Brian Paciotti

Myeloid dendritic cells frequencies are increased in children with autism spectrum disorder and associated with amygdala volume and repetitive behaviors

The pathophysiology of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is not yet known; however, studies suggest that dysfunction of the immune system affects many children with ASD. Increasing evidence points to dysfunction of the innate immune system including activation of microglia and perivascular macrophages, increases in inflammatory cytokines/chemokines in brain tissue and CSF, and abnormal peripheral monocyte cell function. Dendritic cells are major players in innate immunity and have important functions in the phagocytosis of pathogens or debris, antigen presentation, activation of naïve T cells, induction of tolerance and cytokine/chemokine production. In this study, we assessed circulating frequencies of myeloid dendritic cells (defined as Lin-1(-)BDCA1(+)CD11c(+) and Lin-1(-)BDCA3(+)CD123(-)) and plasmacytoid dendritic cells (Lin-1(-)BDCA2(+)CD123(+) or Lin-1(-)BDCA4(+) CD11c(-)) in 57 children with ASD, and 29 typically developing controls of the same age, all of who were enrolled as part of the Autism Phenome Project (APP). The frequencies of dendritic cells and associations with behavioral assessment and MRI measurements of amygdala volume were compared in the same participants. The frequencies of myeloid dendritic cells were significantly increased in children with ASD compared to typically developing controls (p<0.03). Elevated frequencies of myeloid dendritic cells were positively associated with abnormal right and left amygdala enlargement, severity of gastrointestinal symptoms and increased repetitive behaviors. The frequencies of plasmacytoid dendritic cells were also associated with amygdala volumes as well as developmental regression in children with ASD. Dendritic cells play key roles in modulating immune responses and differences in frequencies or functions of these cells may result in immune dysfunction in children with ASD. These data further implicate innate immune cells in the complex pathophysiology of ASD.

Are Religious Individuals More Generous, Trusting, and Cooperative? An Experimental Test of the Effect of Religion on Prosociality

We investigated the effect of religion on generosity, interpersonal trust, and cooperation by using games developed by experimental economists (Dictator, Trust, and Public Goods). In these experiments, individuals were paired or grouped with unknown strangers to test the degree to which religion promotes prosocial behavior. We evaluated group- and individual-level effects of religion on prosocial behavior across the three games. Although playing the games in a religious setting showed no overall difference as compared to a secular setting, we did find a weak association between some individual-level dimensions of religiosity and behavior in some of the games. The weak association between religion and behavior is consistent with theory and empirical studies using similar measures – the anonymous pairing and grouping of the economic games may moderate individual-level effects of religion. Our research is a strong complement to the empirical literature because the three studies involved a large and diverse sample and used sensitive instruments that have been found to reliably measure prosocial behavior.

LARGE-SCALE COOPERATION AMONG SUNGUSUNGU “VIGILANTES” OF TANZANIA: CONCEPTUALIZING MICRO-ECONOMIC AND INSTITUTIONAL APPROACHES

Sungusungu non-state justice organizations in Tanzania exemplify large-scale cooperation. Sungusungu third-party enforcers protect property and resolve interpersonal disputes for ethnic Sukuma and individuals from other ethnic groups who have joined the hierarchically structured organizations. We use ethnographic and experimental data to highlight the importance of institutional forces when attempting to understand patterns of large-scale cooperation. We acknowledge the usefulness of considering micro-economic theories (e.g. costly signaling theory) to understand Sungusungu, but show that social institutions and a human predisposition to act as a “strong reciprocator” are important mechanisms to explain both the origins and maintenance of Sungusungu cooperation.

Homicide in Seattle’s Chinatown, 1900-1940 Evaluating the Influence of Social Organizations

This study extends the understanding of how features of Chinese social organization influenced patterns of homicide in Seattle from 1900 to 1940. The findings illustrate that generalizations about Chinese violence fit pre–World War II Seattle homicide data: (a) Chinese homicide rates were high as a result of conflict between tong organizations involved in the vice industry; (b) the timing of tong events was driven by disputes among organizational chapters in different cities; and (c) homicide rates unrelated to tong violence were relatively low but far higher than modern Asian rates. The findings suggest the importance of considering patterns of violence within particular ethnic groups to evaluate how ethnic social organizations influence violence.

Cultural evolutionary theory: A synthetic theory for fragmented disciplines

Cultural evolutionary theory, like other evolutionary theories, links individual-level and population or society-level phenomena. It provides numerous bridges between social psychology and other disciplines and sub-disciplines. The theory uses mathematical models to understand the population-level consequences of the individual-level processes of individual and social learning. The theory has been used to explain group-level behavior such as cooperation, altruism, and the cross-cultural variation associated with social institutions. The empirical study of social psychological assumptions of such models and experimental tests of cultural-evolutionary hypotheses are in their infancy.Increasingly in recent years, social psychologists have come to appreciate the role that language plays in social life. For the discipline, the consequences of this developing awareness have been salutary. Language is critically implicated in many of the core phenomena social psychologists study (e.g., causal attribution, social identity, status and intimacy, and interpersonal relations, to list but a few), and taking the role of language into account has greatly enhanced our understanding of them. Moreover, because stimulus and response in social psychology are so often verbal in form, many fundamental questions of methodology turn on issues that are implicitly linguistic. When social psychologists have considered language, they typically have focused on the semantic–pragmatic levels of linguistic analysis. Much less attention has been paid to the system of sound production that allows semantic representations to be transformed into the perceptually accessible form we call speech. This is unfortunate for many reasons, not the least of which is that speech, in addition to its semantic content, contains information that bears directly on phenomena that are the concern of social psychological theory. It is useful to distinguish between two related areas of investigation that involve speech processing: research on speech perception and speaker perception. Speech perception research studies the process by which listeners extract linguistically significant information from highly variable acoustic input. The process is complicated by the fact that spoken language is both highly variable