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Eithne Kavanagh

@eithnekavanagh.bsky.social
1.3K followers 428 following 50 posts

Senior lecturer and research fellow at NTU Psychology. Research on social and communicative behaviour in humans and other primates

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Eithne Kavanagh @eithnekavanagh.bsky.social · 05/06/2026
New paper! Being more facially expressive has social network benefits, especially in women. May explain why highly expressive faces have evolved in humans! www.cell.com/iscience/ful... With @bridgetwaller.bsky.social @jamiewhitehouse.bsky.social Alisa Balabanova, Robin Dunbar and Jasmine Rollings
cell.com
Spontaneous facial expressivity predicts real-world social network size and richness
Psychology; Social interaction; Social sciences
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Jamie Whitehouse @jamiewhitehouse.bsky.social · 08/05/2026
🐒 Post-doc Opportunity 🐒 ... annndd we're now also advertising a 3-year Research Fellow position at NTU as part of our @leverhulme.ac.uk funded project. More info: jamiewhitehouse.github.io/mappingconne... Apply here: vacancies.ntu.ac.uk/Job/JobDetai... Deadline: 19th June :) Please repost!
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Cardiff Babylab @cardiffbabylab.bsky.social · 28/01/2026
🎉 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...
youtube.com
Baby headcams reveal how babies encounter faces during development
YouTube video by Cardiff Babylab
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Eithne Kavanagh @eithnekavanagh.bsky.social · 13/01/2026
One more month to apply for this! Please forward to any potential students (UK-only)
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Eithne Kavanagh @eithnekavanagh.bsky.social · 02/12/2025
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...
ntu.ac.uk
Physiological health outcomes of dominance hierarchies in team-based contexts
Find out more about this fully funded PhD studentship opportunity.
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Bridget Waller @bridgetwaller.bsky.social · 09/12/2025
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...
cambridge.org
Structural and Cognitive Mechanisms of Group Cohesion in Primates | Behavioral and Brain Sciences | Cambridge Core
Structural and Cognitive Mechanisms of Group Cohesion in Primates - Volume 48
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Bridget Waller @bridgetwaller.bsky.social · 02/12/2025
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...
ntu.ac.uk
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.
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Eithne Kavanagh @eithnekavanagh.bsky.social · 02/12/2025
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...
ntu.ac.uk
Physiological health outcomes of dominance hierarchies in team-based contexts
Find out more about this fully funded PhD studentship opportunity.
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Bridget Waller @bridgetwaller.bsky.social · 24/11/2025
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...
ntu.ac.uk
Physiological health outcomes of dominance hierarchies in team-based contexts
Find out more about this fully funded PhD studentship opportunity.
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Jordan S. Martin @jsmartin.bsky.social · 30/07/2025
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/...
science.org
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.
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Eithne Kavanagh @eithnekavanagh.bsky.social · 28/07/2025
@bridgetwaller.bsky.social www.researchgate.net/publication/...
researchgate.net
(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...
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Dieter Lukas @dieterlukas.fediscience.org.ap.brid.gy · 08/07/2025
Our #study finds that #male #dominance isn't the norm among #primates, and starts to unravel what shapes flexibility in intersexual power paper (OA) www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.25004… press release www.mpg.de/24986976/0630-evan-beyon…
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Stephanie L King @stephanielking.bsky.social · 15/06/2025
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...
bristol.ac.uk
Details | Working at Bristol | University of Bristol
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Emma Suvi McEwen @emmasmcewen.bsky.social · 06/06/2025
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...
journals.plos.org
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...
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Raphaela Heesen @heesenr.bsky.social · 17/05/2025
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!
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Amanda Melin @amelinlab.bsky.social · 28/04/2025
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.
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Bridget Waller @bridgetwaller.bsky.social · 17/04/2025
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
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Cultural Evolution Society @culturalevolsoc.bsky.social · 03/04/2025
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...
culturalevolutionsociety.org
Two-year Postdoctoral Research Officer - Cultural Evolution Society
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Mélissa Berthet @berthetmelissa.bsky.social · 04/04/2025
🚨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
science.org
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 ...
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Robert Ross @robert-m-ross.bsky.social · 01/04/2025
Have you every found yourself wondering whether the most widely used measures of social cognitive ability measure what they are supposed to measure?
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Maria Wimber @marwimber.bsky.social · 31/03/2025
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!
tinyurl.com
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...
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Stephanie L King @stephanielking.bsky.social · 26/03/2025
🐳 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
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EHBEA @ehbea.bsky.social · 26/03/2025
@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...
eva.mpg.de
Positions available - Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
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Bridget Waller @bridgetwaller.bsky.social · 26/03/2025
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...
sciencedirect.com
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…
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Bridget Waller @bridgetwaller.bsky.social · 17/03/2025
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....
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Eiko Fried @eikofried.bsky.social · 13/02/2025
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
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Delphine De Moor @delphinedemoor.bsky.social · 12/02/2025
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/
besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com
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...
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Eithne Kavanagh @eithnekavanagh.bsky.social · 29/01/2025
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
scientificamerican.com
Expressive Faces Make People More Likable
Facial expressions do far more than just broadcast emotions
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Megan Petersdorf @meganpetersdorf.bsky.social · 27/01/2025
New paper! 🐒 🧪 We found the Kinda baboons have long-lasting female-male relationships that are largely male-driven and persist across female reproductive states. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...
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Bridget Waller @bridgetwaller.bsky.social · 23/12/2024
Fully funded PhD studentship using imaging methods to quantify variation in faces - would suit candidates with coding skills or computational methods. Get in touch! www.ntu.ac.uk/study-and-co...
ntu.ac.uk
Using imaging spectroscopy to measure individual differences in facial expressivity in human and non-human primates
Find out about this studentship opportunity on using multiple imaging spectroscopy techniques to understand individual differences in facial expressivity in human and non-human primates.
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Rebecca Sear @rebeccasear.bsky.social · 16/12/2024
Today (16 December) is the deadline for submitting abstracts for the European Human Behaviour and Evolution Association conference. Don't miss it 😊
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Nicholas A. Christakis @nachristakis.bsky.social · 07/12/2024
Friendship from a whole different angle.
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Franciska de Vries 🟥 @frantecol.bsky.social · 28/11/2024
Science takes time - a lot of time. Time that is more and more difficult to make available because of increased workloads. Time that exceeds the temporary contracts of postdocs and PhDs. I'll illustrate this using our paper published in Nature yesterday. 🧵 (1/x) www.nature.com/articles/s41...
nature.com
Soil microbiomes show consistent and predictable responses to extreme events - Nature
Soils from 30 grasslands across Europe were subjected to 4 contrasting extreme climatic events under drought, flood, freezing and heat conditions, with the results suggesting that soil microbiomes fro...
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Eithne Kavanagh @eithnekavanagh.bsky.social · 26/11/2024
Maybe late to the starter pack game? But haven't seen one specific to those studying the evolution of social behaviour, so made one! Any study species; humans, primates and beyond. Added some initial people but please comment to be added. go.bsky.app/CibACbM
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Jonathan Peelle @jpeelle.bsky.social · 23/11/2024
Great suggestions in this list!
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Dr Ruby (she/her) @paperwhispers.bsky.social · 21/11/2024
Leeds has a fully funded scholarship program for undergraduate and Masters study for Gaza students. **Tell Everyone** www.leeds.ac.uk/masters-scho...
leeds.ac.uk
Gazan Humanitarian Scholarship
We offer scholarships for citizens of Gaza who have been displaced as a result of the ongoing conflict in the region and are living in a different country (outside of the UK).
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Dr Chris Young @drchrisyoung.bsky.social · 20/11/2024
Fully funded PhD studentship with field work in South Africa on baboon health resilience with me, Rich McFarland and Stefano Kaburu at Nottingham Trent University. Please share or get in touch if interested 👇 tinyurl.com/3uy8e6th
tinyurl.com
The social and environmental predictors of health resilience in a wild animal model
Find out about this studentship opportunity on social and environmental predictors of health resilience in a wild animal model.
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Dr Kathleen Millen @neurodevkathy.bsky.social · 18/11/2024
Let's keep this going here BlueSky! #icanhazpdf can level the playing field for publication access
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Mubashar “Mubs” Iqbal @mubashariqbal.com · 11/11/2024
Starter packs are genius, but I was surprised there wasn't a list of them for people to find. So I built it: blueskydirectory.com/starter-pack... The website monitors the packs being shared and adds the ones it finds to the database. Missed your stater pack? Message me and I'll get it added.
blueskydirectory.com
All - Bluesky Directory
A curated collection of all things relating to the Blue Sky social media platform.
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Tay (Antonio J. Osuna Mascaró) @biotay.bsky.social · 16/11/2024
1/7 Ego depletion is possible The continuous striving for self-control leads the prefrontal cortex to enter a NREM sleep-like state, and as we lose self-control we become more hostile and resentful. It is fascinating. (paper) buff.ly/3Z9e6np
https://www.psytoolkit.org/lessons/stroop.html
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Prof Sarah-Jayne Blakemore @sjblakemore.bsky.social · 13/11/2024
New paper! Increased threat learning after social isolation in human adolescents Very proud of @emilyanntowner @KirstenThomas64 @livia_tomova who ran this mammoth study during the pandemic Emily Towner’s thread on X copied below (with permission) royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...
royalsocietypublishing.org
Increased threat learning after social isolation in human adolescents | Royal Society Open Science
In animal models, social isolation impacts threat responding and threat learning, especially during development. This study examined the effects of acute social isolation on threat learning in human a...
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georgia 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 @blahttodea.bsky.social · 12/11/2024
I made a starter pack for animal behaviour researchers / ethologists! please share and feel free to self-nominate or suggest others to be added as this is very much still a work in progress and not an exhaustive list 🌍🧪😊 #SciSky #BioSky #AnimalBehaviour #AnimalBehavior #Ethology go.bsky.app/Tr8VZpV
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James Holland Jones @juemos.bsky.social · 27/02/2021
Excellent review of the relationship between niche construction theory and human behavioral ecology by @elspethready and @MikePricePhD. It's framed in terms of archaeology, but it actually quite general. doi.org/10.1002/evan.21885
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Eithne Kavanagh @eithnekavanagh.bsky.social · 13/11/2024
Here because it's apparently like the old Twitter! I expect to post about research on social behaviour and communication in humans 👩👨‍🦰, nonhuman primates 🐵🦍 and maybe some other animals 🐺🐬. Below is a video of me causing a conflict in an experiment
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