commerce or the Seattle Police Department using a burlesque dancer as in-house entertainment. But she declined to comment, as did St. James, and referred me to a statement by the Trans Women of Color Solidarity Network, which says St. James has been subjected to threats, harassment, and doxing.

Watching this story unfold and seeing the outrage it inspired, I was reminded of a recent segment on the NPR show Hidden Brain. The host, Shankar Vedantam, interviewed a journalist named Julie Zimmerman about the Covington High scandal, which, if youve wiped that particular outrage cycle from your memory, centered around a group of high school boys in MAGA hats who were accused of harassing an elderly Native American man in DC. That narrative ended up falling apart, which became national news on its own and spurned a thousand think pieces (my own included), but the question is, why does anyone care?

If you were my editor and I came to you and said, Yeah, this Native American guy and these kids in MAGA hats kind of got in this tense standoff on the mall today and I think it's a story, Zimmerman said, any self-respecting editor would say, Well, did somebody get shot? You know, how, like, how is this a story? Weird confrontations between people happen all the time, and we don't consider them to be news stories.

That may have been true in the past, but now, interpersonal conflict and drama can quickly go viral, and then global.

I've begun to wonder why we get so mad over things that, when it comes done to it, dont directly impact us. The attendees of the Home Away conference, who were reportedly not warned in advance, may understandably be pissed (although from the looks of the video, plenty of them enjoyed the show). But why the anger from anyone else, especially people thousands of miles away who dont give a second thought to Seattles actual homelessness problem?

Social scientists have been studying the issue of moral outrage for years, and theyve found, as anyone who spends a lot of time online has probably noticed, that the internet has vastly increased the amount of outrage were exposed to. One study found that encountering outrageous eventsor what they call norm violationsis relatively rare, but hearing or reading about them is exceedingly common online. Any scan of social media could tell you thats true. In fact, social media thrives on it.

Research on virality shows that people are more likely to share content that elicits moral emotions such as outrage, wrote Yale psychologist Molly Crockett in a 2017 paper published in the journal Nature. In other words, we get madder online than we tend to in real life, and this is reinforced by the algorithms that feed us content. As Columbia psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman told me, online, You arent rewarded for being reasonable but for being passionate.

The negative consequences of the ever-present cycle of outrage are obvious. For one, its divisive, contributing to the escalating tribalism and culture wars between left, right, and center. Plus, individuals, businesses, and institutions have lost their reputations and money after inspiring online outrage campaigns. The Hallmark Channel is learning about this right now: After a conservative group was outraged by a commercial featuring a lesbian couple, the channel yanked it from circulation, only to outrage progressive and LGBTQ groups, whose outrage got Hallmark to apologize and reverse course. That's another thing that has to be acknowledged: Outrage from minority groups over how they are treated does get things done sometimes.

Still, researchers have found that constantly feeling outraged not only reduces empathy, after a while, it creates a sort of numbness. Outrageous events start to take on less meaning, a proposed phenomenon some psychologists refer to as "outrage fatigue. We can only handle so much before checking out. As Molly Crockett told me in an email, If everything is worthy of outrage, effectively nothing is. This can mean truly outrageous things (for instance, US drones killing civilians in Afghanistan) inspire less outrage than strippers at conferences or kids wearing MAGA hats. (There are, I should note, multiple reasons we tend to care about dumb shit, not just outrage fatigue.)

And yet, the negative consequences of outrage may seem small compared to the benefits. Outrage can force action; it can signal I, personally, am on the right side of history; it can increase ones social position; and it can serve as a kind of bonding mechanism. Outrage can tear people apart, to be sure, but it can also bring them together.

Theres also a sort of visceral gratification associated with outrage. Getting outraged, and then acting on it, particularly by shaming the norm violator, activates parts of the brain associated with reward. But while the internet may have made outrage more ubiquitous, its not like any of this is new: In fact, its deeply ingrained in human behavior, according to Kaufman, who notes that for individuals who score high on traits of narcissism, expressing outrage online can be particularly rewarding. It doesnt just bring us attention, it also brings us esteem. The novelist Aldous Huxley wrote about this phenomenon in 1921: "To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior 'righteous indignation'this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats." It feels good, so we do it.

On the plus side, outrage really can lead to social change. #MeToo is a movement built on outrage, its undeniable that its had a real impact on the culture, mostly for the better.

Unfortunately, outrage also has a tendency to obscure reason. Take, for instance, an incident at NYU, where last year, stereotypically African American food served at the cafeteria during Black History Month (including fried chicken and watermelon water) caused such outrage that two people lost their jobs. But, as New York Magazine detailed, both of the staffers fired were black and, whats more, the menus were designed by black employees. That, however, didnt matter. Outrage demands someonewhether its the villain or nottake the fall.

Where outrage typically fails, however, is in changing minds. As Shankar Vedantam said on his show, It can feel good to start a fire, to see all the push notifications that come to your phone as people like and retweet your outrage. But, he adds, When was the last time you changed your mind because someone screamed at you? If you are anything like me, the answer is never. Thats the thing about outrage: It rarely works on an individual basis. Outrage may feel good from within your echo chamber, but expressing it is less likely to change someones mind than listening, forming common ground, and asking questions designed to make people inspect their beliefs.

So what can we do to end this constant cycle of outrage besides chucking our phones off a bridge and moving someplace with no cell service?

This is something I think about often, and yet, I also have a confession, because I, too, was part of the outrage cycle over Beyonce Black St. James. While I wasnt outraged by the performance (it struck me as more amusing than enraging), I did feel a bit outraged by Nikkita Olivers defense of it. And so I did the thing that you do: I shared it on Twitter.

Ive been waiting for the first full-throated defense of hiring a stripper to perform at a county-funded event, and I finally found it. From a former city council candidate, nonetheless, I tweeted. I wasnt just wrong in my facts (Oliver was a mayoral candidate, not a city council candidate) but in feeling. Yes, the likes and the retweets gave me a quick reward, but I know the problems with the outrage cycle better than most. And yet there I was, perpetuating the very thing that I hate. So I deleted it. I disagree with her take, but who cares? Shes as entitled to her opinion as anyone else.

Until algorithms stop rewarding outrage, perhaps the only thing each of can do is to inspect our own part in the problem. This is a little like trying to solve climate change with reusable bags and bamboo strawsthe problem is too big for choices like that to have much of an impactbut for those of us sick of these cycles, maybe the first step is to stop taking part.

Read the original here:
Outrage Is Everywhere. Here's Why. - Slog - TheStranger.com

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Although customers are highly satisfied with their utility service this year, ratings for enhanced utility offerings, specifically those that help manage bill amounts, have dropped. Adoption of digital services and consumption management programs is also beginning to stall. This signals that customer satisfaction does not translate to the use of enhanced utility offerings and the industry must focus on developing and marketing these offerings for future success. These findings are from the 2019 Cogent Syndicated Utility Trusted Brand & Customer Engagement: Residential study from Escalent, a top human behavior and analytics firm.

The study benchmarks and trends performance of 140 utilities on the Engaged Customer Relationship (ECR) scorea composite index of Service Satisfaction, Brand Trust and Product Experience performance based on over 67,000 nationwide customer interviews. The 2019 overall industry ECR score is 713 (on a 1,000-point scale), which is unchanged from last year.

To continue to succeed with customers in the future, the utility industry needs to become proficient at developing and marketing enhanced offerings and ensuring customers are engaged. Younger Millennials and Generation Zers now compose 20% of the utility market and score utilities significantly lower on customer engagement this year. The study shows these younger customers expect innovation, digital convenience and social responsibility. They will continue to demand utilities deliver on those expectations through enhanced offerings.

Engaged Customer Relationship Score

2019

2018

Change

Gen Zers (1824)

690

710

-20

Millennials (2534)

709

722

-13

Gen Xers (3554)

712

706

6

Late Boomers (5564)

712

711

1

Early Boomers (65+)

726

722

4

Customers currently have push-pull relationships with utilities where they appreciate the basic service they receive but arent seeing the value in engaging beyond that, said Chris Oberle, senior vice president at Escalent. We also see that the best utilities are those that are emerging as great product marketers. The future belongs to utilities that innovate to move from service providers to value-added partners in the eyes of their customers.

The study designates 40 utilities as 2019 Customer Champions. These utilities have higher offering usage and provide value-added offerings and services, and are best positioned for future customer success and industry innovation.

2019 Cogent Syndicated Utility Customer Champions

AEP Ohio

Elizabethtown Gas

Piedmont Natural Gas

Ameren Illinois

Florida Power & Light

PPL Electric Utilities

Atmos Energy South

Georgia Power

Public Service Company of Oklahoma

Avista

Idaho Power

Puget Sound Energy

Black Hills Energy Midwest

Kentucky Utilities

Salt River Project

Cascade Natural Gas

MidAmerican Energy

Seattle City Light

CenterPoint Energy South

National Fuel Gas

Southwestern Electric Power Company

Columbia Gas South

New Jersey Natural Gas

TECO Peoples Gas

Columbia Gas of Ohio

NW Natural

Texas Gas Service

ComEd

OPPD

UGI Utilities

CPS Energy

OUC

Washington Gas

Delmarva Power

Peoples Gas

West Penn Power

DTE Energy

Philadelphia Gas Works

Xcel Energy South

Xcel Energy West

The following are ECR scores for the 140 utilities covered in the study.

East Region Utility Brands

Engaged CustomerRelationship index

Service type

Delmarva Power

714

Combination

PECO

711

Combination

Con Edison

710

Combination

PSE&G

708

Combination

RG&E

704

Combination

National Grid

701

Combination

BGE

686

Combination

Eversource

684

Combination

NYSEG

668

Excerpt from:
High Utility Customer Satisfaction Isn't Translating to Use of Enhanced Offerings - Business Wire

Man is an extremely complex being. With age and different exposure to experiences, it is hard to make a general assumption about such a diverse species. However, an individuals behavior in different circumstances can be traced back to his inherited nature. This can then be used for the generalization as a whole. A generalized claim can then be concluded with mans inherited nature to be altruistic, bringing a concern for others before himself.

First, in the novel Lord of the Flies by William Golding, the characters are placed in a completely new environment-- an uninhabited island. One boy, Simon, in particular shows altruism throughout his time in the book. He displays selflessness while taking care of the children of the island. Even after expressing his own hunger, he proceeds to feed them. Simon found for them the fruit they could not reach, pulled off the choicest from up in the foliage, passed them back down to the endless, outstretched hands (138). When placed in a survival situation dealing with the unknown of his new island, he exhibits concern for those around him, especially those who are set at a disadvantage due to age. His true nature is untouched by unfavorable conditions when his selflessness put the children before his own well-being and needs.

True nature can be traced to the behavior of children where there has been less time for alteration of these natural instincts. For instance, in a study performed by Michael Tomasello at Stanford University, the claim that altruism is instinctive is brought to light through the study of toddlers.

...kids are quite altruistic when compared to apes. They gesture to communicate that something is out of place. They empathize with those they sense have been wronged. They have an almost reflexive desire to help, inform, and share. And they do so without expectation or desire for reward. And they do not get this from adults; it comes naturally (For Kids, Altruism Comes, Gorlick).

The best way to study a natural instinct can be through studying children. They have had less exposure to nurturement by parents/society. A general showing of altruistic behavior such as compassion and sharing in toddlers is probable evidence that the nature of humankind is altruism, especially when there is no reward involved with their actions.

Another area of human behavior that can be studied for this claim is in situations of crisis. For example, when the 9/11 crisis occurred in Manhattan, there were no accounts of people being trampled rushing out of the World Trade Centers; rather, those who needed more assistance descending were cared for, and calm mainly prevailed (Is Human Nature Fundamentally, Szalavitz). This is the outcome of other crisis situations, such as natural disasters and climate change. When evaluating true nature, situations of survival can be used to make a conclusion about man. Survival puts man in a situation with quick thinking and instinct, or an inherited characteristic. This allows the natural state of man to show. To conclude, when placed in a situation where potential death is being faced, man does not show signs of selfish survival instincts, but rather a concern for the safety and well-being of others: altruism.

An important document in the Roman Catholic Church is Augustines doctrine of original sin, which proclaimed that all people were born broken and selfish, saved only through the power of divine intervention (Scientists Probe to Human, Ward). However, in the sonnet by Francis Duggan, the author describes how people are born with a sense of selflessness and a concept of morality.

Those born to altruism in any way not small/The gifts of love, kindness and compassion are the greatest gifts of all/To help those in need of helping they go out of their way/They are the unsung heroes of the Human World of today/They never make the news headlines nor they never seek publicity/They were born not to seek self glory but to serve humanity

The lines of poetry support the idea that those who have the natural sense to be altruistic are not pursuing earthly desires, which would be considered a sin stated in the Ten Commandments in the Bible. They are not doing deeds through God, but through an altruistic inheritance, seeking a well-being for humanity and those who need good. This discredits the claim by Augustines Doctrine that man needs divinity to perform good.

When concluding on the perplex being that man is, it is clear that his true nature is to do good. As displayed in everyday desires, crisis situations, childrens behavior, and good deeds, selfless concern for others prevails in human character. This is not to say that there are not evil things in this world, but that man will always be rooted from the same altruistic nature.

Works Cited

Duggan, Francis. Those Born To Altruism. PoemHunter.com, 13 Feb. 2016,

https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/those-born-to-altruism/.

Golding, William, et al. William Goldings Lord of the Flies: Text, Notes, & Criticism.

Penguin Books, 2016.

Gorlick, Adam, and Adam Gorlick. For Kids, Altruism Comes Naturally,

Psychologist Says. Stanford University, 5 Nov. 2008, https://news.stanford.edu/news/2008/november5/tanner-110508.html.

Szalavitz, Maia. Is Human Nature Fundamentally Selfish or Altruistic? Time,

Time, 8 Oct. 2012, http://healthland.time.com/2012/10/08/is-human-nature-fundamentally-selfish-or-altruistic/.

Ward, Adrian F. Scientists Probe Human Nature--and Discover We Are Good,

After All. Scientific American, 20 Nov. 2012, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/scientists-probe-human-nature-and-discover-we-are-good-after-all/.

This is the fourth of 24 essays that will be written by PHS Honors English students in collaboration with The Portland Beacon over the next six months. Ms. Chandra Polasek, PHS Honors English and Drama teacher, will provide the essays on a regular basis to The Beacon. All essays are original work of the students.

Continue reading here:
PHS Honors Essay Project: The Nature of Mankind - theportlandbeacon.com

Its easy to become cynical about the holiday spirit. For a few weeks every year, we focus on giving to family, friends, charitable organizations. But soon after the new year, most of us return to a self-centered status quo.

Hypocrisy?

Not at all, according to evolutionary anthropologist Michael Gurven. Chair of integrative anthropological sciences at UC Santa Barbara, he argues that giving to others is a fundamental part of human nature but so is being selective about who we give to, and under what circumstances. Therefore a season of giving makes perfect sense.

The impulse to connect with others is a human universal, and a major way we do this is by giving and sharing, Gurven said. When you compare us to our nearest primate relative, chimpanzees, we share a wide range of resources and give freely not just upon request or in response to begging.

Thats especially true at this time of year, when the air is filled with familiar melodies of carols proclaiming peace and goodwill.

In his research, Gurven approaches human behavior from an evolutionary perspective, which posits that our habits and motivations often echo behaviors that allowed our ancient ancestors to survive and thrive. Our impulse to give to others, he argues, very much reflects our biological legacy.

Early and again late in life, Gurven notes, we depend upon others to take care of us. These experiences imprint on us the importance of sharing.

Even in hunter-gatherer societies, people cant make ends meet until theyre in their late teens, he said. That means the first 18 years of life, you need to receive food from others. That can also be true in your productive prime say your 30s and 40s if you have a lot of hungry mouths to feed in your family. On the other hand, chimpanzees can feed themselves shortly after weaning.

Humans grow and develop slowly, and it takes a long time to become a successful food producer, be it in hunting, farming or gathering, he continued. That training period requires subsidies from other individuals. Cooperation is not just a curious human attribute its a large part of who we are.

That said, as philanthropists, we are very selective, Gurven said. If we gave everything we produced away every day, wed be destitute. So we are strategic about what we give and who we give it to. If youre primed to give all the time, it could become overwhelming, and then you might not want to give at all.

So many of us wait until the holidays the time of year when all of the signals that inspire giving are turned up really high. When youre at a supermarket, the Salvation Army is right outside the door. You cant avoid them.

Gurven believes all those opportunities to give can produce a certain contagion. Generosity is in the air, he said. Everyone around you is giving, and were competitive.

If you get an appeal in the mail that starts Dear Friend or Dear Brother, the charity is creating a fictive social relationship that might pull on your obligation to give to family or close ties, he continued. When a friend donates to a charitable cause, you might see it on social media; its virtue signaling to everybody see what I just did, which could inspire others to do the same thing.

Then there are those holiday white elephant parties, which Gurven notes are opportunities to bring people together and remind them to think about each other.

Some people act altruistically no matter what, he said. They have to watch out that they dont get exploited. For the rest of us, context matters, culture matters. The holiday season focuses us. We recognize how important our social networks are, so we spend money on gifts for family and friends.

OK, but why do we take the time and effort to pick out presents for our loved ones, rather than just giving the gift you can be assured they will like: Cold, hard cash?

When you exchange gifts with people in your social network, (well thought out) gifts have a lot of symbolic value, Gurven explained. An economist would argue that money is the best gift because you can get anything you want, which should maximize your satisfaction. But thats too easy. It doesnt show much about your relationship; it just shows you have a thick wallet.

If Im giving you a gift that was both costly to me and shows that Ive been paying careful attention to your likes and dislikes, from your perspective it signals, He must really value me. As a result, youre more likely to value our friendship and want to interact in the future. Thats a big deal.

So take care when picking out those presents, and dont feel bad when your donations drop off in mid-January. Both, Gurven said, are prime examples of human nature.

Read more from the original source:
The Giving Season - The UCSB Current

Nearly all of economic theory depends on a key assumption: that individuals and organizations behave in their own self interest. This is the assumption that underlies Adam Smiths invisible hand and makes markets work. Without this assumption, rationality vanishes, and our ability to predict behaviors and their outcomes is lost.

But, under this assumption, some common human preferences and behavior do not make sense. For example, firms that practice racial or gender discrimination in hiring are foregoing profit to satisfy irrational preferences.

And under this assumption, altruism does not exist. For a long time, economists have explained away charitable giving as something people only do when it benefits themselves. People give to charities for the tax benefits. Or People give to charities that directly give back to them through their services. Or people give to charities because it makes them feel good or look good to do so.

At this time of year, especially, we see an up-tick in charitable giving. There is evidence that tax policy contributes to our giving. Forbes reported that charitable giving by individuals fell 3.4% in 2018 when the standard deduction for income taxes increased, lowering the incentive to donate to charity and itemize deductions.

However, tax incentives cannot explain why we give gifts to our families, friends and neighbors.

A few decades ago, economists began to try to reconcile economic theory with observed irrational behavior like gift-giving, and a new branch of economics was born behavioral economics, which brings psychology into our study of economic decision-making. Among behavioral economists are some who conduct experiments to better understand human behavior.

One experimental series in particular seeks to understand altruistic behavior. Dr. James Cox, who now is an economist at Georgia State University, conducted experiments in which each participant was given an endowment and assigned a partner, who would remain anonymous to the participant. The participant and his or her partner would play one of three short games. Each game involved allowing one or both players to choose to or not to give money to their anonymous partner in the game.

The three games were carefully designed so that observing players choices would allow the economists to distinguish among three types of giving: trust or reciprocity of trust, inequality-aversion and altruism.

Trust and reciprocity lead to conditional giving giving with the expectation of receiving something in return or giving in response to having received something.

But, the other two types of giving, inequality-aversion and altruism, are unconditional. These types of giving indicate that ones own happiness is dependent on minimizing inequality between oneself and another or simply on giving to another.

In Coxs experiments, he found evidence of all three types of giving.

Economic theory explains altruism and inequality aversion in the context of individuals preferences. Cox calls these other-regarding preferences. Simply put, someone with other-regarding preferences gains personal satisfaction from the increased satisfaction of others.

In this sense, charitable giving still fits the fundamental assumption that people behave in their own self interest. One will only give to another if that giving increases his own satisfaction.

But, these preferences are weird, and they took economists some time and some word-smithing to fit them into our traditional self-interest story.

With the holidays approaching, I am grateful for the weirdness of humanity. I am grateful for all of the non-profit organizations working tirelessly for the good of our community. I am grateful for the individuals and for-profit organizations that contribute to charitable causes. I am grateful for tax policies that encourage giving and for those who would give anyway.

The rest is here:
The economic search for why we give | Editorial Columns - Brunswick News

Wils team and I recently sat down together fora follow-up meeting on his behavior plan.

We have experiencedbumpsin the road with Wils behaviors along hisjourney through the school years. He has displayed what are typical behaviors for individuals his age with Down syndrome, including sitting down obstinately or fleeing the scene when he feels overwhelmed. Weve been able to work with him through these behaviorswith motor breaks, social storiesprompting communication, and sometimes its just a matter of sitting down withhim until he feels back in control of the situation. Now,in Wils seventh-grade year, his team and I have decided on theneed to create a formalbehavior plan. The mix of entering his teen years (hell be 13 in February) along withadvancing communication and processing gaps between Wil and his typical peers promptedthe decision toforma behavior plan.

Wils resource room teacher, paraprofessional, teacher consultant, social worker and speech therapist were all present at this follow-up behavior planmeeting. After the initial pleasantries, we got down to business. We created the initial behavior plan about a month prior to this follow-up meeting. The purpose of the follow-upwas to discern what aspects of the plan were working, what areas of the plan required more detail, and any other areas of the plan that needed to be re-mapped or removed.

Related: Researchers Are Developing a Dating App That Would Prevent Genetic Diseases

As a whole, we concluded the initial behavior plan that was put into place was working. Of course, this is an ever-evolving process,but at that point, we decided to continue with the current plan with a few added details. I cant say exactly when, but at some point during the meeting I was overwhelmed with the thought that we were all sitting together, in this room, for Wil. Yes, it is a statement of the obvious. But if you really think about that fact in and of itself, its powerful. Of course, things arent perfect; you can poke holes in any program or process. But I thought of my moms friends son. He is my age, almost 50 years old and has Down syndrome. There was no such team for him.Its hard to believe, at one time, these rights for Wil did not exist.

Wils rights are protected under IDEA. IDEA was first known as the Education of Handicapped Children Act, but even that did not pass until 1975. Thats really not so long ago. My moms friends son was born before this act passed. Bringing her son home from the hospital without institutionalizing him was a highly progressive choice at that time. Most parents at that time were told their child would be a burden to the entire family their marriage would surely be strained, siblings would suffer, and the child would not be able to talk, read or write, and possibly notwalk. Their child would never leave home. They were told that institutionalizing their child was surely the most humane choice for all involved. My moms friend was a pioneer in the fact alone that she chose to take her child home to raise.

Related: The Best Christmas Gift I Received After My Son Was Born With Down Syndrome

These laws are powerful, but as powerful as they are, we are all humans with our own emotions and own ideas working within the guidelines of the laws. A few short weeks before this meeting,I was not able to step back and appreciate the whole of that very fact. Wils behaviors had escalated and I was receiving almost daily calls from the school. Getting Wil out of bed every morning was at least a half an hour process, and it was becoming a given that he would completely shut down every day at lunchtime. Whether Wil would get on the bus or not was the question of the day. The tension within me was building as this continued day-after-day-after-day. I knew my sonwas hurting inside, and his team and I were not able to crack his code. Asking me to step back and appreciate the whole would have been beyond my emotional capabilities at that time.

Related: Woman With Down Syndrome Named L'Oreal Paris Woman of Worth

Fortunately, I was able to step back just enough torealize I was at an emotional breaking point. I knew I was in an emotional place where I could only see one step in front of me and I may be missing a lot of clues that someone from the outside looking in could see. I called Wils teacher consultant, Julie. She has known Wil since he was in preschool. Julie also sat in on Wils IEP and behavior plan meeting. However, Julie does not work with Wil on a day-to-day basis. She also has a vast knowledge of behaviors and how to work with behaviors. When I called her, I told her where I was emotionally. That I could be missing critical pieces because I could not see outside of where I was. I asked if she could help give me a broader lens. Julie immediately put me at ease, validated my concerns and also helped educate me in these new areas I was navigating with Wil. It was a turning point for me.The tides began to turn. Wils behaviors started to fall in line with the plan.

We have not struck gold, though it feels like it right now. There is no perfect plan. But there is a plan that works right now, and this is that plan. After living and learning what I have in thelast few weeks, I will revel in each day, or even if it is mere hours, that this plan works. There is no real cracking of the code. But there is always a new discovery. And that discovery takes us two leaps forward after so many backward steps. Wils team is taking those steps right along with him no matter which direction they go.

Sitting at the table with Wils team at the follow-up meeting, I was able to appreciate that very fact. The fact that Wil is doing well with this behavior plan. The fact that Wil is now getting out of bed easily in the mornings, taking the bus home and not objecting to homework. Wil did have a rough day the Monday after Thanksgiving break, and with the holidays coming up, the variances in schedule will likely cause more bumps in the road. And we know as eachfull moon approaches, thatcauses waves in behavior too, not just the tide. This behavior plan is still, and will continue to be a day-to-day process, with many tweaks and turns along the way. But while we are riding a good spell, I am taking advantage of the wide-lensed view.

Each day, month and year I learn more. More about the law. More about human behavior first and foremost mine! Im not in a place where I can appreciate the big picture when times are tough. The many detailed pieces that go into the days when Wil is having a rough spell pile up to a level of patience Im not always sure I have. But I miraculously find mywell of patience is dug deeper and deeper with each new experience. Would I ever call it a burden? Not for one hot second. I will always be Wils first and biggest advocate. Though each of uson Wils team has our ownemotional breaking points, we are together for one purpose the success of Wil Taylor. This is a team of people who love him, support him and want the very best for him. They believe in his future and in his potential not because a law says so, but because they care.

Today I will focus on that fact. Today I will gather all that I have learned from these past weeks. When the time comes again that I can not see past my next step, Ill be a little bit stronger, a little bit smarter, and know that though I cant see it now, there will be a clearing of the clouds. There will again be a time just like this, when I can sit with Wils team and feel the deep gravity and gratitude of the moment.

High-End Restaurant Staffed by People With Down Syndrome Is a Win for Inclusion

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How Finding My Down Syndrome Community Has Made Christmas Merry

Read more:
Why I'm Grateful for the Team Supporting My Son With Down Syndrome - Yahoo Lifestyle

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The 2010s were a decade that saw many box office records broken, including in Arlington at the Capitol Theatre. The theater has been entertaining Arlington audiences since 1925. While the price of the average movie ticket has risen since then, the timeless charm of the cinema lives on.

The Capitol provided The Advocate with a list of its biggest movies of the decade, with animated favorites and inspiring true stories proving to be the most popular films for Arlington residents this decade.

10. Lego Movie (2014)

Worldwide Box Office: $468 million

The whole family was invited for this surprise box office smash, featuring the popular Danish building blocks and a litany of pop culture figures, including Batman, Han Solo and Shaquille ONeal. The success of the movie spawned a series of sequels and spin-offs, including The Lego Move 2: The Second Part, The Lego Batman Movie and The Lego Ninjago Movie.

9. The Social Network (2010)

Worldwide Box Office: $225 million

The story about the creation and rise of social media giant Facebook was a crowd favorite in 2010, and is the only R-rated film to crack the Capitols top 10. The film was nominated for eight Academy Awards and in 2019 Esquire magazine named it the best film of the 2010s.

8. Hidden Figures (2016)

Worldwide Box Office: $236 million

Theodore Melfis 2016 drama about Katherine Johnson, a mathematician whose prodigious calculating abilities helped propel NASA into space during the 1960s was a major success at the box office and on award ballots, earning three Academy Award nominations and two Golden Globe nominations.

7. The Help (2011)

Worldwide Box Office: $216 million

Based on a best-selling novel that told the story of black women working in white households in Jackson, Mississippi in the 1960s, The Help featured a rich cast of leading women, including Emma Stone, Viola Davis, Octavia Spencer, Jessica Chastain and Bryce Dallas Howard.

6. Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2013)

Worldwide Box Office: $865 million

The second installment in the Hunger Games trilogy, the movie series based on Suzanne Collins best-selling novel series, was the biggest box office success at the Capitol. The story of arrow-shooting heroine Katniss Everdeen made Catching Fire one of the most successful female-starring movies in film history.

5. Frozen (2013)

Worldwide Box Office: $1.25 billion

Speaking of female leads, nothing was quite as big in the 2010s to young girls like the Disney animated film "Frozen." The chilly story of sisters Elsa and Anna is one of the most successful films in Disneys illustrious history, and the movies soundtrack has been played on countless car rides around Arlington since.

4. Black Panther (2018)

Worldwide Box Office: $1.34 billion

Ryan Cooglers epic superhero movie took viewers to the futuristic world of Wakanda and broke numerous box office records, including the highest-grossing solo superhero film, the highest-grossing film by a black director and the highest grossing opening weekend for a predominantly black cast.

3. Despicable Me (2010)

Worldwide Box Office: $543 million

The animated film about Gru, a wannabe supervillain tasked with taking care of three young girls would spawn one of the most successful film franchises of the decade, with two sequels and one spinoff being released later in the decade. However, the first movie is better known for introducing the world (and frightened parents) to the yellow, gibberish-spouting, overall-wearing creatures known as Minions.

2. Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015)

Worldwide Box Office: $2.06 billion

The hype was strong with this one. The highly anticipated start of the third "Star Wars" trilogy was a box office monster, according to website Box Office Mojo, the film sold 110 million tickets in North America alone. The series would include 2017s The Last Jedi and 2019 The Rise of Skywalker which is in theaters this Friday.

1. Inside Out (2015)

Worldwide Box Office: $857 million

Toppling goliaths like "Star Wars" and "Frozen" isnt an easy task, but Pixars sweet story of a girl and the different emotions that make up human behavior was a huge hit with audiences of all ages and ended up being the top movie of the Capitol in 2019.

What else should we report on? Let us know.

See the rest here:
What were Arlingtons 10 favorite movies of the decade? - Wicked Local Arlington

You know what its like to be sick. You feel fatigued, maybe a little depressed, less hungry than usual, more easily nauseated and perhaps more sensitive to pain and cold.

The fact that illness comes with a distinct set of psychological and behavioral features is not a new discovery. In medical terminology, the symptom of malaise encompasses some of the feelings that come with being ill. Animal behaviorists and neuroimmunologists use the term sickness behavior to describe the observable behavior changes that occur during illness.

Health care providers often treat these symptoms as little more than annoying side effects of having an infectious disease. But as it turns out, these changes may actually be part of how you fight off infection.

Im an anthropologist interested in how illness and infection have shaped human evolution. My colleagues and I propose that all these aspects of being sick are features of an emotion that we call lassitude. And its an important part of how human beings work to recover from illness.

The human immune system is a complex set of mechanisms that help you suppress and eliminate organisms such as bacteria, viruses and parasitic worms that cause infection.

Activating the immune system, however, costs your body a lot of energy. This presents a series of problems that your brain and body must solve to fight against infection most effectively. Where will this extra energy come from? What should you do to avoid additional infections or injuries that would increase the immune systems energy requirements even more?

Fever is a critical part of the immune response to some infections, but the energy cost of raising your temperature is particularly high. Is there anything you can do to reduce this cost?

To eat or not to eat is a choice that affects your bodys fight against infection. On one hand, food ultimately provides energy to your body, and some foods even contain compounds that may help eliminate pathogens. But it also takes energy to digest food, which diverts resources from your all-out immune effort. Consuming food also increases your risk of acquiring additional pathogens. So what should you eat when youre sick, and how much?

We humans are highly dependent on others to care for and support us when were sick. What should you do to make sure your friends and family care for you when youre ill?

My colleagues and I propose that the distinctive changes that occur when you get sick help you solve these problems automatically.

Of course these changes depend on the context. Any parents reading this article are likely familiar with the experience of being sick but pushing through it because a child needs care. While it may make sense to reduce food intake to prioritize immunity when the sick individual has plenty of energy reserves, it would be counterproductive to avoid eating if the sick person is on the verge of starvation.

So how does your body organize these advantageous responses to infection?

The evidence my colleagues and I reviewed suggests that humans possess a regulatory program that lies in wait, scanning for indicators that infectious disease is present. When it detects signs of infection, the program sends a signal to various functional mechanisms in the brain and body. They in turn change their patterns of operation in ways that are useful for fighting infection. These changes, in combination with each other, produce the distinct experience of being sick.

This kind of coordinating program is what some psychologists call an emotion: an evolved computational program that detects indicators of a specific recurrent situation. When the certain situation arises, the emotion orchestrates relevant behavioral and physiological mechanisms that help address the problems at hand.

Imagine youre walking through the woods, thinking youre alone, and suddenly you are startled by sounds suggesting a large animal is in the underbrush nearby. Your pupils dilate, your hearing becomes attuned to every little sound, your cardiovascular system starts to work harder in preparation for either running away or defending yourself. These coordinated physiological and behavioral changes are produced by an underlying emotion program that corresponds to what you might think of as a certain kind of fear.

Some of these coordinating programs line up nicely with general intuitions about what makes up an emotion. Others have functions and features that we might not typically think of as emotional.

Some psychologists suggest these emotion programs likely evolved to respond to identifiable situations that occurred reliably over evolutionary time, that would affect the survival or reproduction of those involved.

This way of thinking has helped researchers understand why some emotions exist and how they work. For instance, the pathogen disgust program detects indicators that some potentially infectious agent is nearby. Imagine you smell the stench of feces: The emotion of disgust coordinates your behavior and physiology in ways that help you avoid the risky entity.

Another example is the emotion of shame, which scouts for signs that youve done something that causes members of your social group to devalue you. When you detect one of these indicators a loved one rebukes you for doing something that hurt them, say the experience of shame helps you adjust your mental map of what kinds of things will cause others to devalue you. Presumably you will try to avoid them in the future.

Drawing from the emerging discipline of evolutionary medicine, my colleagues and I now apply the idea of these emotion programs to the experience of being sick. We call this emotion lassitude to distinguish the underlying program from the outputs it generates, such as sickness behavior and malaise.

We hope that our approach to lassitude will help solve problems of practical importance. From a medical perspective, it would be useful to know when lassitude is doing its job and when it is malfunctioning. Health care providers would then have a better sense of when they ought intervene to block certain parts of lassitude and when they should let them be.

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Feeling sick is an emotion meant to help you get better faster - The Conversation AU

Psst! Hey, are you overweight? Touchy subject, I know, but its OK to admit. More than two-thirds of adults are said to be clinically overweight or obese.

The National Institutes of Health has awarded a consortium of university researchers, led by the University of Alabama, a $2.5 million grantto further evaluate a wearable device designed to change eating behaviors. Developed in a UA lab, the patent-pending system uses a tiny camera to photograph food and sensors that measure how quickly you eat it.

The grant, via the NIHs National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, enables the researchers to test the device in a clinical trial over four years. An initial round of funding was awarded this fall.

Changing eating behavior enough to achieve and maintain long-term weight loss is elusive, saidDr. Edward Sazonov, a UA professor of electrical and computer engineering who is leading the project. Were seeking to determine if a device that adapts to your individual eating habits can change that.

The high-tech effort, which involves researchers at Brown University; Boston University and the University of Colorado, Anschutz Medical Campus, centers on the ingenious development within Sazonovs UA campus lab of a device he calls the Automatic Ingestion Monitor, or AIM.

Clipped to prescription or nonprescription eyeglasses, the AIM includes a tiny, high-definition still camera aligned with the wearers gaze. Sensors that accurately detect food intake trigger the camera to record what was eaten and to measure when, how much and how fast the wearer eats.

The hope is that this technology will give people a new, less burdensome way to monitor and take control of their eating, saidDr. Graham Thomas, a behavioral scientist who serves as associate professor of psychiatry and human behavior at Brown and is a co-principal investigator on the research project.

While measuring food intake, which previous studies show the technology can do accurately, is important, Sazonov said thats only part of the story.

The way you eat is as important as what you eat, Sazonov said. We are also looking at the rates of ingestion. We want to slow down and be more mindful about our eating.

Every person is different in when they eat, what they eat, how much they eat and how long they eat. We use machine learning to create a model of these individual eating patterns. After we learn the individual eating patterns, we see how it can be manipulated by suggesting small changes to reduce the total amount of energy consumed.

During the clinical trial, the devices built-in computer will communicate with the wearers smartphone and, when necessary, trigger the phone to send carefully designed messages suggesting modifications to the wearers eating behaviors.

Work by other researchers has shown that tracking what you eat by hand is one of the most powerful strategies for weight control, but it can be burdensome, tedious and error-prone.

Electronic fitness trackers have proven popular, so for those open to wearing a high-tech method to help in modifying their behaviors, the device could prove effective.

The key to this particular technology is to learn individual eating behaviors and then attempt to provide personalized feedback to modify those behaviors, Sazonov said.

Additional researchers on the project include two nutritionists,Drs. Megan McCrory of Boston University andJanine Higgins of University of Colorado; and UAsChris CrawfordandJason Parton.

This story originally appeared on the University of Alabamas website.

See the article here:
Want to shed a few pounds? University of Alabama researchers test new technology to help - Alabama NewsCenter