The article engages with the literature on the ‘East Asian welfare model’ by using Esping‐Andersen's ‘worlds of welfare capitalism’ approach to analyze social policy in the region. It describes the main features of a productivist world of welfare capitalism that stands alongside Esping‐Andersen's conservative, liberal and social democratic worlds. It then shows that Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan are all part of this world, though they divide into sub‐groups within it. To account for productivist welfare capitalism in East Asia, the article focuses particularly on bureaucratic politics at the unit level, and on a range of key shaping factors at the system level. It closes by considering the implications of East Asian experience for comparative social policy analysis.

We discuss the application of beamforming techniques to the field of magnetoencephalography (MEG). We argue that beamformers have given us an insight into the dynamics of oscillatory changes across the cortex not explored previously with traditional analysis techniques that rely on averaged evoked responses. We review several experiments that have used beamformers, with special emphasis on those in which the results have been compared to those observed in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and on those studying induced phenomena. We suggest that the success of the beamformer technique, despite the assumption that there are no linear interactions between the mesoscopic local field potentials across distinct cortical areas, may tell us something of the balance between functional integration and segregation in the human brain. What is more, MEG beamformer analysis facilitates the study of these complex interactions within cortical networks that are involved in both sensory-motor and cognitive processes.

Darwin originally pointed out that there is something about infants which prompts adults to respond to and care for them, in order to increase individual fitness, i.e. reproductive success, via increased survivorship of one's own offspring. Lorenz proposed that it is the specific structure of the infant face that serves to elicit these parental responses, but the biological basis for this remains elusive. Here, we investigated whether adults show specific brain responses to unfamiliar infant faces compared to adult faces, where the infant and adult faces had been carefully matched across the two groups for emotional valence and arousal, as well as size and luminosity. The faces also matched closely in terms of attractiveness. Using magnetoencephalography (MEG) in adults, we found that highly specific brain activity occurred within a seventh of a second in response to unfamiliar infant faces but not to adult faces. This activity occurred in the medial orbitofrontal cortex (mOFC), an area implicated in reward behaviour, suggesting for the first time a neural basis for this vital evolutionary process. We found a peak in activity first in mOFC and then in the right fusiform face area (FFA). In mOFC the first significant peak (p<0.001) in differences in power between infant and adult faces was found at around 130 ms in the 10–15 Hz band. These early differences were not found in the FFA. In contrast, differences in power were found later, at around 165 ms, in a different band (20–25 Hz) in the right FFA, suggesting a feedback effect from mOFC. These findings provide evidence in humans of a potential brain basis for the “innate releasing mechanisms” described by Lorenz for affection and nurturing of young infants. This has potentially important clinical applications in relation to postnatal depression, and could provide opportunities for early identification of families at risk.

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