Intense sociality has been a catalyst for human culture and civilization, and our social
relationships at a personal level play a pivotal role in our health and well-being. These …

Friendship is the single most important factor influencing our health, well-being, and
happiness. Creating and maintaining friendships is, however, extremely costly, in terms of …

Based on an analysis of the literature and a large scale crowdsourcing experiment, we
estimate that an average 20-year-old native speaker of American English knows 42,000 …

Human cooperation is highly unusual. We live in large groups composed mostly of non-
relatives. Evolutionists have proposed a number of explanations for this pattern, including …

Nonhuman primates use social touch for maintenance and reinforcement of social
structures, yet the role of social touch in human bonding in different reproductive, affiliative …

It has been proposed that singing evolved to facilitate social cohesion. However, it remains
unclear whether bonding arises out of properties intrinsic to singing or whether any social …

We use data on frequencies of bi-directional posts to define edges (or relationships) in two
Facebook datasets and a Twitter dataset and use these to create ego-centric social …

The social brain hypothesis has suggested that natural social network sizes may have a
characteristic size in humans. This is determined in part by cognitive constraints and in part …

Despite the spread and adoption of social network concepts outside of the academy and the
rising use of social network analysis across a number of disciplines, there is no general …

Written at an introductory level, and featuring engaging case examples, this book reviews
the theory and practice of personal and egocentric network research. This approach offers …