ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2018
Observing grooming promotes affiliation in Barbary macaques.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 16 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
16 citing papers in PubMed.
- The play fever: individual and group factors influence the contagion of play behaviour within social hominid groups.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2026Article
- Oxytocin in the Amygdala Sustains Prosocial Behavior via State-Dependent Amygdala-Prefrontal Modulation.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- Strategic third-party interventions in feral ungulate affiliation.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Rapid mimicry of trunk and head movements during play in African Savanna elephants (Loxodonta africana).Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Is it a Match? Yawn Contagion and Smile Mimicry in Toddlers.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2025Article
- Social tolerance and success-biased social learning underlie the cultural transmission of an induced extractive foraging tradition in a wild tool-using primate.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Group-level signatures in bonobo sociality.Evolutionary human sciences · 2024Article
- Article
- Sharing Positive Affective States Amongst Rodents.Affective science · 2023Review
- Island Life: Use of Activity Budgets and Visibility to Evaluate a Multi-Species Within-Zoo Exhibit Move.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2022Article
- Yawn contagion in bonobos: Another group, another story.American journal of primatology · 2022Article
- Testing the contagious nature of allopreening: bystander ravens are affected by conspecifics' affiliative interactions.Animal behaviour · 2022Article
- Visuo-Motor Affective Interplay: Bonding Scenes Promote Implicit Motor Pre-dispositions Associated With Social Grooming-A Pilot Study.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- Emotional contagion in nonhuman animals: A review.Wiley interdisciplinary reviews. Cognitive science · 2022Review
- Social contagion of affiliation in female macaques.Royal Society open science · 2021Article
- Prosocial Influence and Opportunistic Conformity in Adolescents and Young Adults.Psychological science · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Observing friendly social interactions makes people feel good and, as a result, then act in an affiliative way towards others. Positive visual contagion of this kind is common in humans, but whether it occurs in non-human animals is unknown. We explored the impact on female Barbary macaques of observing grooming, a behaviour that physiological and behavioural studies indicate has a relaxing effect on the animals involved. We compared females' behaviour between two conditions: after observing conspecifics groom, and in a matched control period. We found that observing grooming was associated with reduced behavioural indicators of anxiety, suggesting that seeing others groom is, in itself, relaxing. Observing grooming was also associated with a shorter latency to becoming involved in a grooming bout (and higher likelihood both of initiating that bout and being the groomer rather than groomee), and with elevated rates of other affiliative behaviours. These results provide evidence for positive visual contagion; this phenomenon may contribute fundamentally to group cohesion not just in this species, but also in the many mammal and bird species where grooming occurs. Our study highlights the importance of exploring social behaviour beyond the level of the interacting individuals, within the broader social context where it occurs.
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