Research Articles

Subject(s):
Author(s): Pellis, S.M., McKenna, M.M.
NIFP Rating: 3

play fighting is a frequent activity of juvenile rats and appears to show marked variability amongst individuals in that some rats play a great deal and others very little. This study attempted to identify some of the factors involved in producing this individual variability. The major influence over an individual’s frequency of play as a […]

Author(s): Pellis, S.M., Pasztor, T.J., Pellis, V.C., Dewsbury, D.A.
NIFP Rating: 3

The body targets contacted, the type of contact made, and the patterns of defense and counterattack elicited by those attacks are examined in the play fighting of captive male and female pairs of grasshopper mice. The nape was the most frequently contacted body target, irrespective of the type of contact made, be it nosing, allogrooming, […]

Author(s): Pellis, S.M., Pellis, V.C.
NIFP Rating: 2

Play fighting is a commonly reported form of play in the young of many mammals. Most of the studies on the neurobehavioral mechanisms regulating this behavior have focused on the laboratory rat. The rationale for doing so has been primarily on practical grounds. This paper seeks to answer the question, ‘How good is the rat […]

Author(s): J. Panksepp, Solms, M.
NIFP Rating: 5

First paragraph of this paper: Neuropsychoanalysis seeks to understand the human mind, especially as it relates to first-person experience. It recognizes the essential role of neuroscience in such quests. However, unlike most branches of neuroscience, it positions mind and brain on an equal footing. It recognizes that the mammalian brain is not only an information […]

Author(s): Pellis, S.M.
NIFP Rating: 6

play fighting appears to involve the behavior patterns of attack and defense otherwise seen in serious fighting. The degree of similarity, however, depends on the body targets attacked and defended during these forms of fighting. For many taxa, including diverse mammalian families and some birds, the same targets are attacked and defended during both play […]

Author(s): J. Panksepp
NIFP Rating: 7

During the past half century of research with preclinical animal models, affective neuroscience has helped identify and illuminate the functional neuroanatomies and neurochemistries of seven primary process, i.e., genetically provided emotional systems of mammalian brains. All are subcortically localized, allowing animal models to guide the needed behavioral and neuroscientific analyses at levels of detail that […]

Author(s): E. Palagi, I. Norscia, G. Spada
NIFP Rating: 7

Play signals are commonly used by animals to communicate their playful motivation and to limit the risk that rough acts are misunderstood by playmates. The relaxed open mouth is the most common facial expression performed during play in many mammals and represents the ritualized version of the movement anticipating a play bite. The signaling nature […]

Author(s): Panksepp  J., Yovell Y.
NIFP Rating: 8

Mammalian brains contain at least 7 primal emotional systems–Seeking, Rage, Fear, Lust, Care, Panic and Play (capitalization reflects a proposed primary-process terminology, to minimize semantic confusions and mereological fallacies). These systems help organisms feel affectively balanced (e.g. euthymic) and unbalanced (e.g. depressive, irritable, manic), providing novel insights for understanding human psychopathologies. Three systems are especially […]

Author(s): E. Palagi, D. Antonacci, G. Cordoni

Social play, which involves cooperation, communication, and learning, may represent a suitable field for the investigation of cognitive ability in a given species. We collected data on a captive group of gorillas in order to evaluate the potential cognitive skill of juveniles in fine-tuning play behavior. This study revealed that juvenile gorillas are able to […]

Author(s): E. Palagi, G. Cordoni, E. Demuru, Marc Bekoff
NIFP Rating: 9

The concept of peace, with its corollary of behaviours, strategies and social implications, is commonly believed as a uniquely human feature. Through a comparative approach, we show how social play in animals may have paved the way for the emergence of peace. By playing fairly, human and nonhuman animals learn to manage their social dynamics […]

Author(s): E. Palagi, V. Nicotra, G. Cordoni
NIFP Rating: 7

Emotional contagion is a basic form of empathy that makes individuals able to experience others’ emotions. In human and non-human primates, emotional contagion can be linked to facial mimicry, an automatic and fast response (less than 1 s) in which individuals involuntary mimic others’ expressions. Here, we tested whether body (play bow, PBOW) and facial […]

Author(s): B.C. O’Meara, K.L. Graham, S.M. Pellis, G.M Burghardt
NIFP Rating: 6

What factors in animal life history facilitate or reduce the probability that a species will perform play behavior? While some relationships are known within species and across individuals, it is not obvious that such relationships can be used to explain differences and similarities in amount and type of play across large taxonomic groupings of animals, […]

Author(s): E. Palagi

Play is ephemeral and versatile. Probably for this reason it is so difficult to study systematically. Results from the last two decades of research suggest that play is a multifunctional phenomenon that varies according to different factors such as the species, age, sex, relationship quality of the players, etc. Accordingly, animal play needs to be […]

Author(s): B. Knutson, J. Panksepp
NIFP Rating: 9

Introduction: Rough-and-tumble play presents opportunities for young mammals to test social skills in an affiliative context. Because serotonin (5HT) depletion can induce nonaffiliative or openly hostile behavior in adult rats’ and primates,’ we conducted an experiment to examine if serotonin depletion would also increase the agonistic nature of play behavior in juvenile rats. Results: Taken […]

Subject(s):
Author(s): S. Lammes, C. Wilmott
NIFP Rating: 2

This article examines how maps in location-based mobile games are used as surfaces on which players can inscribe their whereabouts and other local information while being on the move. Using different examples of location-based games (LBGs) to which the map is central, our main argument is that such cartographical LBGs foreground the fluidity of mapping […]

Author(s): Marek Špinka, Marie Palečková, Milada Reháková
NIFP Rating: 4

The metacommunication hypothesis asserts that some elements of play behaviour are associated with play elements borrowed from aggression and interpret these aggression-like elements as playful. Using data from free living Hanuman langurs (Semnopithecus entellus), we tested three predictions that follow from the metacommunication hypothesis: (i) aggression-like elements (ALEs) abbreviate play bouts; (ii) candidate signal elements […]

Author(s): C. Montag, J. Panksepp
NIFP Rating: 6

Emotional facial expressions provide important insights into various valenced feelings of humans. Recent cross-species neuroscientific advances offer insights into molecular foundations of mammalian affects and hence, by inference, the related emotional/affective facial expressions in humans. This is premised on deep homologies based on affective neuroscience studies of valenced primary emotional systems across species. Thus, emerging […]

Author(s): Jenny Louise Gibson, Megan Cornell, Tim Gill
NIFP Rating: 5

Loose parts play (LPP) interventions introduce moveable materials and equipment to children’s play spaces to facilitate unstructured, child-led play. Metaanalysis of previous school-based research has shown significant benefits of LPP for physical activity. In the current paper, we review the scope and quality of the quantitative evidence relating to cognitive, social and emotional outcomes. We conducted a systematic search […]

Author(s): N.S. Gordon, S. Kollack-Walker, H. Akil, J. Panksepp
NIFP Rating: 8

Rough and tumble (R&T) play is an intrinsic behavior in most mammals. However, unlike sex and aggression, play has not been well characterized in terms of neuronal circuitry. We employed in situ hybridization to explore the differences of c-fos mRNA activation in juvenile rats that had been allowed R&T play for a total of 30 […]

Author(s): C.J. Green
NIFP Rating: 7

Places assigned and places chosen have major implications for the lives of children. While the former are a result of children’s subordinate position in an adult world, the latter are the essence of their agency. Beginning at a young age children seek out places to claim as their own. Places, real and imaginary, shape children […]

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