Teachers' perceptions of virtual worlds as a medium for social inclusion for adults with intellectual disability.

Science.gov (United States)

Balandin, Susan; Molka-Danielsen, Judith

2015-01-01

The aim of this research was to explore educators' perceptions of a virtual world Second Life TM as an environment for social interaction and social inclusion for the Norwegian adult students with intellectual disability that they supported. Five educators who supported a total of 10 adult students with intellectual disability in computer classes in community Adult Education Centres participated in individual in-depth interviews. The interviews were transcribed verbatim and analysed using a content analysis. Participants were positive about Second Life although they did not perceive that it offered a successful context for social interaction or inclusion. They identified a number of benefits to using a virtual world and for students participating in virtual world research. Barriers identified included language, literacy, and technology issues along with the complexity of participating independently in a virtual world. Some people with intellectual disability can use virtual worlds but the skills required need additional research. Virtual worlds may provide a stimulating, safe, and exciting context for a range of activities but the level of support required by many people is high and consequently expensive.

Individual differences in fundamental social motives.

Science.gov (United States)

Neel, Rebecca; Kenrick, Douglas T; White, Andrew Edward; Neuberg, Steven L

2016-06-01

Motivation has long been recognized as an important component of how people both differ from, and are similar to, each other. The current research applies the biologically grounded fundamental social motives framework, which assumes that human motivational systems are functionally shaped to manage the major costs and benefits of social life, to understand individual differences in social motives. Using the Fundamental Social Motives Inventory, we explore the relations among the different fundamental social motives of Self-Protection, Disease Avoidance, Affiliation, Status, Mate Seeking, Mate Retention, and Kin Care; the relationships of the fundamental social motives to other individual difference and personality measures including the Big Five personality traits; the extent to which fundamental social motives are linked to recent life experiences; and the extent to which life history variables (e.g., age, sex, childhood environment) predict individual differences in the fundamental social motives. Results suggest that the fundamental social motives are a powerful lens through which to examine individual differences: They are grounded in theory, have explanatory value beyond that of the Big Five personality traits, and vary meaningfully with a number of life history variables. A fundamental social motives approach provides a generative framework for considering the meaning and implications of individual differences in social motivation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved).

Between individual agency and structure in HIV prevention: understanding the middle ground of social practice.

Science.gov (United States)

Kippax, Susan; Stephenson, Niamh; Parker, Richard G; Aggleton, Peter

2013-08-01

When HIV prevention targets risk and vulnerability, it focuses on individual agency and social structures, ignoring the centrality of community in effective HIV prevention. The neoliberal concept of risk assumes individuals are rational agents who act on information provided to them regarding HIV transmission. This individualistic framework does not recognize the communities in which people act and connect. The concept of vulnerability on the other hand acknowledges the social world, but mainly as social barriers that make it difficult for individuals to act. Neither approach to HIV prevention offers understanding of community practices or collective agency, both central to success in HIV prevention to date. Drawing on examples of the social transformation achieved by community action in Australia and Brazil, this article focuses on this middle ground and its role in effective HIV prevention.

Citizenship, immigration, and the European social project: rights and obligations of individuality.

Science.gov (United States)

Soysal, Yasemin Nuhoğlu

2012-03-01

As envisioned by T.H. Marshall, social citizenship was a corrective to the injustices caused by the capitalist market. Entitlements and protections guaranteed by the welfare state would prevent social and economic exclusions that civil and political rights, on their own, simply could not. Such protections consequently would ensure social cohesion and solidarity, as well as a productive economy and market. European welfare states successfully followed this formula for the most part of the post-World War II period, however the last couple of decades witnessed significant changes. For one, the very meaning of 'work' and 'worker' on which the welfare state is based has changed - flexibility, risk, and precariousness have become defining elements of working life. The welfare state itself has gone through a transformation as well, increasingly moving away from a system of 'passive benefits' to 'social investment' in human capital. These developments are coupled with an emphasis on education in 'active citizenship', which envisions participatory individuals who are adaptable in an increasingly globalized society, and ready to contribute at local, national and transnational levels. The emergent European social project draws on a re-alignment between these strands: work, social investment, and active participation. In this article, I consider the implications of this project for immigrant populations in Europe in particular and for the conceptions of citizenship and human rights in general. In contrast to the recent commentary on the neoliberal turn and the return of nation-state centered citizenship projects in Europe, I emphasize the broader trends in the post-World War II period that indicate a significant shift in the very foundations of good citizenship and social justice. The new social project transpires a citizenship model that privileges individuality and its transformative capacity as a collective good. Thus, while expanding the boundaries and forms of

Sharing sensitive health information through social media in the Arab world.

Science.gov (United States)

Asiri, Eman; Khalifa, Mohamed; Shabir, Syed-Abdul; Hossain, Md Nassif; Iqbal, Usman; Househ, Mowafa

2017-02-01

Sharing daily activities on social media has become a part of our lifestyle, but little is known about sharing sensitive health information in the Arab world. The objective of this study is to explore how social media users in the Arab world share sensitive health information through Facebook. A retrospective qualitative analysis was used in the study. A total of 110 Facebook groups, related to HIV, sickle cell and depression were screened between 5 June and 1 December 2014. Forty four Facebook groups met the inclusion criteria. 28 471 posts were extracted, of which 649 met inclusion criteria. Forty two percent of health information exchanged were related to HIV, 34% to depression and 24% to sickle cell diseases. The majority of postings were from Egypt 21.1%, Saudi Arabia 20%, Algeria 10% and Libya 9.2%. Male posts were 54.2% while 45.8% were posted by females. Individuals utilized Facebook groups to share personal experiences of their disease 31%, in addition to being used for seeking queries 13.6%, offering explicit advice 8.3%, reporting signs and symptoms of the disease 7.3% and posting their communication with the health-care provider 6.6%. Users in the Arab world use social media to exchange sensitive health information, which could have serious implications regarding the privacy of the information shared with other members of the group. On the other hand, sharing health information could have positive effects for patients, such as sharing disease experiences and peer support. However, more work is needed to ensure that Facebook users in the Arab world are aware of the potential consequences of sharing sensitive health information through social media. © The Author 2016. Published by Oxford University Press in association with the International Society for Quality in Health Care. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com

This is Not a Game - Social Virtual Worlds, Fun, and Learning

Science.gov (United States)

Bell, Mark W.; Smith-Robbins, Sarah; Withnail, Greg

This chapter asks a simple question: what is required to make learning fun in social virtual worlds? Several scholars have connected fun with learning but most of these have centered on the function of games in learning. Studies of learning in massive multiplayer online role playing games connect the game mechanics to how learning occurs. However, few have asked whether learning in a virtual world can be fun if there is no game. In a social virtual world, like Second Life (SL) there are no game mechanics (unlike game worlds like World of Warcraft [WoW]). There are no quests, challenges, rewards or other game elements in SL. So can a virtual world that has no game-content provided be a place where fun learning can take place? We define fun and explore how fun has been related to learning. We explore theories of fun from Koster, Crawford, Csíkszentmihályi and others as well as views of the ways fun is explored as related to the learning experience. With these models in mind, we explore how fun is different in a social virtual world. Drawing on definitions of fun from Castronova and others, we see game structures in virtual worlds may not be needed to have fun. These fun activities include game creation, business interactions, and most importantly, identity play and socialization in a social virtual world. Finally, we propose that if learning is to be successful and fun in a social virtual world it should pay close attention to these two activities.

Neighborhood social capital and individual health.

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Mohnen, S.M.; Groenewegen, P.P.; Völker, B.; Flap, H.

2011-01-01

Neighborhood social capital is increasingly considered to be an important determinant of an individual's health. Using data from the Netherlands we investigate the influence of neighborhood social capital on an individual's self-reported health, while accounting for other conditions of health on

Individual differences in social anxiety affect the salience of errors in social contexts.

Science.gov (United States)

Barker, Tyson V; Troller-Renfree, Sonya; Pine, Daniel S; Fox, Nathan A

2015-12-01

The error-related negativity (ERN) is an event-related potential that occurs approximately 50 ms after an erroneous response. The magnitude of the ERN is influenced by contextual factors, such as when errors are made during social evaluation. The ERN is also influenced by individual differences in anxiety, and it is elevated among anxious individuals. However, little research has examined how individual differences in anxiety interact with contextual factors to impact the ERN. Social anxiety involves fear and apprehension of social evaluation. In the present study, we explored how individual differences in social anxiety interact with social contexts to modulate the ERN. The ERN was measured in 43 young adults characterized as being either high or low in social anxiety, while they completed a flanker task in two contexts: alone and during social evaluation. The results revealed a significant interaction between social anxiety and context, such that the ERN was enhanced in a social relative to a nonsocial context only among highly socially anxious individuals. Furthermore, the degree of such enhancement significantly correlated with individual differences in social anxiety. These findings demonstrate that social anxiety is characterized by enhanced neural activity to errors in social-evaluative contexts.

Social Goals and Conflict Strategies of Individuals with Mild to Moderate Intellectual Disabilities Who Present Problems of Aggression

Science.gov (United States)

Pert, C.; Jahoda, A.

2008-01-01

Background: A few recent studies have adopted a social cognitive perspective to explore how individuals with intellectual disabilities (IDs), who present problems of aggression, view their social world. The focus has mainly been on participants' perceptions of others' behaviour within conflict situations. The present exploratory study aims to…

Secondary students' use of social and natural world information in a land use decision context

Science.gov (United States)

Kumler, Laura M.

Many societal problems, including land use issues, are complex integrated human-ecological challenges that require an understanding of social and natural world connections. This dissertation investigates how secondary students perceive the social and natural world dimensions of land use, how they might act to support sustainable land use, and how Kaplan and Kaplan's (2008) Reasonable Person Model can inform teaching approaches to prepare students for such complex decisions and action-taking. The dissertation argues that subject compartmentalization in high schools adversely impacts students' abilities to use and to integrate information from various subjects to make a land use decision. Nine secondary science and social studies teachers and their students (n=500) participated in a quasi-experiment using pre- and posttests with treatment and comparison groups to gauge students' requests for social versus natural world information to make land use decisions. Students' self-reported actions and knowledge of actions to support sustainable land use were also measured. Additional data included classroom observations, teacher logs and interviews, and 52 student interviews. Results indicated that students requested social world over natural world information and preferred to consult with social scientists and stakeholders over natural scientists. Results also suggested that experiencing an integrated curriculum increased students' requests for natural world information relevant to the land use decision. Interestingly, this effect occurred even among social studies students whose teachers reported putting scant emphasis on the natural world curriculum content. Moreover, the type of course in which students experienced the curriculum predicted student information use. Finally, students were found to have a limited repertoire of land use actions and knowledge of actions and generally reported undertaking and thinking of individual actions such as recycling or trash pick

The Individual and the «Spiritual» World in Kafka's Novels

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Ulrich Fülleborn

1978-08-01

Full Text Available Following an earlier essay by the same author on 'Perspektivismus und Parabolik' in Kafka's shorter prose pieces, this article gives a description of the structure of Kafka's novels in terms of the concepts 'the individual' (cf. Kierkegaard's 'individuals' and 'the spiritual world' (Kafka: «There is no world but the spiritual one». Joseph K. and the land-surveyor K. become individuals by leaving the world of everyday life and passing over into the incomprehensible spiritual world of trials and a village-castle community, in the same way that Karl Rossmann had passed over into the 'Nature-theatre of Oklahoma' before them. And they remain as individuals, since in this world they struggle to hold their own. As they can only employ their intellect as an excessive mania for calculation in this struggle, any interpretation of the novels must end in the seemingly unanswerable question: how can such a struggle lead, on the one hand, to a free and rational form of existence and, on the other, to some form of relatedness with those strange spiritual worlds? This question has a direct bearing on the main conclusion of this essay, namely that the role of the parable becomes more and more important from one novel to the next: that is to say, the spiritual world attains universal validity for Kafka and proves to be the only world where life has any meaning.

Group Effects on Individual Attitudes Toward Social Responsibility.

Science.gov (United States)

Secchi, Davide; Bui, Hong T M

2018-01-01

This study uses a quasi-experimental design to investigate what happens to individual socially responsible attitudes when they are exposed to group dynamics. Findings show that group engagement increases individual attitudes toward social responsibility. We also found that individuals with low attitudes toward social responsibility are more likely to change their opinions when group members show more positive attitudes toward social responsibility. Conversely, individuals with high attitudes do not change much, independent of group characteristics. To better analyze the effect of group dynamics, the study proposes to split social responsibility into relative and absolute components. Findings show that relative social responsibility is correlated with but different from absolute social responsibility although the latter is more susceptible than the former to group dynamics.

Social Desirability Bias and Earnings Management around the World

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Niszczota Paweł

2015-09-01

Full Text Available In this paper we test whether inter-country variation in individuals’ tendency to conform, as measured by the Lie (social desirability scale used in the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire, can explain differences in the propensity to employ corporate earnings management around the world. Such a link is feasible, given that survey data suggest executives tend to be under severe pressure to meet earnings benchmarks, to which they often succumb by engaging in earnings management (to the detriment of the company’s long-term prospects. We hypothesize that in countries where the propensity to act in a socially desirable (outsider-satisfying way is stronger, earnings management should be more prevalent. Research results support our hypothesis, and demonstrate the existence of a positive relationship between the prevalence of earnings management in a country and the mean score of individuals from that country on the Eysenck Lie scale, which further evidences that capital market pressure is a significant determinant of earnings management.

Social challenges and supports from the perspective of individuals with Asperger syndrome and other autism spectrum disabilities.

Science.gov (United States)

Müller, Eve; Schuler, Adriana; Yates, Gregory B

2008-03-01

The study describes the perspectives of individuals with Asperger syndrome and other autism spectrum disabilities (ASDs) regarding social challenges and supports. Eighteen adults with ASDs were individually interviewed. They were asked to describe their experiences navigating their social worlds, and recommend effective social supports and strategies for improving social connectedness. Qualitative analyses of the interview transcripts revealed a number of common experiences including a profound sense of isolation, difficulty initiating social interactions, challenges relating to communication, longing for greater intimacy, desire to contribute to one's community, and effort to develop greater social/self-awareness. Commonly recommended social supports included external supports (e.g. activities based on shared interests, highly structured or scripted social activities, and small groups or dyads); communication supports (e.g. alternative modes of communication, explicit communication, and instruction in interpreting and using social cues); and self-initiated strategies for handling social anxiety (e.g. creative/improvisational outlets, physical activity, spiritual practice/organized religion, and time spent alone).

SUBJECTIVITY: SOCIAL REPRESENTATION OF THE FAMILY

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Lourdete Rejane Ferro Zago

2013-09-01

Full Text Available The family, first family group of human beings, is the collective dimension of human existence and becomes responsible for the formation of the first social identity, as well as the constitution of subjectivity. Subjectivity is the inner world of each and every human being. This inner world is made up of emotions, feelings and thoughts. It is through this inner world that the individual relates to the social world, appointed by the outside world. This relationship follows the individual characteristics that mark the individual as unique, originated in shaping the individual, when they built the knowledge and beliefs. social representation as a form of knowledge, socially elaborated, shared with a practical purpose, contributing to the construction of a common reality to a social group. Is thus built up the social representation of the family.

Having belief(s) in social virtual worlds: A decomposed approach

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Merikivi, J.; Verhagen, T.; Feldberg, J.F.M.

2013-01-01

The interest in social virtual worlds with multiple functions has mushroomed during the past few years. The key challenge social virtual worlds face while attempting to anchor and serve the masses is to reflect the core beliefs of their users. As existing research lacks insight into these core

Individual savings accounts for social insurance

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Bovenberg, Lans; Hansen, Martin Ino; Sørensen, Peter Birch

2008-01-01

Using Danish data, we find that about three-fourths of the taxes levied to finance public transfers actually finance benefits that redistribute income over the life cycle of individual taxpayers rather than redistribute resources across people. This finding and similar results for other countries...... provide a rationale for financing part of social insurance via mandatory individual savings accounts. We discuss the advantages and disadvantages of mandatory individual savings accounts for social insurance and survey some recent alternative proposals for such accounts...

Navigating the Social World: A Curriculum for Individuals with Asperger's Syndrome, High Functioning Autism and Related Disorders.

Science.gov (United States)

McAfee, Jeanette L.

This volume presents a curriculum developed specifically to develop the social, emotional, and organizational skills of individuals with Asperger's Syndrome or high functioning autism. The book offers ideas and techniques drawn from various disciplines including cognitive behavioral therapy, applied behavioral therapy, education, and occupational…

Experimental Evidence that Social Relationships Determine Individual Foraging Behavior.

Science.gov (United States)

Firth, Josh A; Voelkl, Bernhard; Farine, Damien R; Sheldon, Ben C

2015-12-07

Social relationships are fundamental to animals living in complex societies. The extent to which individuals base their decisions around their key social relationships, and the consequences this has on their behavior and broader population level processes, remains unknown. Using a novel experiment that controlled where individual wild birds (great tits, Parus major) could access food, we restricted mated pairs from being allowed to forage at the same locations. This introduced a conflict for pair members between maintaining social relationships and accessing resources. We show that individuals reduce their own access to food in order to sustain their relationships and that individual foraging activity was strongly influenced by their key social counterparts. By affecting where individuals go, social relationships determined which conspecifics they encountered and consequently shaped their other social associations. Hence, while resource distribution can determine individuals' spatial and social environment, we illustrate how key social relationships themselves can govern broader social structure. Finally, social relationships also influenced the development of social foraging strategies. In response to forgoing access to resources, maintaining pair bonds led individuals to develop a flexible "scrounging" strategy, particularly by scrounging from their pair mate. This suggests that behavioral plasticity can develop to ameliorate conflicts between social relationships and other demands. Together, these results illustrate the importance of considering social relationships for explaining behavioral variation due to their significant impact on individual behavior and demonstrate the consequences of key relationships for wider processes. Copyright © 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.

Measurement of individual social capital

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Gaag, Martin Pieter Johannes van der

2005-01-01

The last twenty years have seen the idea of social capital blossoming as a popular and promising new look at phenomena in the social sciences. Essentially a theory that explains how and why relational networks are important for the production of outcomes at the individual and collective level,

Research on Social Work Practice in Egypt and the Arab World

Science.gov (United States)

Megahead, Hamido A.

2017-01-01

This article aims at introducing the research on social work practice in Egypt and the Arab World as a thematic topic. It has started with the essence of the current Arab World and its definition. Social work practice and models of social work intervention in this specific region have been described in terms of its specific and topographic nature.…

Evolution of individual versus social learning on social networks.

Science.gov (United States)

Tamura, Kohei; Kobayashi, Yutaka; Ihara, Yasuo

2015-03-06

A number of studies have investigated the roles played by individual and social learning in cultural phenomena and the relative advantages of the two learning strategies in variable environments. Because social learning involves the acquisition of behaviours from others, its utility depends on the availability of 'cultural models' exhibiting adaptive behaviours. This indicates that social networks play an essential role in the evolution of learning. However, possible effects of social structure on the evolution of learning have not been fully explored. Here, we develop a mathematical model to explore the evolutionary dynamics of learning strategies on social networks. We first derive the condition under which social learners (SLs) are selectively favoured over individual learners in a broad range of social network. We then obtain an analytical approximation of the long-term average frequency of SLs in homogeneous networks, from which we specify the condition, in terms of three relatedness measures, for social structure to facilitate the long-term evolution of social learning. Finally, we evaluate our approximation by Monte Carlo simulations in complete graphs, regular random graphs and scale-free networks. We formally show that whether social structure favours the evolution of social learning is determined by the relative magnitudes of two effects of social structure: localization in competition, by which competition between learning strategies is evaded, and localization in cultural transmission, which slows down the spread of adaptive traits. In addition, our estimates of the relatedness measures suggest that social structure disfavours the evolution of social learning when selection is weak. © 2015 The Author(s) Published by the Royal Society. All rights reserved.

Individual Search and Social Networks

OpenAIRE

Sanjeev Goyal; Stephanie Rosenkranz; Utz Weitzel; Vincent Buskens

2014-01-01

The explosion in online social networks motivates an enquiry into their structure and their welfare effects. A central feature of these networks is information sharing: online social networks lower the cost of getting information from others. These lower costs affect the attractiveness of individual search vis-a-vis a reliance on social networks. The paper reports the findings of an experiment on these effects. Our experiment shows that online networks can have large effects. Information acqu...

Individual consistency and flexibility in human social information use.

Science.gov (United States)

Toelch, Ulf; Bruce, Matthew J; Newson, Lesley; Richerson, Peter J; Reader, Simon M

2014-02-07

Copying others appears to be a cost-effective way of obtaining adaptive information, particularly when flexibly employed. However, adult humans differ considerably in their propensity to use information from others, even when this 'social information' is beneficial, raising the possibility that stable individual differences constrain flexibility in social information use. We used two dissimilar decision-making computer games to investigate whether individuals flexibly adjusted their use of social information to current conditions or whether they valued social information similarly in both games. Participants also completed established personality questionnaires. We found that participants demonstrated considerable flexibility, adjusting social information use to current conditions. In particular, individuals employed a 'copy-when-uncertain' social learning strategy, supporting a core, but untested, assumption of influential theoretical models of cultural transmission. Moreover, participants adjusted the amount invested in their decision based on the perceived reliability of personally gathered information combined with the available social information. However, despite this strategic flexibility, participants also exhibited consistent individual differences in their propensities to use and value social information. Moreover, individuals who favoured social information self-reported as more collectivist than others. We discuss the implications of our results for social information use and cultural transmission.

Paranoid individuals with schizophrenia show greater social cognitive bias and worse social functioning than non-paranoid individuals with schizophrenia

OpenAIRE

Amy E. Pinkham; Philip D. Harvey; David L. Penn

2016-01-01

Paranoia is a common symptom of schizophrenia that may be related to how individuals process and respond to social stimuli. Previous investigations support a link between increased paranoia and greater social cognitive impairments, but these studies have been limited to single domains of social cognition, and no studies have examined how paranoia may influence functional outcome. Data from 147 individuals with schizophrenia were used to examine whether actively paranoid and non-paranoid indiv...

Individual- and community-level social gradients of edentulousness.

Science.gov (United States)

Ito, Kanade; Aida, Jun; Yamamoto, Tatsuo; Ohtsuka, Rika; Nakade, Miyo; Suzuki, Kayo; Kondo, Katsunori; Osaka, Ken

2015-03-11

Community-level factors as well as individual-level factors affect individual health. To date, no studies have examined the association between community-level social gradient and edentulousness. The aim of this study was to investigate individual- and community-level social inequalities in edentulousness and to determine any explanatory factors in this association. We analyzed the data from the Japan Gerontological Evaluation Study (JAGES). In 2010-2012, 112,123 subjects aged 65 or older responded to the questionnaire survey (response rate = 66.3%). Multilevel logistic regression analysis was applied to determine the association between community-level income and edentulousness after accounting for individual-level income and demographic covariates. Then, we estimated the probability of edentulousness by individual- and community-level incomes after adjusted for covariates. Of 79,563 valid participants, the prevalence of edentulousness among 39,550 men (49.7%) and 40,013 women (50.3%) were both 13.8%. Living in communities with higher mean incomes and having higher individual-level incomes were significantly associated with a lower risk of edentulousness (odds ratios [ORs] by 10,000 USD increments were 0.37 (95% confidence interval [CI] [0.22-0.63]) for community-level and 0.85 (95% CI [0.84-0.86]) for individual-level income). Individual- and community-level social factors, including density of dental clinics, partially explained the social gradients. However, in the fully adjusted model, both community- and individual-level social gradients of edentulousness remained significant (ORs = 0.43 (95% CI [0.27-0.67]) and 0.90 (95% CI [0.88-0.91]), respectively). One standard deviation changes in community- and individual-level incomes were associated with 0.78 and 0.84 times lower odds of edentulousness, respectively. In addition, compared to men, women living in communities with higher average incomes had a significantly lower risk of edentulousness (p-value for

Social dimensions of expertise in World of Warcraft players

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Mark Chen

2009-03-01

Full Text Available Expertise development in the massively multiplayer online game World of Warcraft (Blizzard Entertainment, 2004 depends greatly on a player's use of social skills to gain access to expert player groups and accrue social and cultural capital. Drawn from ethnographic research, this paper maps out various forms of expert practice and highlights the social aspects of game play that often eclipse the importance of game-mechanics knowledge. At the time of this research, playing World of Warcraft and developing expertise in the game happened roughly within a two-stage process: (1 leveling up, or advancing one's character or avatar while learning the mechanics of the game, and (2 drawing on social capital gained during the first stage to join a group of up to 40 players to partake in high-end or endgame content.

The Role of the Individual in the Social Information Process

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Christian Fuchs

2003-02-01

Full Text Available Abstract: The aim of this paper is to point out which role the individual plays in the generation of information in social systems. First, it is argued that the individual is a social, self-conscious, creative, reflective, cultural, symbol- and language-using, active natural, producing, labouring, objective, corporeal, living, real, sensuous, visionary, imaginative, designing, co-operative being that makes its own history and can strive towards freedom and autonomy. Based on these assumptions the re-creation/self-organisation of social systems is described as a dialectic of actions and social structures and as a dialectic of individual information and social information. The individual enters economic, political and cultural relationships that result in the emergence and differentiation of social (i.e. economic, political and cultural information which enables and constrains individual actions and thinking. Individuals as actors in social systems are indispensable for social self-organisation.

The Role of the Individual in the Social Information Process

Science.gov (United States)

Fuchs, Christian

2003-03-01

The aim of this paper is to point out which role the individual plays in the generation of information in social systems. First, it is argued that the individual is a social, self-conscious, creative, reflective, cultural, symbol- and language-using, active natural, producing, labouring, objective, corporeal, living, real, sensuous, visionary, imaginative, designing, co-operative being that makes its own history and can strive towards freedom and autonomy. Based on these assumptions the re-creation/self-organisation of social systems is described as a dialectic of actions and social structures and as a dialectic of individual information and social information. The individual enters economic, political and cultural relationships that result in the emergence and differentiation of social (i.e. economic, political and cultural) information which enables and constrains individual actions and thinking. Individuals as actors in social systems are indispensable for social self-organisation.

Chimpanzees demonstrate individual differences in social information use.

Science.gov (United States)

Watson, Stuart K; Vale, Gillian L; Hopper, Lydia M; Dean, Lewis G; Kendal, Rachel L; Price, Elizabeth E; Wood, Lara A; Davis, Sarah J; Schapiro, Steven J; Lambeth, Susan P; Whiten, Andrew

2018-06-19

Studies of transmission biases in social learning have greatly informed our understanding of how behaviour patterns may diffuse through animal populations, yet within-species inter-individual variation in social information use has received little attention and remains poorly understood. We have addressed this question by examining individual performances across multiple experiments with the same population of primates. We compiled a dataset spanning 16 social learning studies (26 experimental conditions) carried out at the same study site over a 12-year period, incorporating a total of 167 chimpanzees. We applied a binary scoring system to code each participant's performance in each study according to whether they demonstrated evidence of using social information from conspecifics to solve the experimental task or not (Social Information Score-'SIS'). Bayesian binomial mixed effects models were then used to estimate the extent to which individual differences influenced SIS, together with any effects of sex, rearing history, age, prior involvement in research and task type on SIS. An estimate of repeatability found that approximately half of the variance in SIS was accounted for by individual identity, indicating that individual differences play a critical role in the social learning behaviour of chimpanzees. According to the model that best fit the data, females were, depending on their rearing history, 15-24% more likely to use social information to solve experimental tasks than males. However, there was no strong evidence of an effect of age or research experience, and pedigree records indicated that SIS was not a strongly heritable trait. Our study offers a novel, transferable method for the study of individual differences in social learning.

Resources for Creating Another World: Financial Strategies of the World Social Forum

OpenAIRE

Liliana Diaz

2006-01-01

Liliana Diaz analyzes the financial structure and strategy of the World Social Forum (WSF). Considering the importance of the ‘participative budget’ as an initiative promoted by the Forum, she looks at this as a strategy to finance the WSF, and as a model by other social movements. Diaz examines six different funding arrangements in each of the Forums looking at the consequences of the financing arrangements for the sustainability of the Forum process. Development (2006) 49, 93–101. doi:10.10...

Consistent individual differences in human social learning strategies.

Science.gov (United States)

Molleman, Lucas; van den Berg, Pieter; Weissing, Franz J

2014-04-04

Social learning has allowed humans to build up extensive cultural repertoires, enabling them to adapt to a wide variety of environmental and social conditions. However, it is unclear which social learning strategies people use, especially in social contexts where their payoffs depend on the behaviour of others. Here we show experimentally that individuals differ in their social learning strategies and that they tend to employ the same learning strategy irrespective of the interaction context. Payoff-based learners focus on their peers' success, while decision-based learners disregard payoffs and exclusively focus on their peers' past behaviour. These individual differences may be of considerable importance for cultural evolution. By means of a simple model, we demonstrate that groups harbouring individuals with different learning strategies may be faster in adopting technological innovations and can be more efficient through successful role differentiation. Our study highlights the importance of individual variation for human interactions and sheds new light on the dynamics of cultural evolution.

A path model investigation of neurocognition, theory of mind, social competence, negative symptoms and real-world functioning in schizophrenia.

Science.gov (United States)

Couture, Shannon M; Granholm, Eric L; Fish, Scott C

2011-02-01

Problems in real-world functioning are pervasive in schizophrenia and much recent effort has been devoted to uncovering factors which contribute to poor functioning. The goal of this study was to examine the role of four such factors: social cognition (theory of mind), neurocognition, negative symptoms, and functional capacity (social competence). 178 individuals with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder completed measures of theory of mind, neurocognition, negative symptoms, social competence, and self-reported functioning. Path models sought to determine the relationships among these variables. Theory of mind as indexed by the Hinting Task partially mediated the relationship between neurocognition and social competence, and negative symptoms and social competence demonstrated significant direct paths with self-reported functioning. Study results suggest theory of mind serves as an important mediator in addition to previously investigated social cognitive domains of emotional and social perception. The current study also highlights the need to determine variables which mediate the relationship between functional capacity and real-world functioning. Copyright © 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

World war II veterans, social support, and veterans' associations.

Science.gov (United States)

Hunt, N; Robbins, I

2001-05-01

People use many different coping strategies to deal with their traumatic recollections. Twenty-five British World War II veterans were interviewed regarding the ways they used social support both during the war and in the years afterwards. The findings demonstrate that social support is used in fundamentally different ways. During the war comradeship was particularly important and even fifty years after the war comrades are still a valuable resource for discussing war experiences, and dealing with the emotional content of traumatic recollections. Veterans rely on wives and families to help deal with the more physical and practical elements of coping, but tend not to discuss their traumatic memories with them. The findings show that social support is an important lifelong coping strategy for World War II veterans.

The relationship of individual psychological and individual-typological characteristics in individuals with personality disorders, committed socially dangerous acts

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Dubinsky A.A.

2017-01-01

Full Text Available The relationship between individual psychological and individually-typological characteristics of patients with personality disorders who committed socially dangerous acts were studied, taking into account the severity of the organic factor and the degree of their social dangerousness. 121 males were surveyed, 70 of them were diagnosed with "organic personality disorder" and 33 - personality disorder. The types of personality disorders were diagnosed. The individual variables, the ratio of processes of system activation of behavior and its inhibition, protective styles, especially coping behaviours that constitute aggression, styles of self-regulation were analyzed. It was revealed that low settings of the system activation behavior found in the group of persons with a high degree of social dangerousness, determines the formation of individual psychological treats related to the rigidity behavior, the instability of the motives, impulsivity, negative emotionality, disinhibition. During comparison of samples of individuals with medium and high degree of social dangerousness it has been discovered that self-centeredness, as a component of self-control, high levels of affective components of aggression – anger and immature defense mechanisms significantly distinguish individuals with a high degree of public danger.

Systems approach to studying animal sociality: individual position versus group organization in dynamic social network models.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Karlo Hock

2010-12-01

Full Text Available Social networks can be used to represent group structure as a network of interacting components, and also to quantify both the position of each individual and the global properties of a group. In a series of simulation experiments based on dynamic social networks, we test the prediction that social behaviors that help individuals reach prominence within their social group may conflict with their potential to benefit from their social environment. In addition to cases where individuals were able to benefit from improving both their personal relative importance and group organization, using only simple rules of social affiliation we were able to obtain results in which individuals would face a trade-off between these factors. While selection would favor (or work against social behaviors that concordantly increase (or decrease, respectively fitness at both individual and group level, when these factors conflict with each other the eventual selective pressure would depend on the relative returns individuals get from their social environment and their position within it. The presented results highlight the importance of a systems approach to studying animal sociality, in which the effects of social behaviors should be viewed not only through the benefits that those provide to individuals, but also in terms of how they affect broader social environment and how in turn this is reflected back on an individual's fitness.

Identity and democracy: linking individual and social reasoning

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Davis, J.B.; Marin, S.R.

2009-01-01

Following Amartya Sen's approach, John Davis and Solange Regina Marin look at individual and social reasoning when examining the complex relationship between identity and democracy. They characterize democracy as a process of social or public reasoning that combines the individual reasoning of all

Considerations in representing human individuals in social ecological models

Science.gov (United States)

Manfredo, Michael J.; Teel, Tara L.; Gavin, Michael C.; Fulton, David C.

2017-01-01

In this chapter we focus on how to integrate the human individual into social-ecological systems analysis, and how to improve research on individual thought and action regarding the environment by locating it within the broader social-ecological context. We discuss three key questions as considerations for future research: (1) is human thought conceptualized as a dynamic and adaptive process, (2) is the individual placed in a multi-level context (including within-person levels, person-group interactions, and institutional and structural factors), and (3) is human thought seen as mutually constructed with the social and natural environment. Increased emphasis on the individual will be essential if we are to understand agency, innovation, and adaptation in social-ecological systems.

Food insecurity, depression, and social support in HIV-infected Hispanic individuals.

Science.gov (United States)

Kapulsky, Leonid; Tang, Alice M; Forrester, Janet E

2015-04-01

Previous research has identified an association between food insecurity and depression in a variety of world regions in both healthy and HIV-infected individuals. We examined this association in 183 HIV-infected Hispanic adults from the greater Boston area. We measured depression with the Burnam depression screen and food insecurity with the Radimer/Cornell Questionnaire. Dietary intake was assessed with an adapted version of the Block Food Frequency Questionnaire. Logistic regression models were created with depression as the outcome variable and food insecurity as the main predictor. In bivariate analyses, food insecurity was significantly associated with depression [odds ratio (OR) 2.5; 95% confidence interval (CI) 1.1, 5.5; p = 0.03]. When we accounted for social support, food insecurity was no longer significant. We found no differences in the quality or quantity of dietary intake between the food insecure and food secure groups. Our findings highlight the importance of social support in the association between food insecurity and depression. Food insecurity may reflect social support more than actual dietary intake in this population.

Understanding the Dynamics of Learning across social worlds

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Mengiste, Shegaw Anagaw; Aanestad, Margunn

2013-01-01

participation, politics and learning in IS implementation and use. We consider learning to be an integral part of the social practice, and it occurs mainly through encounters and negotiations between actors from different social worlds who might have competing interests and values. The paper also analysed how......This paper adopts a novel learning perspective on information systems development. Building on the works of Anselm Strauss we conceptualize development processes as “negotiated orders” where members from different “social worlds” encounter and negotiate differences and tensions. We argue...

Loneliness and Social Internet Use: Pathways to Reconnection in a Digital World?

Science.gov (United States)

Nowland, Rebecca; Necka, Elizabeth A; Cacioppo, John T

2018-01-01

With the rise of online social networking, social relationships are increasingly developed and maintained in a digital domain. Drawing conclusions about the impact of the digital world on loneliness is difficult because there are contradictory findings, and cross-sectional studies dominate the literature, making causation difficult to establish. In this review, we present our theoretical model and propose that there is a bidirectional and dynamic relationship between loneliness and social Internet use. When the Internet is used as a way station on the route to enhancing existing relationships and forging new social connections, it is a useful tool for reducing loneliness. But when social technologies are used to escape the social world and withdraw from the "social pain" of interaction, feelings of loneliness are increased. We propose that loneliness is also a determinant of how people interact with the digital world. Lonely people express a preference for using the Internet for social interaction and are more likely to use the Internet in a way that displaces time spent in offline social activities. This suggests that lonely people may need support with their social Internet use so that they employ it in a way that enhances existing friendships and/or to forge new ones.

Advancing social psychiatry in a fragmented world: Can information technology do it?

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Rachid Bennegadi

2016-01-01

Full Text Available Modern technology (internet, smartphones, etc. already has an impact on communication and health care services throughout the world. Evidently, everyone knows what it means to be able to better communicate with new technology (such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc.. The problem is not here. It is evident that science advances quickly and turns peoples’ lives upside down, even if these advances have never had much of an impact on social, cultural, and psychological dimensions of the individual, the family, and the social group. At what point, then, do these advances in science have an impact for us, the mental health professionals? We will soon find ourselves in a situation where we will be obliged to accept the new methods of communication being presented to us, not only by policy makers, but also by patients and their families. Therefore, we must look at how we both have been integrating the advances of Information Technology into social psychiatry, but also how we can do so in the future.

Trusting Only Whom You Know, Knowing Only Whom You Trust: The Joint Impact of Social Capital and Trust on Individuals' Economic Performance and Well-Being in CEE Countries

OpenAIRE

Growiec, Katarzyna; Growiec, Jakub

2010-01-01

This paper provides evidence that bridging and bonding social capital as well as social trust may interdependently affect individuals' earnings and subjective well-being. Based on cross-sectional World Values Survey 2000 data on individuals from Central and Eastern European countries (CEECs), we show that majority of citizens of these countries seem to fall in a "low trust trap" where deficits of bridging social capital and trust reinforce each other in lowering individuals' incomes and well-...

Prediction and Characterization of High-Activity Events in Social Media Triggered by Real-World News.

Science.gov (United States)

Kalyanam, Janani; Quezada, Mauricio; Poblete, Barbara; Lanckriet, Gert

2016-01-01

On-line social networks publish information on a high volume of real-world events almost instantly, becoming a primary source for breaking news. Some of these real-world events can end up having a very strong impact on on-line social networks. The effect of such events can be analyzed from several perspectives, one of them being the intensity and characteristics of the collective activity that it produces in the social platform. We research 5,234 real-world news events encompassing 43 million messages discussed on the Twitter microblogging service for approximately 1 year. We show empirically that exogenous news events naturally create collective patterns of bursty behavior in combination with long periods of inactivity in the network. This type of behavior agrees with other patterns previously observed in other types of natural collective phenomena, as well as in individual human communications. In addition, we propose a methodology to classify news events according to the different levels of intensity in activity that they produce. In particular, we analyze the most highly active events and observe a consistent and strikingly different collective reaction from users when they are exposed to such events. This reaction is independent of an event's reach and scope. We further observe that extremely high-activity events have characteristics that are quite distinguishable at the beginning stages of their outbreak. This allows us to predict with high precision, the top 8% of events that will have the most impact in the social network by just using the first 5% of the information of an event's lifetime evolution. This strongly implies that high-activity events are naturally prioritized collectively by the social network, engaging users early on, way before they are brought to the mainstream audience.

Social conformity despite individual preferences for distinctiveness.

Science.gov (United States)

Smaldino, Paul E; Epstein, Joshua M

2015-03-01

We demonstrate that individual behaviours directed at the attainment of distinctiveness can in fact produce complete social conformity. We thus offer an unexpected generative mechanism for this central social phenomenon. Specifically, we establish that agents who have fixed needs to be distinct and adapt their positions to achieve distinctiveness goals, can nevertheless self-organize to a limiting state of absolute conformity. This seemingly paradoxical result is deduced formally from a small number of natural assumptions and is then explored at length computationally. Interesting departures from this conformity equilibrium are also possible, including divergence in positions. The effect of extremist minorities on these dynamics is discussed. A simple extension is then introduced, which allows the model to generate and maintain social diversity, including multimodal distinctiveness distributions. The paper contributes formal definitions, analytical deductions and counterintuitive findings to the literature on individual distinctiveness and social conformity.

School meal sociality or lunch pack individualism?

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Andersen, Sidse Schoubye; Holm, Lotte; Baarts, Charlotte

2015-01-01

the social life of a school class, and how these arrangements involve strategies of both inclusion and exclusion. Two types of school meals are compared in the intervention study: a hot meal based on Nordic ingredients and the normal Danish school meal arrangement in which children bring lunch packs...... to school. The study discusses commensality by examining and comparing lunchtime interactions within the same group of children in the two contrasting meal situations. The results fail to confirm the conventional view that shared meals have greater social impacts and benefits than eating individualized...... foods. The article argues that the social entrepreneurship involved in sharing individual lunch packs might even outweigh some of the benefits of shared meals where everyone is served the same food....

Interlaced Social Worlds: Exploring the Use of Social Media in the Kindergarten

Science.gov (United States)

Knauf, Helen

2016-01-01

The study presented in this article examines mediatization processes in an American kindergarten. The kindergarten is considered as a social world in which forms of communication, as well as the identities of those involved (children, teachers, parents), evolve through the use of digital technologies. The relationships between the different…

When the world collapses: changed worldview and social reconstruction in a traumatized community

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Dinka Corkalo Biruski

2014-09-01

Full Text Available Background: Traumatic experience can affect the individual's basic beliefs about the world as a predictable and safe place. One of the cornerstones in recovery from trauma is reestablishment of safety, connectedness, and the shattered schema of a worldview. Objective: This study explored the role of negatively changed worldview in the relationship between war-related traumatization and readiness for social reconstruction of intergroup relations in a post-conflict community measured by three processes: intergroup rapprochement, rebuilding trust, and need for apology. It was hypothesized that more traumatized people are less supportive of social reconstruction and that this relationship is mediated by the changed worldview. Method: The study included a community random sample of 333 adults in the city of Vukovar, Croatia, that was most devastated during the 1991–1995 war. Six instruments were administered: Stressful Events Scale, Impact of Event Scale-Revised, Changed Worldview Scale, and three scales measuring the post-conflict social reconstruction processes: Intergroup Rapprochement, Intergroup Trust and Need for Apology. Results: Mediation analyses showed that the worldview change fully mediated between traumatization and all three aspects of social reconstruction. Conclusions: In a population exposed to war traumatization the worldview change mediates post-conflict social recovery of community relations.

Positive Relationship Between Individuality and Social Identity in Virtual Communities: Self-Categorization and Social Identification as Distinct Forms of Social Identity.

Science.gov (United States)

Guo, Tian-Chao; Li, Xuemei

2016-11-01

Previous studies have reported conflicting results regarding the relationship between individuality and social identity, indicating this area requires further examination. This study constructed a research model to help understand the positive role of individualized behavior and social identity in virtual communities. The results of an online survey conducted to assess our theoretical research model indicated that social identity can be expressed in two ways: self-categorization and social identification. Furthermore, we found individualized behavior was positively related to social identification, while self-categorization was directly derived from social identification.

World energy tendencies: social and environmental implications

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Pichs, Ramon

2007-01-01

The current world energy situation is the result of the combination of diverse economic, political, technological, social and environmental tendencies that conform a crisis panorama for the high price of the hydrocarbons and especially in the petroleum. Under the current conditions the necessity of a global energy restructuring is imposed that changes the current patterns of generation and energy consumption significantly

Teen Girls' Resistance and the Disappearing Social in "Ghost World."

Science.gov (United States)

Giroux, Henry A.

2002-01-01

Examines "Ghost World," a Hollywood film about youth, friendship, alienation, and survival, critically investigating how popular representations of youth signal a particular crisis of the social through a discourse of privatization, which fails to locate youth and problems they face within the related geographies of the social and political. The…

Social phobia and sexual problems: A comparison of social phobic, sexually dysfunctional and normal individuals.

Science.gov (United States)

Munoz, Valentina; Stravynski, Ariel

2010-03-01

This study sought to test the putative link between social phobia and sexual functioning. Three groups consisting of 106 social phobic, 164 sexually dysfunctional and 111 normal participants were assessed in terms of sexual functioning, social anxiety, social functioning and general psychopathology. Although social phobic men were less sexually active than normal men, they were as sexually satisfied. Social phobic women were alike their normal counterparts in all respects. Overall, social phobic individuals were not more prone to report sexual problems than normal individuals despite reporting the severest levels of social anxiety. Theoretically, our results are best understood as supporting an interpersonal conception of social phobia and a related socio-cultural perspective regarding sexual roles.

Social Evolution, Global Governance and a World Parliament

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Andreas Bummel

2012-04-01

Full Text Available This article describes the relevance of a world parliament in the context of long-term social evolution and the crisis of global governance.[*] It is argued that due to the development of weapons of mass destruction and complex interdependency, war has ceased to be a driver of socio-evolutionary consolidation of power at the world-system level. At the same time, there is an increasingly urgent need for global governance in spheres such as climate change mitigation or economics and finances. The author looks at how the established and now dysfunctional pattern of evolutionary change can be overcome and identifies the institution of a world parliament as an important political and psychological aspect of the evolving collective.

Consumer world-mindedness, social-mindedness, and store image

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Nijssen, E.J.; Douglas, S.P.

2008-01-01

As advances in communications technology shrink the impact of geographic distance, consumers are likely to become more aware of and familiar with products and services in other parts of the world, as well as global social and ethical issues. Retailers have responded to these trends (termed here

Does human body odor represent a significant and rewarding social signal to individuals high in social openness?

Science.gov (United States)

Lübke, Katrin T; Croy, Ilona; Hoenen, Matthias; Gerber, Johannes; Pause, Bettina M; Hummel, Thomas

2014-01-01

Across a wide variety of domains, experts differ from novices in their response to stimuli linked to their respective field of expertise. It is currently unknown whether similar patterns can be observed with regard to social expertise. The current study therefore focuses on social openness, a central social skill necessary to initiate social contact. Human body odors were used as social cues, as they inherently signal the presence of another human being. Using functional MRI, hemodynamic brain responses to body odors of women reporting a high (n = 14) or a low (n = 12) level of social openness were compared. Greater activation within the inferior frontal gyrus and the caudate nucleus was observed in high socially open individuals compared to individuals low in social openness. With the inferior frontal gyrus being a crucial part of the human mirror neuron system, and the caudate nucleus being implicated in social reward, it is discussed whether human body odor might constitute more of a significant and rewarding social signal to individuals high in social openness compared to individuals low in social openness process.

Visions for a sustainable world: A conference on science, technology and social responsibility. Conference report

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

1992-12-31

This report summarizes the organization, activities, and outcomes of Student Pugwash USA`s 1992 International Conference, Visions for a Sustainable World: A Conference on Science, Technology and Social Responsibility. The conference was held June 14--20, 1992 at Emory University, and brought together 94 students and over 65 experts from industry, academe, and government. The conference addressed issues ranging from global environmental cooperation to the social impacts of the Human Genome Project to minority concerns in the sciences. It provided a valuable forum for talented students and professionals to engage in critical dialogue on many interdisciplinary issues at the juncture of science, technology and society. The conference challenged students -- the world`s future scientists, engineers, and political leaders -- to think broadly about global problems and to devise policy options that are viable and innovative. The success of the conference in stimulating interest, understanding, and enthusiasm about interdisciplinary global issues is clearly evident from both the participants` feedback and their continued involvement in Student Pugwash USA programs. Six working groups met each morning. The working group themes included: environmental challenges for developing countries; energy options: their social and environmental impact; health care in developing countries; changing dynamics of peace and global security; educating for the socially responsible use of technology; ethics and the use of genetic information. The conference was specifically designed to include mechanisms for ensuring its long-term impact. Participants were encouraged to focus on their individual role in helping resolve global issues. This was achieved through each participant`s development of a Personal Plan of Action, a plan which mapped out activities the student could undertake after the conference to continue the dialogue and work towards the resolution of global and local problems.

Personality maturation around the world: a cross-cultural examination of social-investment theory.

Science.gov (United States)

Bleidorn, Wiebke; Klimstra, Theo A; Denissen, Jaap J A; Rentfrow, Peter J; Potter, Jeff; Gosling, Samuel D

2013-12-01

During early adulthood, individuals from different cultures across the world tend to become more agreeable, more conscientious, and less neurotic. Two leading theories offer different explanations for these pervasive age trends: Five-factor theory proposes that personality maturation is largely determined by genetic factors, whereas social-investment theory proposes that personality maturation in early adulthood is largely the result of normative life transitions to adult roles. In the research reported here, we conducted the first systematic cross-cultural test of these theories using data from a large Internet-based sample of young adults from 62 nations (N = 884,328). We found strong evidence for universal personality maturation from early to middle adulthood, yet there were significant cultural differences in age effects on personality traits. Consistent with social-investment theory, results showed that cultures with an earlier onset of adult-role responsibilities were marked by earlier personality maturation.

Individual Learner Differences In Web-based Learning Environments: From Cognitive, Affective and Social-cultural Perspectives

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Mustafa KOC

2005-10-01

Full Text Available Individual Learner DifferencesIn Web-based Learning Environments:From Cognitive, Affective and Social-cultural Perspectives Mustafa KOCPh.D Candidate Instructional TechnologyUniversity of Illinois at Urbana-ChampaignUrbana, IL - USA ABSTRACT Throughout the paper, the issues of individual differences in web-based learning, also known as online instruction, online training or distance education were examined and implications for designing distance education were discussed. Although the main purpose was to identify differences in learners’ characteristics such as cognitive, affective, physiological and social factors that affect learning in a web-enhanced environment, the questions of how the web could be used to reinforce learning, what kinds of development ideas, theories and models are currently being used to design and deliver online instruction, and finally what evidence for the effectiveness of using World Wide Web (WWW for learning and instruction has been reported, were also analyzed to extend theoretical and epistemogical understanding of web-based learning.

Social Constructivism: Does It Succeed in Reconciling Individual Cognition with Social Teaching and Learning Practices in Mathematics?

Science.gov (United States)

Bozkurt, Gulay

2017-01-01

This article examines the literature associated with social constructivism. It discusses whether social constructivism succeeds in reconciling individual cognition with social teaching and learning practices. After reviewing the meaning of individual cognition and social constructivism, two views--Piaget and Vygotsky's--accounting for learning…

Social skills: a resource for more social support, lower depression levels, higher quality of life, and participation in individuals with spinal cord injury?

Science.gov (United States)

Müller, Rachel; Peter, Claudio; Cieza, Alarcos; Post, Marcel W; Van Leeuwen, Christel M; Werner, Christina S; Geyh, Szilvia

2015-03-01

To examine the relevance of social skills and their different dimensions (ie, expressivity, sensitivity, control) in relation to social support, depression, participation, and quality of life (QOL) in individuals with spinal cord injury (SCI). Cross-sectional data collection within the Swiss Spinal Cord Injury Cohort. Community-based. Individuals with SCI (N=503). Not applicable. Depression, participation, and QOL were measured using the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale, the Utrecht Scale for Evaluation of Rehabilitation-Participation, and 5 selected items of the World Health Organization Quality of Life Scale. The Social Skills Inventory and the Social Support Questionnaire were used to assess social skills (expressivity, sensitivity, control) and social support, respectively. Structural equation modeling was conducted. In model 1 (χ(2)=27.81; df=19; P=.087; root mean square error of approximation=.033; 90% confidence interval=.000-.052), social skills as a latent variable was related to social support (β=.31; R(2)=.10), depression (β=-.31; total R(2)=.42), and QOL (β=.46; R(2)=.25). Social support partially mediated the effect of social skills on QOL (indirect effect: β=.04; P=.02) but not on depression or participation. In model 2 (χ(2)=27.96; df=19; P=.084; root mean square error of approximation=.031; 90% confidence interval=.000-.053), the social skills dimension expressivity showed a path coefficient of β=.20 to social support and β=.18 to QOL. Sensitivity showed a negative path coefficient to QOL (β=-.15) and control a path coefficient of β=-.15 to depression and β=.24 to QOL. Social skills are a resource related to more social support, lower depression scores, and higher QOL. Copyright © 2015 American Congress of Rehabilitation Medicine. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Argentina: Social Sectors in Crisis. A World Bank Country Study.

Science.gov (United States)

World Bank, Washington, DC.

Based on the findings of a two month visit to Argentina by a World Bank Mission in November/December of 1988, this report summarizes current economic, education, and social policies in Argentina. The four major areas targeted are the social sectors, education, health care, and housing. The analysis identifies critical problems in the organization…

Tensions between Individual Use and Network Adoption of Social Media Platforms

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Srinivasan, Nikhil; Damsgaard, Jan

2013-01-01

Social media have diffused into the everyday lives of many but still pose challenges to individuals regarding use of these platforms. This paper explores the multiple manners in which social media platforms gets employed by individuals based on an examination of 4 vignettes generated...... by interviewing individuals within a university context. An analysis of the vignettes and individual use behaviors highlights the tension between network-based adoption of social media platforms and the constraints that the network places on individual use of the platform....

Individual social capital, neighbourhood deprivation, and self-rated health in England.

Science.gov (United States)

Verhaeghe, Pieter-Paul; Tampubolon, Gindo

2012-07-01

Individual social capital is increasingly considered to be an important determinant of an individual's health. This study examines the extent to which individual social capital is associated with self-rated health and the extent to which individual social capital mediates t.he relationship between neighbourhood deprivation and self-rated health in an English sample. Individual social capital was conceptualized and operationalized in both the social cohesion- and network resource tradition, using measures of generalized trust, social participation and social network resources. Network resources were measured with the position generator. Multilevel analyses were applied to wave 2 and 3 of the Taking Part Surveys of England, which consist of face-to-face interviews among the adult population in England (N(i) = 25,366 respondents, N(j) = 12,388 neighbourhoods). The results indicate that generalized trust, participation with friends and relatives and having network members from the salariat class are positively associated with self-rated health. Having network members from the working class is, however, negatively related to self-rated health. Moreover, these social capital elements are partly mediating the negative relationship between neighbourhood deprivation and self-rated health. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Does human body odor represent a significant and rewarding social signal to individuals high in social openness?

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Katrin T Lübke

Full Text Available Across a wide variety of domains, experts differ from novices in their response to stimuli linked to their respective field of expertise. It is currently unknown whether similar patterns can be observed with regard to social expertise. The current study therefore focuses on social openness, a central social skill necessary to initiate social contact. Human body odors were used as social cues, as they inherently signal the presence of another human being. Using functional MRI, hemodynamic brain responses to body odors of women reporting a high (n = 14 or a low (n = 12 level of social openness were compared. Greater activation within the inferior frontal gyrus and the caudate nucleus was observed in high socially open individuals compared to individuals low in social openness. With the inferior frontal gyrus being a crucial part of the human mirror neuron system, and the caudate nucleus being implicated in social reward, it is discussed whether human body odor might constitute more of a significant and rewarding social signal to individuals high in social openness compared to individuals low in social openness process.

Social world interactions: how company connects to paranoia.

Science.gov (United States)

Collip, D; Oorschot, M; Thewissen, V; Van Os, J; Bentall, R; Myin-Germeys, I

2011-05-01

Experimental studies have indicated that social contact, even when it is neutral, triggers paranoid thinking in people who score high on clinical or subclinical paranoia. We investigated whether contextual variables are predictive of momentary increases in the intensity of paranoid thinking in a sample of participants ranging across a psychometric paranoia continuum. The sample (n=154) consisted of 30 currently paranoid patients, 34 currently non-paranoid patients, 15 remitted psychotic patients, 38 high-schizotypy participants, and 37 control subjects. Based on their total score on Fenigstein's Paranoia Scale (PS), three groups with different degrees of paranoia were defined. The Experience Sampling Method (ESM), a structured diary technique, was used to assess momentary social context, perceived social threat and paranoia in daily life. There were differences in the effect of social company on momentary levels of paranoia and perceived social threat across the range of trait paranoia. The low and medium paranoia groups reported higher levels of perceived social threat when they were with less-familiar compared to familiar individuals. The medium paranoia group reported more paranoia in less-familiar company. The high paranoia group reported no difference in the perception of social threat or momentary paranoia between familiar and unfamiliar contacts. Paranoid thinking is context dependent in individuals with medium or at-risk levels of trait paranoia. Perceived social threat seems to be context dependent in the low paranoia group. However, at high levels of trait paranoia, momentary paranoia and momentary perceived social threat become autonomous and independent of social reality.

A Practical Problem Approach to World Hunger: Universities Fighting World Hunger

Science.gov (United States)

Shirley, Lindsey

2012-01-01

Throughout the profession's history, family and consumer sciences professionals have worked to consider what should be done about various social issues affecting individuals, families, and communities across the world. Hunger is a global issue pertaining to the right to life, human survival, sustainable communities, and promotion of healthy…

Cultural psychopathology: uncovering the social world of mental illness.

Science.gov (United States)

López, S R; Guarnaccia, P J

2000-01-01

We review cultural psychopathology research since Kleinman's (1988) important review with the goals of updating past reviews, evaluating current conceptualizations and methods, and identifying emerging substantive trends. Conceptual advances are noted, particularly developments in the definition of culture and the examination of both culture-specific and cultural-general processes. The contributions of the Culture and Diagnosis Task Force for DSM-IV and the World Mental Health Report are reviewed and contrasted. Selected research on anxiety, schizophrenia, and childhood disorders is examined, with particular attention given to the study of ataque de nervios, social factors affecting the course of schizophrenia, and cross-national differences in internalizing and externalizing problems in children. Within the last ten years, cultural psychopathology research has become a significant force. Its focus on the social world holds promise to make significant inroads in reducing suffering and improving people's everyday lives.

Cooperation prevails when individuals adjust their social ties.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Francisco C Santos

2006-10-01

Full Text Available Conventional evolutionary game theory predicts that natural selection favours the selfish and strong even though cooperative interactions thrive at all levels of organization in living systems. Recent investigations demonstrated that a limiting factor for the evolution of cooperative interactions is the way in which they are organized, cooperators becoming evolutionarily competitive whenever individuals are constrained to interact with few others along the edges of networks with low average connectivity. Despite this insight, the conundrum of cooperation remains since recent empirical data shows that real networks exhibit typically high average connectivity and associated single-to-broad-scale heterogeneity. Here, a computational model is constructed in which individuals are able to self-organize both their strategy and their social ties throughout evolution, based exclusively on their self-interest. We show that the entangled evolution of individual strategy and network structure constitutes a key mechanism for the sustainability of cooperation in social networks. For a given average connectivity of the population, there is a critical value for the ratio W between the time scales associated with the evolution of strategy and of structure above which cooperators wipe out defectors. Moreover, the emerging social networks exhibit an overall heterogeneity that accounts very well for the diversity of patterns recently found in acquired data on social networks. Finally, heterogeneity is found to become maximal when W reaches its critical value. These results show that simple topological dynamics reflecting the individual capacity for self-organization of social ties can produce realistic networks of high average connectivity with associated single-to-broad-scale heterogeneity. On the other hand, they show that cooperation cannot evolve as a result of "social viscosity" alone in heterogeneous networks with high average connectivity, requiring the

Navigating the massive world of reddit: using backbone networks to map user interests in social media

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Randal S. Olson

2015-05-01

Full Text Available In the massive online worlds of social media, users frequently rely on organizing themselves around specific topics of interest to find and engage with like-minded people. However, navigating these massive worlds and finding topics of specific interest often proves difficult because the worlds are mostly organized haphazardly, leaving users to find relevant interests by word of mouth or using a basic search feature. Here, we report on a method using the backbone of a network to create a map of the primary topics of interest in any social network. To demonstrate the method, we build an interest map for the social news web site reddit and show how such a map could be used to navigate a social media world. Moreover, we analyze the network properties of the reddit social network and find that it has a scale-free, small-world, and modular community structure, much like other online social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. We suggest that the integration of interest maps into popular social media platforms will assist users in organizing themselves into more specific interest groups, which will help alleviate the overcrowding effect often observed in large online communities.

Motivation and effort in individuals with social anhedonia.

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McCarthy, Julie M; Treadway, Michael T; Blanchard, Jack J

2015-06-01

It has been proposed that anhedonia may, in part, reflect difficulties in reward processing and effortful decision making. The current study aimed to replicate previous findings of effortful decision making deficits associated with elevated anhedonia and expand upon these findings by investigating whether these decision making deficits are specific to elevated social anhedonia or are also associated with elevated positive schizotypy characteristics. The current study compared controls (n=40) to individuals elevated on social anhedonia (n=30), and individuals elevated on perceptual aberration/magical ideation (n=30) on the Effort Expenditure for Rewards Task (EEfRT). Across groups, participants chose a higher proportion of hard tasks with increasing probability of reward and reward magnitude, demonstrating sensitivity to probability and reward values. Contrary to our expectations, when the probability of reward was most uncertain (50% probability), at low and medium reward values, the social anhedonia group demonstrated more effortful decision making than either individuals high in positive schizotypy or controls. The positive schizotypy group only differed from controls (making less effortful choices than controls) when reward probability was lowest (12%) and the magnitude of reward was the smallest. Our results suggest that social anhedonia is related to intact motivation and effort for monetary rewards, but that individuals with this characteristic display a unique and perhaps inefficient pattern of effort allocation when the probability of reward is most uncertain. Future research is needed to better understand effortful decision making and the processing of reward across a range of individual difference characteristics. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Social implications arise in embodied music cognition research which can counter musicological "individualism".

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Moran, Nikki

2014-01-01

The agenda in music research that is broadly recognized as embodied music cognition has arrived hand-in-hand with a social interpretation of music, focusing on the real-world basis of its performance, and fostering an empirical approach to musician movement regarding the communicative function and potential of those movements. However, embodied cognition emerged from traditional cognitivism, which produced a body of scientific explanation of music-theoretic concepts. The analytical object of this corpus is based on the particular imagined encounter of a listener responding to an idealized "work." Although this problem of essentialism has been identified within mainstream musicology, the lingering effects may spill over into interdisciplinary, empirical research. This paper defines the situation according to its legacy of individualism, and offers an alternative sketch of musical activity as performance event, a model that highlights the social interaction processes at the heart of musical behavior. I describe some recent empirical work based on interaction-oriented approaches, arguing that this particular focus - on the social interaction process itself - creates a distinctive and promising agenda for further research into embodied music cognition.

Social Aspects of the Workplace Among Individuals With Bipolar Disorder.

Science.gov (United States)

O'Donnell, Lisa; Himle, Joseph A; Ryan, Kelly; Grogan-Kaylor, Andrew; McInnis, Melvin G; Weintraub, Jenna; Kelly, Marisa; Deldin, Patricia

2017-01-01

Bipolar disorder (BD) is characterized by recurrent mood episodes and profound impairments in psychosocial functioning. Occupational disability is one of the most problematic impairments for individuals with BD due to high rates of unemployment and work impairments. Current evidence indicates that social stressors at work-such as social isolation, conflict with others, and stigmas-are common experiences for employed individuals with BD. Yet, few studies have examined the relationship between social stressors at work and overall occupational functioning, instead focusing on individual clinical features of the disorder. This cross-sectional study employed logistic and linear regressions to determine which demographic variables, mood symptoms, and social aspects of the work environment (exclusion, conflict, social support, stigma) were associated with work status (working vs. not working) and work functioning for individuals with bipolar disorder I and II. Greater stigma and exclusion at work ( p < .05) are associated with unemployment among adult individuals with BD, and higher degrees of depression and conflict at work ( p < .05) are associated with work impairments for employed individuals. By examining two distinct measures of work outcomes (work status and work functioning) within the same group of participants, this study provides a unique insight, revealing that predictors of occupational functioning vary based on the specific measure of work outcomes used. This study also emphasizes the need for treatments that address the clinical features of BD and intervene in the work environment to improve functioning and prevent unemployment among individuals with BD.

The money-flows of socially responsible investment funds around the world

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Renneboog, L.D.R.; Ter Horst, J.R.; Zhang, C.; Baker, H.K.; Nofsinger, J.R.

2012-01-01

This chapter studies the money flows into and out of socially responsible investment (SRI) funds around the world. In their investment decisions, investors in SRI funds may be more concerned with ethical or social issues than with fund performance. Therefore, SRI money flows are less related to past

Oxytocin biases men but not women to restore social connections with individuals who socially exclude them

OpenAIRE

Xu, Xiaolei; Yao, Shuxia; Xu, Lei; Geng, Yayuan; Zhao, Weihua; Ma, Xiaole; Kou, Juan; Luo, Ruixue; Kendrick, Keith M.

2017-01-01

We normally react to individuals who exclude us socially by either avoiding them or increasing our attempts to interact with them. The neuropeptide oxytocin can promote social bonds and reduce social conflict and we therefore investigated whether it facilitates more positive social responses towards individuals who exclude or include us. In a double-blind, placebo-controlled, between-subject design 77 healthy Chinese male and female participants received intranasal oxytocin (40 IU) or placebo...

Equity, social inclusion and individual capability

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Guadalupe Francia

2015-02-01

Full Text Available How to reference this articleFrancia, G. (2015. Equidad, inclusión social y capacidad individual. Foro de Educación, 13(18, pp. 5-12. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.14516/fde.2015.013.018.001

Defending the hive: social mechanisms complement individual immunity in honey bees

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Honey bees live in large colonies (~50,000 individuals), but sociality has both costs and benefits. In some ways, social life enables individuals within colonies to better fend off pathogens and parasites than if they were solitary. However, an environment with many genetically related individuals i...

Dispelling a myth: developing world poverty, inequality, violence and social fragmentation are not good for outcome in schizophrenia.

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Burns, J

2009-08-01

The WHO multi-site studies of schizophrenia concluded the course and outcome of the disorder was better in developing countries. This has become psychiatric lore. However, the reality is that significant political, social and economic ills that characterize many countries in Africa, Latin America and Asia constitute psychosocial stressors that mediate strongly against better outcome in individuals living with this disorder. Outcome studies of schizophrenia in developing countries are reviewed and concepts of poverty, inequality and violence in relation to the course of the illness in this context are debated. The generally poor state of mental health services and policies in these regions are discussed. The belief that community and family life in the developing world is widely intact and that it provides a nurturing environment that facilitates recovery and promotes social and economic empowerment of serious mentally ill individuals is dispelled as a myth. Idealisation of the under-developed South as a haven for schizophrenia sufferers will only add to the already heavy burden experienced by these individuals, their families and these societies in coping with this disabling disease.

SOCIAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL FEATURES OF HIV-INFECTED INDIVIDUALS

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Liliya Anatolyevna Kudrich

2016-02-01

Full Text Available By 2020 the prevalence of HIV in the Russian Federation may increase by 250%, unless we provide appropriate treatment to as many HIV-infected people as possible (V.I. Skvortsova, 2015. Previous research in this field shows that the psychotraumatic character of the disease lowers the psychological resource of HIV-infected individuals. In most cases, they are not psychologically prepared for the negative life events, unable to find an optimal behavioral pattern when their life stereotypes are being destroyed. In fact, being HIV-infected is an example of an acute event (V.V. Pokrovsky, 1993. The ability to overcome the life crisis and effectiveness of using adaptation and compensatory mechanisms to fight the disease depend on the level of adaptation to the fact of being infected and resistance to stress. The aim of the current study was to determine social and psychological features of HIV-infected individuals and assess their influence on the stress resistance and adaptation abilities of HIV+ patients. We observed men and women aged 21-30 who had been HIV+ for 1-5 years. Investigation methods included the following diagnostic tools: The Cattel Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire (Form C, The State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (conducted by Spielberger, adapted for use in Russia by Hanin, The Social Readjustment Rating Scale (The Holmes-Rahe Stress Inventory, The Social and Psychological Adaptation Questionnaire (by C. Rogers and R. Diamond, methods of mathematical statistics. As a result of the study, we have developed comparative factor profiles of individual psychological features of HIV-infected individuals that show their dependence on the social environment and form certain behavioral patterns. We have revealed significant difference in state and trait anxiety between HIV-infected and non-HIV-infected individuals. Self-blame, inadequate self-esteem and level of aspiration indicate low cognitive assessment of the condition by the patients

Individual decision making and social interaction

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Kosfeld, M.

1999-01-01

All economic action involves interaction among individuals. Moreover, most of these interactions have a primarily social character. We talk with friends, we ask others for advice, we arrange to meet people, we work together with colleagues, we live next to neighbours. This thesis takes a closer

Individual differences in social comparison : Development of a scale of social comparison orientation

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Gibbons, FX; Buunk, BP

Development and validation of a measure of individual differences in social comparison orientation (the Iowa-Netherlands Comparison Orientation Measure [INCOM]) are described. Assuming that the tendency toward social comparison is universal, the scale was constructed so as to be appropriate to and

Using Social Media components in business world – SMEs perspective

OpenAIRE

Robu, Maximilian

2013-01-01

SMEs have a major contribution to economic growth and job creation. In a dynamic world, marked by very rapid technological and economic changes, they must adapt and seek new ways to improve business. Social Media seems to provide tools to improve the work, especially on the sales and marketing. This paper is to capture how social media components are used in SMEs, also highlighting some of the advantages of them.

Visual perception: digital imagination and sensitive experience of the social world

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Fabio La Rocca

2016-03-01

Full Text Available With every historical epoch comes a different way of thinking, a different way of seeing, capable of identifying the fundamental elements of a change of paradigm. Any discussion of ‘paradigm’ in relation to the contemporary world must include the development of the digital realm and its technological apparatus, which transform vision and influence how we perceive the world. Central to this development has been the emergence of myriad new forms of communication and a culture of sharing life, which characterize the process of seeing.Technology opens up new horizons in terms of how we expose our presence in the world: via digital photography and video, in every instant of everyday life we are in a position to expose our social world, the fragments of our existence. This cultural effect is not merely a consequence of ways of structuring existence, but also constitutes a change in the way we think about our relationship with the world. Every cultural and technical change brings together a variation of thought and perception, and this represents a basis on which to understand and interrogate the continual mutation of our social imaginary and the process of building, producing and transforming the Real.

Social inclusion of individuals with intellectual disabilities in the military.

Science.gov (United States)

Werner, Shirli; Hochman, Yael

2017-06-01

Despite policies advocating the social inclusion of persons with disabilities in all settings that are a part of everyday life within society, individuals with intellectual disabilities (ID) are usually excluded from service in the military. This study examined the meaning of service in the military for individuals with ID from the perspective of various stakeholder groups. Semi-structured qualitative interviews were conducted with 31 individuals with ID, 36 relatives, and 28 commanders. The recent model for social inclusion developed by Simplican et al. (2015) served as the basis for analyses. Findings suggest a successful social inclusion process for individuals with ID, which resulted in them feeling as an integral part and as contributing members of the military unit and of society at large. Social inclusion in the military was described with reference to two overlapping and interacting domains of interpersonal relationships and community participation. The interaction between interpersonal relationships within the military and community participation has led to positive outcomes for soldiers with ID. Recommendations are provided for the continued inclusion of individuals with ID in the military and in other everyday settings. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Testing problem-solving capacities: differences between individual testing and social group setting.

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Krasheninnikova, Anastasia; Schneider, Jutta M

2014-09-01

Testing animals individually in problem-solving tasks limits distractions of the subjects during the test, so that they can fully concentrate on the problem. However, such individual performance may not indicate the problem-solving capacity that is commonly employed in the wild when individuals are faced with a novel problem in their social groups, where the presence of a conspecific influences an individual's behaviour. To assess the validity of data gathered from parrots when tested individually, we compared the performance on patterned-string tasks among parrots tested singly and parrots tested in social context. We tested two captive groups of orange-winged amazons (Amazona amazonica) with several patterned-string tasks. Despite the differences in the testing environment (singly vs. social context), parrots from both groups performed similarly. However, we found that the willingness to participate in the tasks was significantly higher for the individuals tested in social context. The study provides further evidence for the crucial influence of social context on individual's response to a challenging situation such as a problem-solving test.

Early and adult social environments have independent effects on individual fitness in a social vertebrate.

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Berger, Vérane; Lemaître, Jean-François; Allainé, Dominique; Gaillard, Jean-Michel; Cohas, Aurélie

2015-08-22

Evidence that the social environment at critical stages of life-history shapes individual trajectories is accumulating. Previous studies have identified either current or delayed effects of social environments on fitness components, but no study has yet analysed fitness consequences of social environments at different life stages simultaneously. To fill the gap, we use an extensive dataset collected during a 24-year intensive monitoring of a population of Alpine marmots (Marmota marmota), a long-lived social rodent. We test whether the number of helpers in early life and over the dominance tenure length has an impact on litter size at weaning, juvenile survival, longevity and lifetime reproductive success (LRS) of dominant females. Dominant females, who were born into a group containing many helpers and experiencing a high number of accumulated helpers over dominance tenure length showed an increased LRS through an increased longevity. We provide evidence that in a wild vertebrate, both early and adult social environments influence individual fitness, acting additionally and independently. These findings demonstrate that helpers have both short- and long-term effects on dominant female Alpine marmots and that the social environment at the time of birth can play a key role in shaping individual fitness in social vertebrates. © 2015 The Author(s).

Experimental Evidence that Social Relationships Determine Individual Foraging Behavior

OpenAIRE

Firth, Josh A.; Voelkl, Bernhard; Farine, Damien R.; Sheldon, Ben C.

2015-01-01

Social relationships are fundamental to animals living in complex societies [1-3]. The extent to which individuals base their decisions around their key social relationships, and the consequences this has on their behavior and broader population level processes, remains unknown. Using a novel experiment that controlled where individual wild birds (great tits, Parus major) could access food, we restricted mated pairs from being allowed to forage at the same locations. This introduced a conflic...

METHODOLOGICAL APPROACH TO THE PHENOMENON OF SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY OF THE INDIVIDUAL

OpenAIRE

L. A. Saenko; E. I. Zritneva

2016-01-01

The authors present an analysis of the phenomenon of "social responsibility of the individual" research from various perspectives. Based on the research of domestic and foreign scientists, as well as the experience of the authors own activities build mechanisms of socially responsible behavior of the person. Emphasis is based on the research of R. Selman, a conductive connection between social responsibility and social intelligence of the individual. In the article are described results of F....

Academic English Socialization through Individual Networks of Practice

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Zappa-Hollman, Sandra; Duff, Patricia A.

2015-01-01

This article introduces the notion of individual network of practice (INoP) as a viable construct for analyzing academic (discourse) socialization in second language (L2) contexts. The authors provide an overview of social practice theories that have informed the development of INoP--community of practice (CoP; Lave & Wenger, 1991; Wenger,…

[Neighborhood environment quality, individual-level social capital, and depressive symptoms among adolescents].

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Asakura, Takashi

2011-09-01

We aimed to develop measures to assess features of neighborhood quality and individual social capital, as well as their associations with depressive symptoms among early adolescents. To determine whether relations of depressive symptoms with neighborhood quality might be contingent upon the level of individual cognitive social capital, neighborhood-by-cognitive social capital interaction terms were examined. A qualitative study was conducted to elicit the perceptions of early adolescents about their neighborhood environment. Subsequently, we recruited 2,002 eighth graders and asked for responses to a self-administered questionnaire. The variables analyzed in this study were the Center for Epidemiologic Studies-Depression scale (10 items), features of neighborhood quality, cognitive and structural individual social capital, and demographics. We adopted a generalized estimating equation regression model for the multivariate analysis. The analytic sample was 1,786 with no missing variable in the models. Seven subscales were devised to assess quality features of neighborhood environments with an examination of validity and reliability: "availability of services," "good neighborhood relations," "spaces for recreation," "insecurity and danger of accidents," "dirty-looking, squalid, unclean," "civic communities," and "aesthetic look." We also developed a scale of individual cognitive social capital, which consisted of three constructs: "social trust," "reciprocity," and "social norms." Additionally, the number of social activities in which subjects participated was counted as an indicator of the structural aspect of individual social capital. On examination with the generalized estimating equation regression model, "availability of services," "insecurity and danger of accidents," "dirty-looking, squalid, unclean," and cognitive social capital were significantly associated with the CES-D scores controlling for demographics. We also found a significant interplay between

Neuroanatomical correlates of individual differences in social anxiety in a non-clinical population.

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Tian, Xue; Hou, Xin; Wang, Kangcheng; Wei, Dongtao; Qiu, Jiang

2016-01-01

Socially anxious individuals are characterized as those with distorted negative self-beliefs (NSBs), which are thought to enhance reactions of social distress (emotional reactivity) and social avoidance (social functioning). However, it remains unclear whether individual differences in social distress and social avoidance are represented by differences in brain morphometry. To probe into these neural correlates, we analyzed magnetic resonance images of a sample of 130 healthy subjects and used the Connectome Computation System (CCS) to evaluate these factors. The results showed that social distress was correlated with the cortical volume of the right orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and the subcortical volume of the left amygdala, while social avoidance was correlated with the cortical volume of the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC). Additionally, loneliness might mediate the relationship between the amygdala volume and the social distress score. Our results demonstrated that social distress and social avoidance were represented by segregated cortical regions in the healthy individuals. These findings might provide a valuable basis for understanding the stable brain structures underlying individual differences in social anxiety.

Social capital, income inequality and the social gradient in self-rated health in Latin America: A fixed effects analysis.

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Vincens, Natalia; Emmelin, Maria; Stafström, Martin

2018-01-01

Latin America is the most unequal region in the world. The current sustainable development agenda increased attention to health inequity and its determinants in the region. Our aim is to investigate the social gradient in health in Latin America and assess the effects of social capital and income inequality on it. We used cross-sectional data from the World Values Survey and the World Bank. Our sample included 10,426 respondents in eight Latin American countries. Self-rated health was used as the outcome. Education level was the socioeconomic position indicator. We measured social capital by associational membership, civic participation, generalized trust, and neighborhood trust indicators at both individual and country levels. Income inequality was operationalized using the Gini index at country-level. We employed fixed effects logistic regressions and cross-level interactions to assess the impact of social capital and income inequality on the heath gradient, controlling for country heterogeneity. Education level was independently associated with self-rated health, representing a clear social gradient in health, favoring individuals in higher socioeconomic positions. Generalized and neighborhood trust at country-level moderated the effect on the association between socioeconomic position and health, yet favoring individuals in lower socioeconomic positions, especially in lower inequality countries, despite their lower individual social capital. Our findings suggest that collective rather than individual social capital can impact the social gradient in health in Latin America, explaining health inequalities. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

More stereotypes, please! The limits of 'theory of mind' and the need for further studies on the complexity of real world social interactions.

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Andrews, Kristin

2017-01-01

I suggest that the Stereotype Rationality Hypothesis (Jussim 2012) is only partially right. I agree it is rational to rely on stereotypes, but in the complexity of real world social interactions, most of our individuating information invokes additional stereotypes. Despite assumptions to the contrary, there is reason to think theory of mind is not accurate, and social psychology's denial of stereotype accuracy led us toward mindreading/theory of mind - a less accurate account of how we understand other people.

RELIGION, TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIAL CHANGE: REPRESENTATIONS OF MUSLIM WORLD IN ACADEMIC ANALYSES OF THE ROLE OF SOCIAL MEDIA IN THE ARAB SPRING

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Adeela Arshad Ayaz

2015-03-01

Full Text Available This article deconstructs the dominant constructions and portrayals of the Muslim world in literature on social media and civic engagement in relation to the Arab Spring. A critical reading of literature on social media and ‘Arab Spring’ shows that analyses by Western scholars and commentators are still grounded in ‘modernist dualism’ and orientalist understandings. The article starts by tracing the history of technology to argue that analyses of social media’s educational and civic potential within the Western context in general, is continuation of arguments about earlier technologies in relation to societal development. However, when it comes to analyzing social media and civic engagement particularly in the Muslim world this tendency gets muddled with another well-established trend, that of Orientalism. The overall impact of this tendency results in restricting majority of arguments within the essentialists/determinists paradigm. Such analyses essentialize the technological aspects of social media as universal and constitute the West as civilized, democratic, multicultural, and progressive. On the other hand Muslim world is represented as uncivilized, undemocratic, uncultured, and chained in past traditions. Thus, there is a need for a nuanced understanding of the relationship between the social media and civic engagement in the Muslim world, which can be conceptualized by framing the issues within a postcolonial critique of neoliberal globalization. DOI: 10.15408/tjems.v1i2.1264

Do people's world views matter? The why and how.

Science.gov (United States)

Chen, Sylvia Xiaohua; Lam, Ben C P; Wu, Wesley C H; Ng, Jacky C K; Buchtel, Emma E; Guan, Yanjun; Deng, Hong

2016-05-01

Over the past decades, personality and social psychologists have extensively investigated the role of self-views in individual functioning. Research on world views, however, has been less well studied due to overly specific conceptualizations, and little research about how and why they impact life outcomes. To answer why and how world views matter, we conducted 7 studies to examine the functions, antecedents, and consequences of generalized beliefs about the world, operationalized as social axioms (Leung et al., 2002). This research focused on 2 axiom factors, namely, social cynicism and reward for application. These axioms were found to explain individual differences in self-views over and above personality traits in Hong Kong and U.S. samples (Study 1) and to explain cultural differences in self-views in addition to self-construals among Mainland Chinese, Hong Kong Chinese, East Asian Canadians, and European Canadians (Study 2). Endorsement of social axioms by participants, their parents, and close friends was collected from Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Canada to infer parental and peer influences on world views (Study 3). World views affected psychological well-being through the mediation of positive self-views across 3 age groups, including children, adolescents, and young adults (Study 4) and over time (Study 5). The mediation of negative self-views was through comparative self-criticism rather than internalized self-criticism (Study 6). Holistic thinking moderated the effect of social cynicism on self-views and psychological well-being (Study 7). These results converge to show that world views as a distal force and self-views as a proximal force matter in people's subjective evaluation of their lives. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved).

Consensus and experience trump leadership, suppressing individual personality during social foraging

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McDonald, Nicholas D.; Rands, Sean A.; Hill, Francesca; Elder, Charlotte; Ioannou, Christos C.

2016-01-01

Whether individual behavior in social settings correlates with behavior when individuals are alone is a fundamental question in collective behavior. However, evidence for whether behavior correlates across asocial and social settings is mixed, and no study has linked observed trends with underlying mechanisms. Consistent differences between individuals in boldness, which describes willingness to accept reward over risk, are likely to be under strong selection pressure. By testing three-spined sticklebacks (Gasterosteus aculeatus) in a risky foraging task alone and repeatedly in shoals, we demonstrate that the expression of boldness in groups is context-specific. Whereas personality is repeatable in a low-risk behavior (leaving a refuge), the collectively made consensus decision to then cross the arena outweighs leadership by bolder individuals, explaining the suppression of personality in this context. However, despite this social coordination, bolder individuals were still more likely to feed. Habituation and satiation over repeated trials degrade the effect of personality on leaving the refuge and also whether crossing the arena is a collective decision. The suppression of personality in groups suggests that individual risk-taking tendency may rarely represent actual risk in social settings, with implications for the evolution and ecology of personality variation. PMID:27652342

Consensus and experience trump leadership, suppressing individual personality during social foraging.

Science.gov (United States)

McDonald, Nicholas D; Rands, Sean A; Hill, Francesca; Elder, Charlotte; Ioannou, Christos C

2016-09-01

Whether individual behavior in social settings correlates with behavior when individuals are alone is a fundamental question in collective behavior. However, evidence for whether behavior correlates across asocial and social settings is mixed, and no study has linked observed trends with underlying mechanisms. Consistent differences between individuals in boldness, which describes willingness to accept reward over risk, are likely to be under strong selection pressure. By testing three-spined sticklebacks (Gasterosteus aculeatus) in a risky foraging task alone and repeatedly in shoals, we demonstrate that the expression of boldness in groups is context-specific. Whereas personality is repeatable in a low-risk behavior (leaving a refuge), the collectively made consensus decision to then cross the arena outweighs leadership by bolder individuals, explaining the suppression of personality in this context. However, despite this social coordination, bolder individuals were still more likely to feed. Habituation and satiation over repeated trials degrade the effect of personality on leaving the refuge and also whether crossing the arena is a collective decision. The suppression of personality in groups suggests that individual risk-taking tendency may rarely represent actual risk in social settings, with implications for the evolution and ecology of personality variation.

The Effect of Individual Factors, Socioeconomic and Social Participation on Individual Happiness: A Cross-Sectional Study.

Science.gov (United States)

Azizi, Maryam; Mohamadian, Fathola; Ghajarieah, Mozhgan; Direkvand-Moghadam, Ashraf

2017-06-01

Happiness and exhilaration are the most essential demands of human innate psychological needs that affect both physical and mental health. The present study aimed to investigate the effect of individual factors, socioeconomic and social participation on individual happiness. In this study, we evaluated 15 to 54-year-old individuals to find the effects of individual factors, socioeconomic and social partnership (formal or informal) on human happiness. A random sampling method was used in the present study. The Oxford Happiness Questionnaire (OHQ) was used. Data analysis was performed using descriptive statistics including; frequency, percentage, Mean±SD. Correlation coefficient, one way ANOVA and logistic regression were also used as analytical statistics. There was a significant relationship between gender (p=0.001, r=0.144), marital status (p=0.001, r=0.174), happy parents (p=0.001, r=0.194), educational grade (p=0.001, r=0.189), employment status (p=0.001, r=0.180), income (p=0.001, r=0.264), car ownership (p=0.001, r=0.173), informal social participation (p=0.001, r=0.3) and formal social participation (p=0.001, r=0.231) with happiness. However, the relationship between home ownership (p=0.346, r=-0.015), and happiness was not significant. It seems that good and cordial relations with others, including family, relatives and friends (informal social participation) are the main sources and the most important factors of life satisfaction and human happiness. Higher income can increase happiness by enhancing the possibility to access the needs, desires, problems solving, enhancing the social support and self esteem and opportunities to perform one's favourite activities.

A manifesto of community-focused psychotherapy for the social participation: Does individual and group psychotherapy still meet the care needs of the society?

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Simone Bruschetta

2015-10-01

Full Text Available This paper presents a critical, on a social-political level, of development of psychotherapy, seen as the health discipline, especially in that part of the world called West, scientifically established itself through the evaluation of the effectiveness of its two most common types of setting: Individual and Group- Psychotherapy. Through a social-anthropological interpretation of mental processes which it underpins, and a group analytical analysis of organizational and institutional dynamics that led to its evolution, the authors highlight the significant impasse in which psychotherapy finds itself today compared to new and more pervasive forms of mental suffering. Following on of the latest scientific research on the functioning of the mind and of new policy proposals from the World Health Organization, it is suggested so a form of basic psychotherapy, focused on the quality of the mental health of human contexts, defined Community-Focused Psychotherapy. This new form of psychotherapy is wrong simply understood as a new setting, alongside the classic individual, group, or family setting, but as a political-cultural background and a theoretical-methodological framework, so for different psychotherapeutic treatment (individual, group , family put in place in cases of specific psychopathological symptoms, as for a number of other clinical and social programs, carried out by professionals, workers and (formerly users, who support the empowerment of people, with serious psychological disorders or severe mental illness, in their own social contexts of belonging, and in their own recovery, through the active participation of all those therapeutic processes that support their care. 

Group level effects of social versus individual learning.

Science.gov (United States)

Jost, Jürgen; Li, Wei

2013-06-01

We study the effects of learning by imitating others within the framework of an iterated game in which the members of two complementary populations interact via random pairing at each round. This allows us to compare both the fitness of different strategies within a population and the performance of populations in which members have access to different types of strategies. Previous studies reveal some emergent dynamics at the population level, when players learn individually. We here investigate a different mechanism in which players can choose between two different learning strategies, individual or social. Imitating behavior can spread within a mixed population, with the frequency of imitators varying over generation time. When compared to a pure population with solely individual learners, a mixed population with both individual and social learners can do better, independently of the precise learning scheme employed. We can then search for the best imitating strategy. Imitating the neighbor with the highest payoff turns out to be consistently superior. This is in agreement with findings in experimental and model studies that have been carried out in different settings.

You and Man in the Western World. A Cultural Approach. Eighth Grade Social Studies.

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Parsippany - Troy Hills Board of Education, Parsippany, NJ.

GRADES OR AGES: Grade 8. SUBJECT MATTER: Social Studies--You and Man in the Western World. ORGANIZATION AND PHYSICAL APPEARANCE: The guide contains five units: 1) cultural orientation; 2) social studies dimensions in Western Europe; 3) social studies dimensions in Eastern Europe and Soviet Union; 4) social studies dimensions in Latin America; and…

The Role of Affective and Cognitive Individual Differences in Social Perception.

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Aquino, Antonio; Haddock, Geoffrey; Maio, Gregory R; Wolf, Lukas J; Alparone, Francesca R

2016-06-01

Three studies explored the connection between social perception processes and individual differences in the use of affective and cognitive information in relation to attitudes. Study 1 revealed that individuals high in need for affect (NFA) accentuated differences in evaluations of warm and cold traits, whereas individuals high in need for cognition (NFC) accentuated differences in evaluations of competent and incompetent traits. Study 2 revealed that individual differences in NFA predicted liking of warm or cold targets, whereas individual differences in NFC predicted perceptions of competent or incompetent targets. Furthermore, the effects of NFA and NFC were independent of structural bases and meta-bases of attitudes. Study 3 revealed that differences in the evaluation of warm and cold traits mediated the effects of NFA and NFC on liking of targets. The implications for social perception processes and for individual differences in affect-cognition are discussed. © 2016 by the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Inc.

Dynamics of organizational culture: Individual beliefs vs. social conformity.

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Ellinas, Christos; Allan, Neil; Johansson, Anders

2017-01-01

The complex nature of organizational culture challenges our ability to infer its underlying dynamics from observational studies. Recent computational studies have adopted a distinctly different view, where plausible mechanisms are proposed to describe a wide range of social phenomena, including the onset and evolution of organizational culture. In this spirit, this work introduces an empirically-grounded, agent-based model which relaxes a set of assumptions that describes past work-(a) omittance of an individual's strive for achieving cognitive coherence; (b) limited integration of important contextual factors-by utilizing networks of beliefs and incorporating social rank into the dynamics. As a result, we illustrate that: (i) an organization may appear to be increasingly coherent in terms of its organizational culture, yet be composed of individuals with reduced levels of coherence; (ii) the components of social conformity-peer-pressure and social rank-are influential at different aggregation levels.

Oxytocin biases men but not women to restore social connections with individuals who socially exclude them.

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Xu, Xiaolei; Yao, Shuxia; Xu, Lei; Geng, Yayuan; Zhao, Weihua; Ma, Xiaole; Kou, Juan; Luo, Ruixue; Kendrick, Keith M

2017-01-12

We normally react to individuals who exclude us socially by either avoiding them or increasing our attempts to interact with them. The neuropeptide oxytocin can promote social bonds and reduce social conflict and we therefore investigated whether it facilitates more positive social responses towards individuals who exclude or include us. In a double-blind, placebo-controlled, between-subject design 77 healthy Chinese male and female participants received intranasal oxytocin (40 IU) or placebo before playing a modified virtual ball-tossing game with three fictitious partners who either showed exclusion, inclusion or neutral behavioral interactions with them. Results showed that both male and female subjects threw the ball more often to individuals who excluded rather than included them, although oxytocin did not alter this or awareness/feelings of exclusion or inclusion. However, when subjects returned a week later males, but not females, in the oxytocin group exhibited an increased liking for, and preference for playing again with, players who had previously excluded them. This oxytocin effect was positively associated with independent traits. Our findings suggest that in a collectivist culture oxytocin may promote the desire of males, but not females, with a stronger independent orientation to rebuild social connections with individuals who have previously excluded them.

Beyond individual-centric privacy : Information technology in social systems

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Pieters, W.

2017-01-01

In the public debate, social implications of information technology are mainly seen through the privacy lens. Impact assessments of information technology are also often limited to privacy impact assessments, which are focused on individual rights and well-being, as opposed to the social

Commentary on Social Skills Training Curricula for Individuals with ASD: Social Interaction, Authenticity, and Stigma

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Bottema-Beutel, Kristen; Park, Haerin; Kim, So Yoon

2018-01-01

By teaching social rules thought to be necessary for social competence, social skills training (SST) curricula aim to improve indicators of well-being for individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), such as the attainment of meaningful friendships. However, several recent meta-analyses indicate that SST curricula may fall short of these…

Compensatory internet use among individuals higher in social anxiety and its implications for well-being

OpenAIRE

Weidman, Aaron C.; Fernandez, Katya C.; Levinson, Cheri A.; Augustine, Adam A; Larsen, Randy J.; Rodebaugh, Thomas L.

2012-01-01

The social compensation hypothesis states that the internet primarily benefits individuals who feel uncomfortable communicating face-to-face. In the current research, we tested whether individuals higher in social anxiety use the internet as a compensatory social medium, and whether such use is associated with greater well-being. In Study 1, individuals higher in social anxiety reported greater feelings of comfort and self-disclosure when socializing online than less socially anxious individu...

In-person and online social participation and emotional health in individuals with multiple sclerosis.

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Sparling, Alica; Stutts, Lauren A; Sanner, Haley; Eijkholt, Marleen M

2017-11-01

Individuals with multiple sclerosis (MS) sometimes have barriers to social participation. The advent of the internet has created online support systems for social participation such as websites for individuals with MS. However, minimal research has been conducted about determinants of individuals' in-person and online social participation or how types of social participation contribute to emotional well-being. The present study aims are: (1) to assess the role of access to resources and other determinants as enabling in-person and online social participation, and (2) to analyze the association between social participation and emotional health of individuals with MS. The sample consisted of 508 individuals diagnosed with relapsing/remitting or secondary/progressive MS. Data from NARCOMS registry and data from original questionnaire on determinants of social participation and emotional health were merged. Logistic and linear regression analyses were performed. Individuals with access to the internet were more likely to participate online with friends (OR 5.47, p social participation with friends reported being happier (B = .38, p health and online social participation. Increasing access to in-person social participation with friends will likely have the most positive impact on emotional health. Future research should examine the aspects of online participation that are helpful or harmful.

Feministas en el Foro Feminists at the World Social Forum: challenges for a new political culture

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Lilian Celiberti

2003-12-01

Full Text Available El articulo trata sobre la forma de incursión de expresiones significativas de la pluralidad feminista en el Foro Social Mundial expresa. Estas incursiones expresan los cambios en las subjetividades y en las estrategias de lucha que comienzan a desarrollar los movimientos feministas en particular y los movimientos sociales en general, en el marco de un mundo globalizado y en el nuevo milenio. Es un proceso inédito, que esta impulsando el desarrollo de nuevos paradigmas para la acción colectiva, que combina lo local y lo global, la interconexión de múltiples agendas y la recuperación de una dimensión mas profunda de la justicia económica, social, cultural y simbólica, ampliando, en este proceso, el concepto de la política, lo político y el poder. El articulo coloca en debate las formas de hacer política de los movimientos sociales que confluyen en el Foro - que arrastran viejas dinámicas y al mismo tiempo recrean los nuevos paradigmas - y que abren la posibilidad de reinventar un mapa emancipatorio y un imaginario social, capaz de competir con el consenso neoliberal y el pensamiento único, recuperando la diversidad y la pluralidad de sujet@s y actor@s sociales.The article deals with the ways of incursion of the feminist plurality's significant expressions in the World Social Forum. These incursions express the changes in the subjectivities and in strategies of struggle that feminist movements in particular and social movements in general begin to develop, in the frame of a globalised world and in the new millennium. It's an unprecedented process, that is promoting the development of new paradigms for collective action, that combines local and global issues, the interconnection of multiple agendas and the recovery of a more profound dimension of economic, social, cultural and symbolic justice, broadening, in this process, the concept of politics, the political and the power. The article sets discussion around the ways in which social

Belief in a just world, social influence and illness attributions: evidence of a just world boomerang effect.

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Lucas, Todd; Alexander, Sheldon; Firestone, Ira; Lebreton, James M

2009-03-01

Characteristics of individuals and illnesses can both influence receptivity to preventative health messages. We examined whether receptivity to health messages depends on interactions between illness characteristics and dispositional concern for justice. Participants considered the preventability of six illnesses after exposure to a message that manipulated personal responsibility for illness. Paradoxically, participants with strong just world beliefs reported greater preventability for less preventable illnesses, such as brain cancer, when exposed to an unpreventable health message. In parallel, participants with low justice beliefs reported less preventability for lung cancer when exposed to a preventable message. This just world boomerang effect suggests that individual dispositions and illness characteristics can interact in ways that can produce either acquiescence or opposition to persuasive health messages.

Social Information Links Individual Behavior to Population and Community Dynamics.

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Gil, Michael A; Hein, Andrew M; Spiegel, Orr; Baskett, Marissa L; Sih, Andrew

2018-05-07

When individual animals make decisions, they routinely use information produced intentionally or unintentionally by other individuals. Despite its prevalence and established fitness consequences, the effects of such social information on ecological dynamics remain poorly understood. Here, we synthesize results from ecology, evolutionary biology, and animal behavior to show how the use of social information can profoundly influence the dynamics of populations and communities. We combine recent theoretical and empirical results and introduce simple population models to illustrate how social information use can drive positive density-dependent growth of populations and communities (Allee effects). Furthermore, social information can shift the nature and strength of species interactions, change the outcome of competition, and potentially increase extinction risk in harvested populations and communities. Copyright © 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Collective Action and the Development of Social Individuality in Women.

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Lykes, M. Brinton

Critics of a dominant model of the person, which emphasizes autonomy and independence, have called for an alternative, more social, conceptualization of the self. To describe and validate social individuality as an alternative conceptualization of the self, 84 adults (54 females, 30 males), from a range of social classes and including persons…

Individual recognition of social rank and social memory performance depends on a functional circadian system.

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Müller, L; Weinert, D

2016-11-01

In a natural environment, social abilities of an animal are important for its survival. Particularly, it must recognize its own social rank and the social rank of a conspecific and have a good social memory. While the role of the circadian system for object and spatial recognition and memory is well known, the impact of the social rank and circadian disruptions on social recognition and memory were not investigated so far. In the present study, individual recognition of social rank and social memory performance of Djungarian hamsters revealing different circadian phenotypes were investigated. Wild type (WT) animals show a clear and well-synchronized daily activity rhythm, whereas in arrhythmic (AR) hamsters, the suprachiasmatic nuclei (SCN) do not generate a circadian signal. The aim of the study was to investigate putative consequences of these deteriorations in the circadian system for animalś cognitive abilities. Hamsters were bred and kept under standardized housing conditions with food and water ad libitum and a 14l/10 D lighting regimen. Experimental animals were assigned to different groups (WT and AR) according to their activity pattern obtained by means of infrared motion sensors. Before the experiments, the animals were given to develop a dominant-subordinate relationship in a dyadic encounter. Experiment 1 dealt with individual recognition of social rank. Subordinate and dominant hamsters were tested in an open arena for their behavioral responses towards a familiar (known from the agonistic encounters) or an unfamiliar hamster (from another agonistic encounter) which had the same or an opposite social rank. The investigation time depended on the social rank of the WT subject hamster and its familiarity with the stimulus animal. Both subordinate and dominant WT hamsters preferred an unfamiliar subordinate stimulus animal. In contrast, neither subordinate nor dominant AR hamsters preferred any of the stimulus animals. Thus, disruptions in circadian

A social insect perspective on the evolution of social learning mechanisms.

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Leadbeater, Ellouise; Dawson, Erika H

2017-07-24

The social world offers a wealth of opportunities to learn from others, and across the animal kingdom individuals capitalize on those opportunities. Here, we explore the role of natural selection in shaping the processes that underlie social information use, using a suite of experiments on social insects as case studies. We illustrate how an associative framework can encompass complex, context-specific social learning in the insect world and beyond, and based on the hypothesis that evolution acts to modify the associative process, suggest potential pathways by which social information use could evolve to become more efficient and effective. Social insects are distant relatives of vertebrate social learners, but the research we describe highlights routes by which natural selection could coopt similar cognitive raw material across the animal kingdom.

Social representations, individual and collective mind: a study of Wundt, Cattaneo and Moscovici.

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Tateo, Luca; Iannaccone, Antonio

2012-03-01

The paper presents a discussion on the role of Social Representations in the articulation between individual and collective dimensions of mental activity. An analysis of some concepts in the works of Wundt and Cattaneo is the starting point for a discussion of the relationship between individual processes, practices, artifacts, symbolic systems and functions of Social Representations in the development of culture and individuals. In this perspective, Social Representations could be considered a space of negotiation of the meaning. The relationship between Social Representations, symbolic systems, practices and sense making involves the elaboration of the tension between continuity and innovation, which is developed through communication and practice along time in the interaction between individual and collective minds.

World-System and Evolution: An Appraisal

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Thomas D. Hall

2015-08-01

Full Text Available This paper makes six arguments. First, socio-cultural evolution must be studied from a "world-system" or intersocietal interaction perspective. A focus on change in individual "societies" or "groups" fails to attend adequately to the effects of intersocietal interaction on social and cultural change. Second, in order to be useful, theories of the modern world-system must be modified extensively to deal with non-capitalist settings. In particular, changes in system boundaries marked by exchange networks (for information, luxury or prestige goods, political/military interactions, and bulk goods seldom coincide,and follow different patterns of change. Third, all such systems tend to pulsate, that is, expand and contract, or at least expand rapidly and less rapidly. Fourth, once hierarchical forms of social organization develop such systems typically have cycles of rise and fall in the relative positions of constituent politics. Fifth, expansion of world-systems forms and transforms social relations in newly incorporated areas. While complex in the modern world-system, these changes are even more complex in precapitalist settings. Sixth, thesetwo cycles combine with demographic and epidemiological processes to shape long -term socio-cultural evolution.

Individual heterogeneity generating explosive system network dynamics.

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Manrique, Pedro D; Johnson, Neil F

2018-03-01

Individual heterogeneity is a key characteristic of many real-world systems, from organisms to humans. However, its role in determining the system's collective dynamics is not well understood. Here we study how individual heterogeneity impacts the system network dynamics by comparing linking mechanisms that favor similar or dissimilar individuals. We find that this heterogeneity-based evolution drives an unconventional form of explosive network behavior, and it dictates how a polarized population moves toward consensus. Our model shows good agreement with data from both biological and social science domains. We conclude that individual heterogeneity likely plays a key role in the collective development of real-world networks and communities, and it cannot be ignored.

Individual heterogeneity generating explosive system network dynamics

Science.gov (United States)

Manrique, Pedro D.; Johnson, Neil F.

2018-03-01

Individual heterogeneity is a key characteristic of many real-world systems, from organisms to humans. However, its role in determining the system's collective dynamics is not well understood. Here we study how individual heterogeneity impacts the system network dynamics by comparing linking mechanisms that favor similar or dissimilar individuals. We find that this heterogeneity-based evolution drives an unconventional form of explosive network behavior, and it dictates how a polarized population moves toward consensus. Our model shows good agreement with data from both biological and social science domains. We conclude that individual heterogeneity likely plays a key role in the collective development of real-world networks and communities, and it cannot be ignored.

Compensatory internet use among individuals higher in social anxiety and its implications for well-being.

Science.gov (United States)

Weidman, Aaron C; Fernandez, Katya C; Levinson, Cheri A; Augustine, Adam A; Larsen, Randy J; Rodebaugh, Thomas L

2012-08-01

The social compensation hypothesis states that the internet primarily benefits individuals who feel uncomfortable communicating face-to-face. In the current research, we tested whether individuals higher in social anxiety use the internet as a compensatory social medium, and whether such use is associated with greater well-being. In Study 1, individuals higher in social anxiety reported greater feelings of comfort and self-disclosure when socializing online than less socially anxious individuals, but reported less self-disclosure when communicating face-to-face. However, in Study 2, social anxiety was associated with lower quality of life and higher depression most strongly for individuals who communicated frequently online. Our results suggest that, whereas social anxiety may be associated with using the internet as an alternative to face-to-face communication, such a strategy may result in poorer well-being.

Study of Problems of Individual's Social Education

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Duisenbayev, Abay K.; Baltymova, Mira R.; Akzholova, Aktoty T.; Bazargaliyev, Gabit B.; Zhumagaziyev, Arman Zh.

2016-01-01

The importance of the study of social education of the individual as an integral process covering all stages of human development, supported by factors of modern development of children, adolescents, youth in the conditions of reforming education. Currently, the scientific literature has accumulated a sufficient fund of theoretical knowledge,…

The interplay between individual social behavior and clinical symptoms in small clustered groups.

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Poletti, Piero; Visintainer, Roberto; Lepri, Bruno; Merler, Stefano

2017-07-26

Mixing patterns of human populations play a crucial role in shaping the spreading paths of infectious diseases. The diffusion of mobile and wearable devices able to record close proximity interactions represents a great opportunity for gathering detailed data on social interactions and mixing patterns in human populations. The aim of this study is to investigate how social interactions are affected by the onset of symptomatic conditions and to what extent the heterogeneity in human behavior can reflect a different risk of infection. We study the relation between individuals' social behavior and the onset of different symptoms, by making use of data collected in 2009 among students sharing a dormitory in a North America university campus. The dataset combines Bluetooth proximity records between study participants with self-reported daily records on their health state. Specifically, we investigate whether individuals' social activity significantly changes during different symptomatic conditions, including those defining Influenza-like illness, and highlight to what extent possible heterogeneities in social behaviors among individuals with similar age and daily routines may be responsible for a different risk of infection for influenza. Our results suggest that symptoms associated with Influenza-like illness can be responsible of a reduction of about 40% in the average duration of contacts and of 30% in the daily time spent in social interactions, possibly driven by the onset of fever. However, differences in the number of daily contacts were found to be not statistically significant. In addition, we found that individuals who experienced clinical influenza during the study period were characterized by a significantly higher social activity. In particular, both the number of person-to-person contacts and the time spent in social interactions emerged as significant risk factors for influenza infection. Our findings highlight that Influenza-like illness can remarkably

Channels of Social Mobility of Russian Society: World War I influence

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Vadim M. Rynkov

2016-09-01

Full Text Available The article deals with World War I influence on dynamics of social processes in Russia. The subject of the research is limited by the channels of social mobility, which mean horizontal or mainly horizontal movement in social space. The conclusions are based on studying statistic sources and modern historiography. In 1914–1917 due to war influence severe deformation of previously stable working channels of social mobility took place. Large groups of people who had not had any prerequisites of social status change started to migrate. Some channels almost stopped working, such as agrarian migration, seasonal work, but some new ones emerged, such as refugees, captivity, desertion. The war effaced estates boundaries and deformed class groups. Produced by war, the processes of society restructuring are characterized by high level of social entropy – the most important prerequisite of revolutionary explosion of 1917.

Informative breath: olfactory cues sought during social foraging among Old World monkeys (Mandrillus sphinx, M. Leucophaeus, and Papio anubis).

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Laidre, Mark E

2009-02-01

Sociality provides a unique opportunity for animals to acquire information and learn from others. Especially during foraging, where trial-and-error food selection might be fatal, conspecifics could act as valuable sources of information. During a six-year study across captive, semifree ranging, and wild Old World monkeys, I investigated whether individuals garnered olfactory-based information from their group mates that could guide their feeding decisions. Each of three study species [mandrills (Mandrillus sphinx), drills (M. leucophaeus), and olive baboons (Papio anubis)] performed a prominent muzzle-muzzle behavior, potentially enabling individuals to smell others' mouths and determine via olfaction what foods their conspecifics had chosen. This muzzle-muzzle behavior (1) was preferentially directed by naïve, younger individuals toward more experienced, older individuals, (2) occurred specifically while recipients were chewing and hence emitting the most potent chemical cues, (3) was typically followed by the actor consuming the very same food type the recipient had been eating, (4) was elicited most often in response to experiments involving novel foods, and (5) occurred less frequently as initially novel foods became more familiar. In contrast to this evidence for information acquisition, there was little support for previous proposals suggesting that muzzle-muzzle functions as a social display. Instead, the omnivorous diets and intensely social lifestyles of mandrills, drills, and baboons, may have each favored a convergent form of information acquisition: seeking out the breath of knowledgeable conspecifics to help decide what foods are safe to eat. Copyright 2009 APA, all rights reserved.

Individual and Social Competence, Personality Factors and Cognitive Abilities of Preschoolers

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Egorov A.V.

2015-06-01

Full Text Available Authors studied the connections between individual and social competence, personality factors and cognitive abilities of preschool children with typical development, attending kindergarten (N = 54; age 73, 4  6 months, 31 boys and 23 girls. The following method have been used: "Preschool children's educational competence scale», M5-PS, computer cognitive tests. K-means clustering of cases and Mann-Whitney U Test were used. Revealed that children with a high level of individual social competence development were more open to experience minded (p <0,0001, agreeable (p <0,05, conscientious (p <0,01, with higher level of Extraversion (0,001 and also more successful with the cognitive tests for stimulus sequences understanding (p <0,05, logical multiplication usage (p <0,05, emotional expression and situations of social interaction recognition (p <0,05 and p < 0,01. The obtained results may indicate the possible involvement of both personality and cognitive factors in the formation of individual and social competences.

The individual-oriented and social-oriented Chinese bicultural self: testing the theory.

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Lu, Luo

2008-06-01

The author proposes a bicultural self theory for contemporary Chinese individuals, encompassing 2 main components: the individual-oriented self and the social-oriented self. The social orientation is rooted in traditional Chinese conceptualization of the self, whereas the individual orientation has evolved and developed under Western influences along with recent societal modernization. The author conducted a series of 5 studies to test the theory and relate the model to important issues in current personality and social psychological research, such as cultural individualism-collectivism, self-construals, motivation, cognition, emotion, and well-being. A total of 977 university students in Taiwan participated. The author found that contrasting self-aspects were differentially associated with the aforementioned constructs, as theoretically predicted. This evidence thus generally supported the bicultural self model.

Social Experience in "World of Warcraft": Technological and Ideological Mediations

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Crenshaw, Nicole Kathryn

2017-01-01

As society shifts towards spending more time online for business and leisure, examining human behavior in virtual environments is crucial. To better understand the role that games play in our society, I analyze social experience in World of Warcraft (WoW), one of the longest running massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMO). Since its…

A Grounded Theory of Sexual Minority Women and Transgender Individuals' Social Justice Activism.

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Hagen, Whitney B; Hoover, Stephanie M; Morrow, Susan L

2018-01-01

Psychosocial benefits of activism include increased empowerment, social connectedness, and resilience. Yet sexual minority women (SMW) and transgender individuals with multiple oppressed statuses and identities are especially prone to oppression-based experiences, even within minority activist communities. This study sought to develop an empirical model to explain the diverse meanings of social justice activism situated in SMW and transgender individuals' social identities, values, and experiences of oppression and privilege. Using a grounded theory design, 20 SMW and transgender individuals participated in initial, follow-up, and feedback interviews. The most frequent demographic identities were queer or bisexual, White, middle-class women with advanced degrees. The results indicated that social justice activism was intensely relational, replete with multiple benefits, yet rife with experiences of oppression from within and outside of activist communities. The empirically derived model shows the complexity of SMW and transgender individuals' experiences, meanings, and benefits of social justice activism.

Social dimension and work with the individual - AIDS patient or carrier

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Stefanos Koffas

2011-01-01

Full Text Available “It is already internationally accepted that a disease is not an exclusively biological phenomenon but has a social basis as well. Therefore the health question cannot be solved through care services alone, but through the harmonious coexistence of the individual and his ecological and social environment. The existence of HealthServices is a fundamental agent of social organisation and quality of life. The social determination of health which does not deny the biological part of the person, but rather correlates it to the social conditions” (Greek Cancer Society, 1991: 73 is the dimension that rehabilitation sciences, such as Nursing and Social Work, take into account. Hence, social causality should be examined as a determining factor in shaping health. The disciplines participating in the provision of care, rehabilitation and welfare services have vast fields of intervention, which are mostly implemented in the natural space, family, work and social; they always take into account theextent of the framework of the possible needs and causality factors, of problems pertaining to the individual or the community (Agrafiotis, 1993.

Message framing in social networking sites.

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Kao, Danny Tengti; Chuang, Shih-Chieh; Wang, Sui-Min; Zhang, Lei

2013-10-01

Online social networking sites represent significant new opportunities for Internet advertisers. However, results based on the real world cannot be generalized to all virtual worlds. In this research, the moderating effects of need for cognition (NFC) and knowledge were applied to examine the impact of message framing on attitudes toward social networking sites. A total of 216 undergraduates participated in the study. Results reveal that for social networking sites, while high-NFC individuals form more favorable attitudes toward negatively framed messages than positively framed messages, low-NFC individuals form more favorable attitudes toward positively framed messages than negatively framed messages. In addition, low-knowledge individuals demonstrate more favorable attitudes toward negatively framed messages than positively framed messages; however, the framing effect does not differentially affect the attitudes of high-knowledge individuals. Furthermore, the framing effect does not differentially affect the attitudes of high-NFC individuals with high knowledge. In contrast, low-NFC individuals with low knowledge hold more favorable attitudes toward positively framed messages than negatively framed messages.

Multirelational organization of large-scale social networks in an online world.

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Szell, Michael; Lambiotte, Renaud; Thurner, Stefan

2010-08-03

The capacity to collect fingerprints of individuals in online media has revolutionized the way researchers explore human society. Social systems can be seen as a nonlinear superposition of a multitude of complex social networks, where nodes represent individuals and links capture a variety of different social relations. Much emphasis has been put on the network topology of social interactions, however, the multidimensional nature of these interactions has largely been ignored, mostly because of lack of data. Here, for the first time, we analyze a complete, multirelational, large social network of a society consisting of the 300,000 odd players of a massive multiplayer online game. We extract networks of six different types of one-to-one interactions between the players. Three of them carry a positive connotation (friendship, communication, trade), three a negative (enmity, armed aggression, punishment). We first analyze these types of networks as separate entities and find that negative interactions differ from positive interactions by their lower reciprocity, weaker clustering, and fatter-tail degree distribution. We then explore how the interdependence of different network types determines the organization of the social system. In particular, we study correlations and overlap between different types of links and demonstrate the tendency of individuals to play different roles in different networks. As a demonstration of the power of the approach, we present the first empirical large-scale verification of the long-standing structural balance theory, by focusing on the specific multiplex network of friendship and enmity relations.

Constructing Social Networks from Unstructured Group Dialog in Virtual Worlds

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Shah, Fahad; Sukthankar, Gita

Virtual worlds and massively multi-player online games are rich sources of information about large-scale teams and groups, offering the tantalizing possibility of harvesting data about group formation, social networks, and network evolution. However these environments lack many of the cues that facilitate natural language processing in other conversational settings and different types of social media. Public chat data often features players who speak simultaneously, use jargon and emoticons, and only erratically adhere to conversational norms. In this paper, we present techniques for inferring the existence of social links from unstructured conversational data collected from groups of participants in the Second Life virtual world. We present an algorithm for addressing this problem, Shallow Semantic Temporal Overlap (SSTO), that combines temporal and language information to create directional links between participants, and a second approach that relies on temporal overlap alone to create undirected links between participants. Relying on temporal overlap is noisy, resulting in a low precision and networks with many extraneous links. In this paper, we demonstrate that we can ameliorate this problem by using network modularity optimization to perform community detection in the noisy networks and severing cross-community links. Although using the content of the communications still results in the best performance, community detection is effective as a noise reduction technique for eliminating the extra links created by temporal overlap alone.

The Combined Use of Video Modeling and Social Stories in Teaching Social Skills for Individuals with Intellectual Disability

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Gül, Seray Olçay

2016-01-01

There are many studies in the literature in which individuals with intellectual disabilities exhibit social skills deficits and which show the need for teaching these skills systematically. This study aims to investigate the effects of an intervention package of consisting computer-presented video modeling and Social Stories on individuals with…

Elaborations of grounded theory in information research: arenas/social worlds theory, discourse and situational analysis

OpenAIRE

Vasconcelos, A.C.; Sen, B.A.; Rosa, A.; Ellis, D.

2012-01-01

This paper explores elaborations of Grounded Theory in relation to Arenas/Social Worlds Theory. The notions of arenas and social worlds were present in early applications of Grounded Theory but have not been as much used or recognised as the general Grounded Theory approach, particularly in the information studies field. The studies discussed here are therefore very unusual in information research. The empirical contexts of these studies are those of (1) the role of discourse in the organisat...

Criticism in the Romantic Relationships of Individuals With Social Anxiety.

Science.gov (United States)

Porter, Eliora; Chambless, Dianne L; Keefe, John R

2017-07-01

Social anxiety is associated with difficulties in intimate relationships. Because fear of negative evaluation is a cardinal feature of social anxiety disorder, perceived criticism and upset due to criticism from partners may play a significant role in socially anxious individuals' intimate relationships. In the present study, we examine associations between social anxiety and perceived, observed, and expressed criticism in interactions with romantic partners. In Study 1, we collected self-report data from 343 undergraduates and their romantic partners on social anxiety symptoms, perceived and expressed criticism, and upset due to criticism. One year later couples reported whether they were still in this relationship. Results showed that social anxiety was associated with being more critical of one's partner, and among women, being more upset by criticism from a partner. Social anxiety was not related to perceived criticism, nor did criticism variables predict relationship status at Time 2. In Study 2, undergraduate couples with a partner high (n = 26) or low (n = 26) in social anxiety completed a 10-minute, video-recorded problem-solving task. Both partners rated their perceived and expressed criticism and upset due to criticism following the interaction, and observers coded interactions for criticism. Results indicated that social anxiety was not significantly related to any of the criticism variables, but post hoc analyses cast doubts upon the external validity of the problem-solving task. Results are discussed in light of known difficulties with intimacy among individuals with social anxiety. Copyright © 2016. Published by Elsevier Ltd.

Direct fitness benefits and kinship of social foraging groups in an Old World tropical babbler

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Kaiser, Sara A.; Martin, Thomas E.; Oteyza, Juan C.; Armstad, Connor E.; Fleischer, Robert C.

2018-01-01

Molecular studies have revealed that social groups composed mainly of nonrelatives may be widespread in group-living vertebrates, but the benefits favoring such sociality are not well understood. In the Old World, birds often form conspecific foraging groups that are maintained year-round and offspring usually disperse to other social groups. We tested the hypothesis that nonbreeding group members are largely unrelated and gain direct fitness benefits through breeding opportunities (males) and brood parasitism (females) in the tropical gray-throated babbler, Stachyris nigriceps, in Malaysian Borneo. Babblers foraged in social groups containing one or more breeding pairs (median = 8 group members of equal sex ratio), but group members rarely assisted with breeding (9% of 67 breeding pairs had a third helper; exhibiting facultative cooperative breeding). Although 20% of 266 group member dyads were first-order relatives of one or both members of the breeding pairs, 80% were unrelated. Male group members gained direct fitness benefits through extrapair and extra-group paternity (25% of 73 offspring), which was independent of their relatedness to the breeding pair and increased with decreasing group size. In contrast, females did not gain direct fitness benefits through brood parasitism. The low levels of relatedness and helping in social groups suggest that most group members do not gain indirect fitness benefits by helping to raise unrelated offspring. These findings highlight the importance of examining benefits of sociality for unrelated individuals that largely do not help and broaden the direct fitness benefits of group foraging beyond assumed survival benefits.

Social media as social capital of LGB individuals in Hong Kong: its relations with group membership, stigma, and mental well-being.

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Chong, Eddie S K; Zhang, Yin; Mak, Winnie W S; Pang, Ingrid H Y

2015-03-01

Social media are found to facilitate social information exchange among lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) individuals who are subjected to social stigma. This study tested the protective role of LGB-tailored social media uses and gratifications in promoting LGB group membership, which we hypothesized to reduce LGB stigma and enhance mental health among LGB individuals in Hong Kong. Based on a sample of 233 Chinese LGB individuals in Hong Kong, structural equation modeling showed evidence for our hypotheses, χ(df=62)(2)= 88.20, GFI = 0.95, CFI = 0.98, NNFI = 0.98, SRMR = 0.07, RMSEA = 0.04. Community surveillance, identity expression, and emotional support on social media may promote mental health by instilling a sense of group membership and reducing stigma. Social media may build camaraderie and bolster resilience among LGB individuals that may otherwise be difficult in conservative regions.

The Relationship of Social Support and Neighborhood Perceptions among Individuals with HIV.

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Shacham, Enbal; López, Julia D; Önen, Nur F; Overton, Edgar T

Social support has been noted to improve health outcomes for individuals with HIV. Understanding how neighborhoods contribute to feelings of social support is beneficial to create environments where populations with HIV can be supported. This study assessed the relationship between neighborhood perceptions and social support with HIV management. A total of 201 individuals were recruited; individuals with HIV, 18 years or older, who were eligible to participate in the 2-hour interview. Psychiatric diagnostic interviews were conducted alongside assessments of social support and neighborhood perceptions; biomedical markers were abstracted from medical records. Correlations and linear regression analyses were performed to assess relationships between social support and neighborhood perceptions with HIV management biomarkers. The majority of the sample was male (68.8%) and African American (72.3%), with a mean age of 43.1 years. Overall, 78% were receiving combination antiretroviral therapy (cART) prescriptions, with 69% being virally suppressed. Fear of neighborhood activities was independently associated with receiving current cART. Reports of social support and neighborhood perceptions were highly correlated. Findings suggest that supportive home environments likely would improve perceptions of social support.

In others' shoes: do individual differences in empathy and theory of mind shape social preferences?

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Artinger, Florian; Exadaktylos, Filippos; Koppel, Hannes; Sääksvuori, Lauri

2014-01-01

Abundant evidence across the behavioral and social sciences suggests that there are substantial individual differences in pro-social behavior. However, little is known about the psychological mechanisms that underlie social preferences. This paper investigates whether empathy and Theory of Mind shape individual differences in pro-social behavior as conventionally observed in neutrally framed social science experiments. Our results show that individual differences in the capacity for empathy do not shape social preferences. The results qualify the role of Theory of Mind in strategic interaction. We do not only show that fair individuals exhibit more accurate beliefs about the behavior of others but that Theory of Mind can be effectively used to pursue both self-interest and pro-social goals depending on the principle objectives of a person.

Do community- and individual-level social relationships contribute to the mental health of disaster survivors?: A multilevel prospective study after the Great East Japan Earthquake.

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Matsuyama, Yusuke; Aida, Jun; Hase, Akihiro; Sato, Yukihiro; Koyama, Shihoko; Tsuboya, Toru; Osaka, Ken

2016-02-01

Disasters greatly threaten the health and lives of people all over the world. Japan experienced severe damage following the Great East Japan Earthquake on March 11, 2011, and some survivors continue to live in prefabricated temporary housing, built collectively in damaged areas. Previous studies have shown that social relationships in such communities have the potential to protect the mental health of disaster survivors. We examined the association between survivors' social support and social participation in 2012 and their psychological distress in 2013 using the K6 scale. Self-reported questionnaires were distributed to all 15,979 households in prefabricated temporary housing in eight municipalities in Miyagi prefecture in 2012, and 19,284 adults from 9366 (58.6%) households responded. One year later, 10,880 adults responded to a follow-up survey. Multivariate multilevel linear regression analyses with multiply imputed datasets showed that survivors' psychological distress at follow-up significantly differed between communities (community-level variance [standard error] = 0.38 [0.13]). The variance was reduced to 0.25 [0.09] after considering individual demographic characteristics and psychological distress at baseline. Individual- and community-level social relationships of 7.1% and 15.8%, respectively, explained the difference. After adjusting for covariates including K6 scale at baseline, individual-level social support, community-level social support, and individual-level social participation were significantly associated with low psychological distress at follow-up (coefficients [95% confidence intervals] were: -0.54 [-0.79, -0.30]; -0.43 [-0.72, -0.14]; and -0.22 [-0.40, -0.04], respectively). Community-level social participation was not significantly associated with psychological distress. The present study showed that: 1) survivors' psychological distress varied between temporary housing communities in 2013; 2) individual- and community-level social

Engagement in social media environments for individuals with who use augmentative and alternative communication.

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Caron, Jessica

2016-10-14

Communicative interactions, despite the mode (e.g., face-to-face, online) rely on the communication skills of each individual participating. Some individuals have significant speech and language impairments and require the use of augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) (i.e., signs, speech generating devices) to maximize their communication participation across a variety of on and offline contexts. Use of social media has brought about changes to communication environments, contributing new contexts for engagement. To provide a framework for considering application of engagement theory for interventions around social media use by individuals who use AAC. The author has applied examples from qualitative social media and AAC research to a framework of engagement. No formal data collection was used. Social media use has become a conventional form of communication. Yet recognition of the value of social media (and other electronic modalities) for individuals who use AAC has not been fully translated into practice. The examples used illustrated how the proposed framework can assist in clinical practice and future research directions. Engagement, including the proposed framework for considerations of social media engagement activities, can provide a systematic way to approach social media use for individuals who use AAC.

A computational approach to characterizing the impact of social influence on individuals' vaccination decision making.

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Xia, Shang; Liu, Jiming

2013-01-01

In modeling individuals vaccination decision making, existing studies have typically used the payoff-based (e.g., game-theoretical) approaches that evaluate the risks and benefits of vaccination. In reality, whether an individual takes vaccine or not is also influenced by the decisions of others, i.e., due to the impact of social influence. In this regard, we present a dual-perspective view on individuals decision making that incorporates both the cost analysis of vaccination and the impact of social influence. In doing so, we consider a group of individuals making their vaccination decisions by both minimizing the associated costs and evaluating the decisions of others. We apply social impact theory (SIT) to characterize the impact of social influence with respect to individuals interaction relationships. By doing so, we propose a novel modeling framework that integrates an extended SIT-based characterization of social influence with a game-theoretical analysis of cost minimization. We consider the scenario of voluntary vaccination against an influenza-like disease through a series of simulations. We investigate the steady state of individuals' decision making, and thus, assess the impact of social influence by evaluating the coverage of vaccination for infectious diseases control. Our simulation results suggest that individuals high conformity to social influence will increase the vaccination coverage if the cost of vaccination is low, and conversely, will decrease it if the cost is high. Interestingly, if individuals are social followers, the resulting vaccination coverage would converge to a certain level, depending on individuals' initial level of vaccination willingness rather than the associated costs. We conclude that social influence will have an impact on the control of an infectious disease as they can affect the vaccination coverage. In this respect, our work can provide a means for modeling the impact of social influence as well as for estimating the

In Others' Shoes: Do Individual Differences in Empathy and Theory of Mind Shape Social Preferences?

Science.gov (United States)

Artinger, Florian; Exadaktylos, Filippos; Koppel, Hannes; Sääksvuori, Lauri

2014-01-01

Abundant evidence across the behavioral and social sciences suggests that there are substantial individual differences in pro-social behavior. However, little is known about the psychological mechanisms that underlie social preferences. This paper investigates whether empathy and Theory of Mind shape individual differences in pro-social behavior as conventionally observed in neutrally framed social science experiments. Our results show that individual differences in the capacity for empathy do not shape social preferences. The results qualify the role of Theory of Mind in strategic interaction. We do not only show that fair individuals exhibit more accurate beliefs about the behavior of others but that Theory of Mind can be effectively used to pursue both self-interest and pro-social goals depending on the principle objectives of a person. PMID:24743312

Importance of fishing as a segmentation variable in the application of a social worlds model

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Gigliotti, Larry M.; Chase, Loren

2017-01-01

Market segmentation is useful to understanding and classifying the diverse range of outdoor recreation experiences sought by different recreationists. Although many different segmentation methodologies exist, many are complex and difficult to measure accurately during in-person intercepts, such as that of creel surveys. To address that gap in the literature, we propose a single-item measure of the importance of fishing as a surrogate to often overly- or needlesslycomplex segmentation techniques. The importance of fishing item is a measure of the value anglers place on the activity or a coarse quantification of how central the activity is to the respondent’s lifestyle (scale: 0 = not important, 1 = slightly, 2 = moderately, 3 = very, and 4 = fishing is my most important recreational activity). We suggest the importance scale may be a proxy measurement for segmenting anglers using the social worlds model as a theoretical framework. Vaske (1980) suggested that commitment to recreational activities may be best understood in relation to social group participation and the social worlds model provides a rich theoretical framework for understanding social group segments. Unruh (1983) identified four types of actor involvement in social worlds: strangers, tourists, regulars, and insiders, differentiated by four characteristics (orientation, experiences, relationships, and commitment). We evaluated the importance of fishing as a segmentation variable using data collected by a mixed-mode survey of South Dakota anglers fishing in 2010. We contend that this straightforward measurement may be useful for segmenting outdoor recreation activities when more complicated segmentation schemes are not suitable. Further, this index, when coupled with the social worlds model, provides a valuable framework for understanding the segments and making management decisions.

Tensão entre tempo social e tempo individual The tension between social time and individual time

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Josué Pereira da Silva

2009-01-01

Full Text Available O artigo discute o tempo na obra de André Gorz, procurando a partir desse tema compreender sua concepção a respeito da relação entre indivíduo e sociedade. Para tanto, identifica e descreve suas três abordagens sobre o tempo: a primeira procura construir uma axiologia de valores baseada nas três dimensões temporais (passado, presente e futuro; a segunda discute a relação entre tempo e envelhecimento; e a terceira trata do tempo de trabalho. Após descrever cada uma dessas três abordagens sobre o tempo, o artigo conclui sugerindo que há uma tensão entre tempo social e tempo do indivíduo na teoria desse autor, tensão que decorre em boa medida de uma visão filosófica que concebe indivíduo e sociedade como entidades quase antagônicas.The article explores the theme of time in the work of André Gorz, using this motif as a basis for understanding his conception of the relationship between individual and society. This aim in mind, it identifies and describes his three approaches to time: the first seeks to construct an axiology of values based on the three temporal dimensions (past, present and future; the second examines the relationship between time and aging; and the third deals with the time of work. After describing each of these three approaches, the article concludes by identifying the tension between social time and individual time in the author's theory, a tension that largely arises from a philosophical viewpoint that conceives individual and society as almost antagonistic entities.

Individual social security accounts: issues in assessing administrative feasibility and costs.

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Olsen, K A; Salisbury, D L

1998-11-01

Whether to add individual accounts (IAs) to the Social Security system is a highly political issue. But almost lost in the debate so far have been any practical considerations about how to administer such accounts. Any discussion of whether to create individual accounts must also address the basic but critical questions of how they would work: Who would run them? What would they cost? Logistically, are they even possible? This EBRI Issue Brief provides an overview of the most salient administrative issues facing the current Social Security reform debate--issues that challenge proponents to carefully think through how their proposals could be implemented so as to achieve their policy goals. The options and difficulties in administering IAs raise concerns that cut across ideology. The object of this report is neither to dissuade the advocates nor support the critics of individual accounts. Rather, it is to bring practical considerations to a political debate that has largely ignored the pragmatic challenges of whether IAs would be too complex for participants to understand or too difficult for record keepers to administer. The major findings in this analysis include: Adding individual accounts to Social Security could be the largest undertaking in the history of the U.S. financial market, and no system to date has the capacity to administer such a system. The number of workers currently covered by Social Security--the largest single entitlement program in the nation--is at least four times higher than the combined number of all tax-favored employment-based retirement accounts in the United States, which are administered by hundreds of entities. Direct comparisons between employment-based retirement savings plans and Social Security reform are tenuous at best. Social Security covers workers and businesses that are disproportionately excluded from employment-based plans. Because of these differences, a system of individual Social Security accounts would be more

Understanding the diffusion and adoption of mobile IT across social worlds

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Mengiste, Shegaw Anagaw; Nielsen, Jeppe

2014-01-01

IT facilitated and mediated negotiation and collaboration among various stakeholders at one time and become source of tension and conflicts at other times between different social worlds. Indeed, the trajectory of mobile IT adoption was of a top-down approach and the use of the new technology interfered...

Modeling Feedbacks Between Individual Human Decisions and Hydrology Using Interconnected Physical and Social Models

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Murphy, J.; Lammers, R. B.; Proussevitch, A. A.; Ozik, J.; Altaweel, M.; Collier, N. T.; Alessa, L.; Kliskey, A. D.

2014-12-01

The global hydrological cycle intersects with human decision making at multiple scales, from dams and irrigation works to the taps in individuals' homes. Residential water consumers are commonly encouraged to conserve; these messages are heard against a background of individual values and conceptions about water quality, uses, and availability. The degree to which these values impact the larger-hydrological dynamics, the way that changes in those values have impacts on the hydrological cycle through time, and the feedbacks by which water availability and quality in turn shape those values, are not well explored. To investigate this domain we employ a global-scale water balance model (WBM) coupled with a social-science-grounded agent-based model (ABM). The integration of a hydrological model with an agent-based model allows us to explore driving factors in the dynamics in coupled human-natural systems. From the perspective of the physical hydrologist, the ABM offers a richer means of incorporating the human decisions that drive the hydrological system; from the view of the social scientist, a physically-based hydrological model allows the decisions of the agents to play out against constraints faithful to the real world. We apply the interconnected models to a study of Tucson, Arizona, USA, and its role in the larger Colorado River system. Our core concept is Technology-Induced Environmental Distancing (TIED), which posits that layers of technology can insulate consumers from direct knowledge of a resource. In Tucson, multiple infrastructure and institutional layers have arguably increased the conceptual distance between individuals and their water supply, offering a test case of the TIED framework. Our coupled simulation allows us to show how the larger system transforms a resource with high temporal and spatial variability into a consumer constant, and the effects of this transformation on the regional system. We use this to explore how pricing, messaging, and

Role of Social Networks in Developing Religious and Social Values of the Students of the World Islamic Sciences & Education University

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Al-Mosa, Nosiba Ali

2015-01-01

The study aimed to identify the role of Social Networks in the social and religious values of The World Islamic Sciences & Education University students. The study applied the survey and descriptive Approach. The population of the study represents all BA students who enrolled in the first academic semester for the year 2014-2015. The sample of…

Creating a social world: a developmental twin study of peer-group deviance.

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Kendler, Kenneth S; Jacobson, Kristen C; Gardner, Charles O; Gillespie, Nathan; Aggen, Steven A; Prescott, Carol A

2007-08-01

Peer-group deviance is strongly associated with externalizing behaviors. We have limited knowledge of the sources of individual differences in peer-group deviance. To clarify genetic and environmental contributions to peer-group deviance in twins from midchildhood through early adulthood. Retrospective assessments using a life-history calendar. Analysis by biometric growth curves. General community. Members of male-male pairs from the population-based Virginia Twin Registry personally interviewed in 1998-2004 (n = 1802). Self-reported peer-group deviance at ages 8 to 11, 12 to 14, 15 to 17, 18 to 21, and 22 to 25 years. Mean and variance of peer-group deviance increased substantially with age. Genetic effects on peer-group deviance showed a strong and steady increase over time. Family environment generally declined in importance over time. Individual-specific environmental influences on peer-group deviance levels were stable in the first 3 age periods and then increased as most twins left home. When standardized, the heritability of peer-group deviance is approximately 30% at ages 8 to 11 years and rises to approximately 50% across the last 3 time periods. Both genes and shared environment contributed to individual differences in the developmental trajectory of peer-group deviance. However, while the correlation between childhood peer-group deviance levels and the subsequent slope of peer-group deviance over time resulting from genetic factors was positive, the same relationship resulting from shared environmental factors was negative. As male twins mature and create their own social worlds, genetic factors play an increasingly important role in their choice of peers, while shared environment becomes less influential. The individual-specific environment increases in importance when individuals leave home. Individuals who have deviant peers in childhood, as a result of genetic vs shared environmental influences, have distinct developmental trajectories

Social Cognitive Correlates of Physical Activity in Black Individuals With Multiple Sclerosis.

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Kinnett-Hopkins, Dominique; Motl, Robert W

2016-04-01

To examine variables from social cognitive theory as correlates of physical activity in black and white individuals with multiple sclerosis (MS). Cross-sectional. National survey. Black (n=151) and white (n=185) individuals with MS were recruited through the North American Research Committee on Multiple Sclerosis Registry. Not applicable. The battery of questionnaires included information on demographic and clinical characteristics, physical activity, exercise self-efficacy, function, social support, exercise outcome expectations, and exercise goal setting and planning. Black individuals with MS reported significantly lower levels of physical activity compared with white individuals with MS. Physical activity levels were significantly correlated with self-efficacy, outcome expectations, functional limitations as impediments, and goal setting in black participants with MS. The pattern and magnitude of correlations were comparable with those observed in white participants based on Fisher z tests. Researchers should consider applying behavioral interventions that target social cognitive theory variables for increasing physical activity levels among black individuals with MS. Copyright © 2016 American Congress of Rehabilitation Medicine. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Suicide ideation of individuals in online social networks.

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Naoki Masuda

Full Text Available Suicide explains the largest number of death tolls among Japanese adolescents in their twenties and thirties. Suicide is also a major cause of death for adolescents in many other countries. Although social isolation has been implicated to influence the tendency to suicidal behavior, the impact of social isolation on suicide in the context of explicit social networks of individuals is scarcely explored. To address this question, we examined a large data set obtained from a social networking service dominant in Japan. The social network is composed of a set of friendship ties between pairs of users created by mutual endorsement. We carried out the logistic regression to identify users' characteristics, both related and unrelated to social networks, which contribute to suicide ideation. We defined suicide ideation of a user as the membership to at least one active user-defined community related to suicide. We found that the number of communities to which a user belongs to, the intransitivity (i.e., paucity of triangles including the user, and the fraction of suicidal neighbors in the social network, contributed the most to suicide ideation in this order. Other characteristics including the age and gender contributed little to suicide ideation. We also found qualitatively the same results for depressive symptoms.

Suicide ideation of individuals in online social networks.

Science.gov (United States)

Masuda, Naoki; Kurahashi, Issei; Onari, Hiroko

2013-01-01

Suicide explains the largest number of death tolls among Japanese adolescents in their twenties and thirties. Suicide is also a major cause of death for adolescents in many other countries. Although social isolation has been implicated to influence the tendency to suicidal behavior, the impact of social isolation on suicide in the context of explicit social networks of individuals is scarcely explored. To address this question, we examined a large data set obtained from a social networking service dominant in Japan. The social network is composed of a set of friendship ties between pairs of users created by mutual endorsement. We carried out the logistic regression to identify users' characteristics, both related and unrelated to social networks, which contribute to suicide ideation. We defined suicide ideation of a user as the membership to at least one active user-defined community related to suicide. We found that the number of communities to which a user belongs to, the intransitivity (i.e., paucity of triangles including the user), and the fraction of suicidal neighbors in the social network, contributed the most to suicide ideation in this order. Other characteristics including the age and gender contributed little to suicide ideation. We also found qualitatively the same results for depressive symptoms.

Mapping the Social World of Classrooms: A Multi-Level, Multi-Reporter Approach to Social Processes and Behavioral Engagement.

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Kim, Ha Yeon; Cappella, Elise

2016-03-01

Understanding the social context of classrooms has been a central goal of research focused on the promotion of academic development. Building on the current literature on classroom social settings and guided by a risk and protection framework, this study examines the unique and combined contribution of individual relationships and quality of classroom interactions on behavioral engagement among low-income Latino students in kindergarten to fifth grade (N = 111). Findings indicate that individual relationships with teachers and peers and classroom quality, each independently predicted behavioral engagement. Moreover, high-quality classrooms buffered the negative influence of students' difficulties in individual relationships on behavioral engagement. Findings illuminate the need to consider multiple layers of social classroom relationships and interactions and suggest the potential benefit of targeting classroom quality as a mechanism for improving behavioral engagement in urban elementary schools. © Society for Community Research and Action 2016.

The Social Benefits of Initial Vocational Education and Training for Individuals in Europe

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Sabates, Ricardo; Salter, Emma; Obolenskaya, Polina

2012-01-01

This article investigates the social benefits of initial vocational education and training (VET) for individuals in different European contexts. Drawing on data from the European Community Household Panel, results show that initial VET is associated with positive changes in social outcomes for individuals across Europe. Health benefits were mainly…

Competition for resources can explain patterns of social and individual learning in nature.

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Smolla, Marco; Gilman, R Tucker; Galla, Tobias; Shultz, Susanne

2015-09-22

In nature, animals often ignore socially available information despite the multiple theoretical benefits of social learning over individual trial-and-error learning. Using information filtered by others is quicker, more efficient and less risky than randomly sampling the environment. To explain the mix of social and individual learning used by animals in nature, most models penalize the quality of socially derived information as either out of date, of poor fidelity or costly to acquire. Competition for limited resources, a fundamental evolutionary force, provides a compelling, yet hitherto overlooked, explanation for the evolution of mixed-learning strategies. We present a novel model of social learning that incorporates competition and demonstrates that (i) social learning is favoured when competition is weak, but (ii) if competition is strong social learning is favoured only when resource quality is highly variable and there is low environmental turnover. The frequency of social learning in our model always evolves until it reduces the mean foraging success of the population. The results of our model are consistent with empirical studies showing that individuals rely less on social information where resources vary little in quality and where there is high within-patch competition. Our model provides a framework for understanding the evolution of social learning, a prerequisite for human cumulative culture. © 2015 The Author(s).

Social Change and Individual Change--Developmental Science as Guide Post

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Silbereisen, Rainer K.

2012-01-01

From a biopsychosocial perspective on human development, this essay review introduces a model linking social changes at the macro level with individual development at the micro level. German unification and the globalization of economy that followed are taken as a case in point for social changes that have affected the lives of many. It is argued…

Circadian Rhythms in Socializing Propensity

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Zhang, Cheng; Phang, Chee Wei; Zeng, Xiaohua; Wang, Ximeng; Xu, Yunjie; Huang, Yun; Contractor, Noshir

2015-01-01

Using large-scale interaction data from a virtual world, we show that people’s propensity to socialize (forming new social connections) varies by hour of the day. We arrive at our results by longitudinally tracking people’s friend-adding activities in a virtual world. Specifically, we find that people are most likely to socialize during the evening, at approximately 8 p.m. and 12 a.m., and are least likely to do so in the morning, at approximately 8 a.m. Such patterns prevail on weekdays and weekends and are robust to variations in individual characteristics and geographical conditions. PMID:26353080

Circadian Rhythms in Socializing Propensity.

Science.gov (United States)

Zhang, Cheng; Phang, Chee Wei; Zeng, Xiaohua; Wang, Ximeng; Xu, Yunjie; Huang, Yun; Contractor, Noshir

2015-01-01

Using large-scale interaction data from a virtual world, we show that people's propensity to socialize (forming new social connections) varies by hour of the day. We arrive at our results by longitudinally tracking people's friend-adding activities in a virtual world. Specifically, we find that people are most likely to socialize during the evening, at approximately 8 p.m. and 12 a.m., and are least likely to do so in the morning, at approximately 8 a.m. Such patterns prevail on weekdays and weekends and are robust to variations in individual characteristics and geographical conditions.

Individual Savings Accounts and the Life-Cycle Approach to Social Insurance

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Sørensen, Peter Birch; Hansen, Martin Ino; Bovenberg, A. Lans

Using Danish data, we find that about three fourths of the taxes levied to finance public transfers actually finance benefits that do not redistribute between people but redistribute income over the life cycle of individual taxpayers. This provides a rationale for financing part of social insurance...... via mandatory individual savings accounts. An account system that offers liquidity insurance and a lifetime income guarantee helps to alleviate the dilemma between insurance and incentives. To illustrate this, we analyse a specific proposal for reform of the Danish system of social insurance......, involving the use of individual accounts. We estimate how the reform would affect the distribution of lifetime incomes, the public budget, and economic efficiency...

Socially anxious individuals with low working memory capacity could not inhibit the goal-irrelevant information.

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Moriya, Jun; Sugiura, Yoshinori

2013-01-01

Socially anxious individuals are interfered by distractors. Recent work has suggested that low working memory capacity and inappropriate temporary goal induce attention to distractors. We investigated the effects of working memory capacity and temporary goal on attention to distractors in social anxiety. Participants viewed a rapid serial visual presentation, in which participants reported the identity of a single target letter drawn in red. Distractors appeared before the target was presented. When the color of distractors was red (i.e., goal-relevant stimuli), low-capacity individuals were strongly interfered by the distractors compared to high-capacity individuals regardless of social anxiety. When the color of distractors was goal-irrelevant, low-capacity and high socially anxious individuals were strongly interfered by the distractors. These results suggest that socially anxious individuals with low working memory capacity could not inhibit the goal-irrelevant information and direct attention to distractors.

Socially Anxious Individuals with Low Working Memory Capacity Could Not Inhibit the Goal-Irrelevant Information

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Jun eMoriya

2013-12-01

Full Text Available Socially anxious individuals are interfered by distractors. Recent work has suggested that low working memory capacity and inappropriate temporary goal induce attentional capture to distractors. We investigated the effects of working memory capacity and temporary goal on attentional capture to distractors in social anxiety. Participants viewed a rapid serial visual presentation, in which participants reported the identity of a single target letter drawn in red. Distractors appeared before the target was presented. When the color of distractors was red (i.e., goal-relevant stimuli, low-capacity individuals were strongly interfered by the distractors compared to high-capacity individuals regardless of social anxiety. When the color of distractors was goal-irrelevant, low-capacity and high socially anxious individuals were strongly interfered by the distractors. These results suggest that socially anxious individuals with low working memory capacity could not inhibit the goal-irrelevant information and direct attention to distractors.

Does social status within a dominance hierarchy mediate individual growth, residency and relocation?

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Akbaripasand, Abbas; Ramezani, J; Krkosek, Martin; Lokman, P Mark; Closs, Gerard P

2014-11-01

The availability of food, and hence energy, is known to influence the abundance, habitat choice and growth of individuals. In contrast, there is a paucity of knowledge on how the interaction of energy supply and social status determines patterns of residency and movement. This study tests whether the presence of conspecifics and an individual's social status in relation to food supply influence the fitness and movement of a drift-feeding fish (Galaxias fasciatus). Using an information-theoretic approach (AIC), our analysis indicated that the most parsimonious model of fish movement among pools was one that included food supply, social rank and fish relative growth rate. Our results indicated that subordinate fish relocated more frequently compared to dominant fish, most likely as a consequence of intra-specific competition that limited the access of these smaller fish to resources and constrained their growth. Our results suggest that energy constraints may force individuals to explore new habitats in an effort to find more energetically profitable patches. We conclude that intra-specific competition mediated through the social hierarchy amongst closely interacting individuals plays a key role in determining individual growth, residency and relocation.

Understanding Gender Differences in Rape Victim Blaming: The Power of Social Influence and Just World Beliefs.

Science.gov (United States)

Pinciotti, Caitlin M; Orcutt, Holly K

2017-08-01

Victims of sexual violence are frequently blamed by friends, family, or legal personnel in the aftermath of an attack, with men attributing greater blame on average than women. Victims' experiences of being blamed may generate a vicious cycle in which they are more likely to be blamed in the future. Moreover, just world beliefs (JWB) have been studied extensively as an underlying cognitive mechanism that predicts greater blame. Studies examining the influence of social support on blame have yet to examine the unique role of JWB on these attributions. The current study examined blame attribution of a fictional rape victim who received either positive, negative, or neutral support from friends and family in a sample of 383 undergraduate men and women. Individually, social support and JWB were both significant predictors of blame, and women were more influenced by social support than men; specifically, gender was a more salient predictor of blame toward the positively supported victim, suggesting that positive support received by friends and family may evoke a domino effect of support from other women. Conditional effects revealed that JWB were most influential on blame when responding to the positively supported victim. Implications and suggestions for future research are discussed.

The effect of relationship quality on individual perceptions of social responsibility in the US

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Joseph C. Thornton

2015-06-01

Full Text Available Social responsibility (SR has been of continuing interest in the United States and around the world. Organizations make a wide variety of SR decisions that represent differing viewpoints. While a number of definitions of SR exist, many of these definitions indicate that SR decisions may be viewed as existing of various facets, such as legal/regulatory, financial/economic, ethical, environmental, and voluntary. While drivers of SR have been proposed, there has been limited research at a micro-level on how individuals perceive SR activities by the organizations where they work. Based on a prior qualitative study (Thornton and Byrd, 2013 that found SR decisions are related to several traits and influenced by relationships, a model was proposed and tested in this research. The traits found relevant in the qualitative research were conscientiousness, especially in the sense of being responsible, and self-efficacy. Relationship quality was assessed based on positive and negative emotional attractors (PNEA as proposed in Intentional Change Theory (ICT. Perceptions of individuals in management and non-management showed that relationship quality mediated the effect of conscientiousness and general self-efficacy on the SR. Because there are multiple facets, the author made use of Carroll’s (1991 pyramid of social responsibility to identify activities that business owners and managers consider relevant. The findings indicate that conscientiousness is related to specific SR activities in the areas of legal/regulatory, ethical and discretionary dimensions while general self-efficacy is related to financial/economic and legal/regulatory dimensions. The presence of relationship quality enhanced the effects of both conscientiousness and general self-efficacy on the various SR dimensions. This suggests that individuals perceived SR activities along different traits and that enhancing these traits might improve perceptions of SR decisions.

Individual Day-to-Day Process of Social Anxiety in Vulnerable College Students

Science.gov (United States)

Campbell, Cynthia G.; Bierman, Karen L.; Molenaar, Peter C. M.

2016-01-01

Transitions requiring the creation of new social networks may be challenging for individuals vulnerable to social anxiety, which may hinder successful adjustment. Using person-specific methodology, this study examined social anxiety in vulnerable university freshman away from home during their first semester of college to understand how day-to-day…

The gravitational law of social interaction

Science.gov (United States)

Levy, Moshe; Goldenberg, Jacob

2014-01-01

While a great deal is known about the topology of social networks, there is much less agreement about the geographical structure of these networks. The fundamental question in this context is: how does the probability of a social link between two individuals depend on the physical distance between them? While it is clear that the probability decreases with the distance, various studies have found different functional forms for this dependence. The exact form of the distance dependence has crucial implications for network searchability and dynamics: Kleinberg (2000) [15] shows that the small-world property holds if the probability of a social link is a power-law function of the distance with power -2, but not with any other power. We investigate the distance dependence of link probability empirically by analyzing four very different sets of data: Facebook links, data from the electronic version of the Small-World experiment, email messages, and data from detailed personal interviews. All four datasets reveal the same empirical regularity: the probability of a social link is proportional to the inverse of the square of the distance between the two individuals, analogously to the distance dependence of the gravitational force. Thus, it seems that social networks spontaneously converge to the exact unique distance dependence that ensures the Small-World property.

Small Worlds Week: An online celebration of planetary science using social media to reach millions

Science.gov (United States)

Mayo, Louis

2015-11-01

In celebration of the many recent discoveries from New Horizons, Dawn, Rosetta, and Cassini, NASA launched Small Worlds Week, an online, social media driven outreach program leveraging the infrastructure of Sun-Earth Days that included a robust web design, exemplary education materials, hands-on fun activities, multimedia resources, science and career highlights, and a culminating social media event. Each day from July 6-9, a new class of solar system small worlds was featured on the website: Monday-comets, Tuesday-asteroids, Wednesday-icy moons, and Thursday-dwarf planets. Then on Friday, July 10, nine scientists from Goddard Space Flight Center, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Naval Research Laboratory, and Lunar and Planetary Institute gathered online for four hours to answer questions from the public via Facebook and Twitter. Throughout the afternoon the scientists worked closely with a social media expert and several summer interns to reply to inquirers and to archive their chats. By all accounts, Small Worlds Week was a huge success with 37 million potential views of the social media Q&A posts. The group plans to improve and replicate the program during the school year with a more classroom focus, and then to build and extend the program to be held every year. For more information, visit http:// sunearthday.nasa.gov or catch us on Twitter, #nasasww.

Social Learning in the Real-World: 'Over-Imitation' Occurs in Both Children and Adults Unaware of Participation in an Experiment and Independently of Social Interaction.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Andrew Whiten

Full Text Available The current study avoided the typical laboratory context to determine instead whether over-imitation-the disposition to copy even visibly, causally unnecessary actions-occurs in a real-world context in which participants are unaware of being in an experiment. We disguised a puzzle-box task as an interactive item available to the public within a science engagement zone of Edinburgh Zoo. As a member of the public approached, a confederate acting as a zoo visitor retrieved a reward from the box using a sequence of actions containing both causally relevant and irrelevant elements. Despite the absence of intentional demonstration, or social pressure to copy, a majority of both child and even adult observers included all causally irrelevant actions in their reproduction. This occurred even though causal irrelevance appeared manifest because of the transparency of the puzzle-box. That over-imitation occurred so readily in a naturalistic context, devoid of social interaction and pressure, suggests that humans are opportunistic social learners throughout the lifespan, copying the actions of other individuals even when these actions are not intentionally demonstrated, and their causal significance is not readily apparent. The disposition to copy comprehensively, even when a mere onlooker, likely provides humans, irrespective of their age, with a powerful mechanism to extract maximal information from the social environment.

Pedagogical conditions of maintenance of integrity of process of socialization-individualization of children-orphans

OpenAIRE

Pronina A. N.

2011-01-01

Formation of the high-grade person of children of preschool age, without parental support should be carried out in complete process of socialization-individualization that assumes working out of the pedagogical conditions directed on maintenance of interrelation of processes of socialization and an individualization.

Pattern of social cognition deficits in individuals with borderline personality disorder.

Science.gov (United States)

Anupama V; Bhola, Poornima; Thirthalli, Jagadisha; Mehta, Urvakhsh Meherwan

2018-03-01

Social cognition deficits have been implicated in the affect regulation and interpersonal difficulties seen in borderline personality disorder (BPD). The study examined patterns of social cognition abilities, using self-report and task-based measures, among individuals diagnosed with BPD. The sample included a clinical group of 20 patients diagnosed with BPD and 20 age and gender-matched control group participants from the community with no psychiatric diagnosis. The measures included the Mentalization Questionnaire, the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test and the Social Cognition Rating Tool in Indian Setting. Results indicated that the clinical group had lower self-reported mentalizing ability. Facial emotion recognition ability was significantly lower for the clinical group, particularly for photographs of the eye region with positive and neutral valences. The clinical group had significantly higher personalizing bias, and greater difficulties in social perception. The two groups did not differ on first and second order theory of mind, recognition of faux pas and externalizing bias. The results point to the links between social cognition deficits and interpersonal difficulties among persons with BPD. Implications include the need for pre-therapy assessment of the magnitude and patterns of social cognition difficulties in BPD, the development of culturally and ecologically valid assessments and the evaluation of interventions for social cognition vulnerabilities among individuals with BPD. Copyright © 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Women's Race-and Sex-Based Social Attitudes: An Individual Differences Perspective

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Peter K. Jonason

2017-05-01

Full Text Available How do individual differences in personality and sexuality relate to social attitudes? We contend that personality traits and sexual orientation are descriptions of underlying biases (e.g., perceptual that exert top-down influences into all of life's domains including social attitudes. The present study (N=200 women examined individual differences in sex-based and race-based social attitudes as a function of the Big Five traits, the Dark Triad traits, and sexual orientation. We found that affiliative-based motivations in the form of agreeableness, openness, and narcissism predicted the desire and tendency to affiliate with other women. We also found fear-based (i.e., neuroticism and entitlement-based (i.e., narcissism traits were associated with efforts towards political action for gender equality. We found a "go-along" disposition (i.e., agreeableness and openness was associated with greater endorsement of traditional gender roles. We replicated associations between the Big Five traits (i.e., openness and agreeableness and race-based social attitudes. Uniquely, Machiavellianism was associated with more race-based social attitudes but with diminished endorsement of traditional gender roles. And last, we suggest that experienced discrimination among bisexual women may lead them to be less likely to hold both undesirable race-based and sex-based social attitudes.

Building Real World Domain-Specific Social Network Websites as a Capstone Project

Science.gov (United States)

Yue, Kwok-Bun; De Silva, Dilhar; Kim, Dan; Aktepe, Mirac; Nagle, Stewart; Boerger, Chris; Jain, Anubha; Verma, Sunny

2009-01-01

This paper describes our experience of using Content Management Software (CMS), specifically Joomla, to build a real world domain-specific social network site (SNS) as a capstone project for graduate information systems and computer science students. As Web 2.0 technologies become increasingly important in driving business application development,…

Humiliation in the virtual world: Definitions and conceptualization

OpenAIRE

Dilmaç, Julie Alev

2014-01-01

The cyberspace represents a platform for social relations which permit to be in touch with the World, to be “seen” by others and to “see” others. As new technologies emerge, ways of viewing are revised, especially through screens: though it has facilitated communication, the main innovation of the virtual world has been seeing, hearing and showing everything with the individual at the center of permanent interactions. But this overexposure can be dangerous: in attempting to be as much a part ...

Technologically Reflective Individuals as Enablers of Social Innovation*

Science.gov (United States)

Rau, Christiane; Gassmann, Oliver; van den Hende, Ellis

2015-01-01

This paper identifies technologically reflective individuals and demonstrates their ability to develop innovations that benefit society. Technological reflectiveness (TR) is the tendency to think about the societal impact of an innovation, and those who display this capability in public are individuals who participate in online idea competitions focused on technical solutions for social problems (such as General Electric's eco‐challenge, the James Dyson Award, and the BOSCH Technology Horizon Award). However, technologically reflective individuals also reflect in private settings (e.g., when reading news updates), thus requiring a scale to identify them. This paper describes the systematic development of an easy‐to‐administer multi‐item scale to measure an individual's level of TR. Applying the TR scale in an empirical study on a health monitoring system confirmed that individuals' degree of TR relates positively to their ability to generate (1) more new product features and uses, (2) features with higher levels of societal impact, and (3) features that are more elaborated. This scale allows firms seeking to implement co‐creation in their new product development (NPD) process and sustainable solutions to identify such individuals. Thus, this paper indicates that companies wishing to introduce new technological products with a positive societal impact may profit from involving technologically reflective individuals in the NPD process. PMID:27134342

Technologically Reflective Individuals as Enablers of Social Innovation.

Science.gov (United States)

Schweitzer, Fiona; Rau, Christiane; Gassmann, Oliver; van den Hende, Ellis

2015-11-01

This paper identifies technologically reflective individuals and demonstrates their ability to develop innovations that benefit society. Technological reflectiveness (TR) is the tendency to think about the societal impact of an innovation, and those who display this capability in public are individuals who participate in online idea competitions focused on technical solutions for social problems (such as General Electric's eco-challenge, the James Dyson Award, and the BOSCH Technology Horizon Award). However, technologically reflective individuals also reflect in private settings (e.g., when reading news updates), thus requiring a scale to identify them. This paper describes the systematic development of an easy-to-administer multi-item scale to measure an individual's level of TR. Applying the TR scale in an empirical study on a health monitoring system confirmed that individuals' degree of TR relates positively to their ability to generate (1) more new product features and uses, (2) features with higher levels of societal impact, and (3) features that are more elaborated. This scale allows firms seeking to implement co-creation in their new product development (NPD) process and sustainable solutions to identify such individuals. Thus, this paper indicates that companies wishing to introduce new technological products with a positive societal impact may profit from involving technologically reflective individuals in the NPD process.

Individual differences on social comparison : properties of the orientation Spanish scale towards social comparison

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Buunk, AP; Belmonte, J; Peiro, JM; Zurriaga, R; Gibbons, FX

2005-01-01

This paper describes the development and the properties of the INCOM-E, the Spanish language version of the INCOM, a measure to assess individual differences in social comparison orientation that was originally developed simultaneously in English and in Dutch. In both Study 1 (including 212

Variations between world regions in individual health: a multilevel analysis of the role of socio-economic factors

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Witvliet, Margot I.; Kunst, Anton E.; Stronks, Karien; Arah, Onyebuchi A.

2012-01-01

Background: Living in a particular region might affect health. We aimed to assess variations between regions in individual health. The role of socio-economic factors in the associations was also investigated. Methods: World Health Survey data were analysed on 220 487 individuals. Main outcomes

Diffusion with social reinforcement: The role of individual preferences

Science.gov (United States)

Tur, Elena M.; Zeppini, Paolo; Frenken, Koen

2018-02-01

The debate on diffusion in social networks has traditionally focused on the structure of the network to understand the efficiency of a network in terms of diffusion. Recently, the role of social reinforcement has been added to the debate, as it has been proposed that simple contagions diffuse better in random networks and complex contagions diffuse better in regular networks. In this paper, we show that individual preferences cannot be overlooked: complex contagions diffuse better in regular networks only if the large majority of the population is biased against adoption.

Fighting for Social Democracy: R.H. Tawney and Educational Reconstruction in the Second World War

Science.gov (United States)

Ku, Hsiao-Yuh

2016-01-01

R.H. Tawney (1880-1962), a leading English economic historian and prominent socialist, was vigorously involved in educational reconstruction during the Second World War. For Tawney, the war was a war for social democracy. His ideals of social democracy formed a basis for his case for Public (independent) School reform and free secondary education…

Social Identity, Health and Well-Being : An Emerging Agenda for Applied Psychology

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Haslam, S.A.; Jetten, J; Postmes, T.; Haslam, C.

The social environment comprising communities, families, neighbourhoods, work teams, and various other forms of social group is not simply an external feature of the world that provides a context for individual behaviour. Instead these groups impact on the psychology of individuals through their

Individualism-Collectivism, Social Self-Control and Adolescent Substance Use and Risky Sexual Behavior.

Science.gov (United States)

Pokhrel, Pallav; Bennett, Brooke L; Regmi, Sakshi; Idrisov, Bulat; Galimov, Artur; Akhmadeeva, Leila; Sussman, Steve

2018-06-07

Individualism and collectivism are cultural syndromes that have been associated with adolescent problem behavior in studies conducted in the U.S. and Southeast Asia. However, research investigating the mechanisms of how cultural orientation impacts health risk behaviors has been limited. This study tested a new model explaining the relationship between cultural orientation (i.e., individualism, collectivism) and adolescent problem behavior (i.e., substance use and risky sex) in terms of interpersonal self-regulation (i.e., social self-control). As such, the study is rooted in theories of the role of culture in developing self-regulation. Participants were high school students (N = 716) from the Bashkirtostan Republic of the Russian Federation. Adolescents from the Russian Federation tend to show high prevalence of cigarette smoking and binge drinking. People of the Russian Federation in general are traditionally collectivist in orientation, although increased globalization and post-Soviet capitalism may indicate high individualist values in younger generation Russians. Using path analysis we found that in addition to having direct effects, higher individualism indirectly affected substance use and risky sexual behavior through social self-control and negative life events. Higher collectivism was found to have a direct protective effect on risky sexual behavior and a direct effect on social self-control. However, collectivism was not found to have indirect effects on substance use or risky sexual behavior. Higher individualism appears to function as a risk factor for adolescent problem behavior and this relationship may be mediated by lower social self-control. Culturally-tailored prevention programs utilizing the individualism-collectivism framework may benefit from addressing social self-control.

Intensified neuronal investment in the processing of chemosensory anxiety signals in non-socially anxious and socially anxious individuals.

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Bettina M Pause

Full Text Available BACKGROUND: The ability to communicate anxiety through chemosensory signals has been documented in humans by behavioral, perceptual and brain imaging studies. Here, we investigate in a time-sensitive manner how chemosensory anxiety signals, donated by humans awaiting an academic examination, are processed by the human brain, by analyzing chemosensory event-related potentials (CSERPs, 64-channel recording with current source density analysis. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: In the first study cerebral stimulus processing was recorded from 28 non-socially anxious participants and in the second study from 16 socially anxious individuals. Each individual participated in two sessions, smelling sweat samples donated from either female or male donors (88 sessions; balanced session order. Most of the participants of both studies were unable to detect the stimuli olfactorily. In non-socially anxious females, CSERPs demonstrate an increased magnitude of the P3 component in response to chemosensory anxiety signals. The source of this P3 activity was allocated to medial frontal brain areas. In socially anxious females chemosensory anxiety signals require more neuronal resources during early pre-attentive stimulus processing (N1. The neocortical sources of this activity were located within medial and lateral frontal brain areas. In general, the event-related neuronal brain activity in males was much weaker than in females. However, socially anxious males processed chemosensory anxiety signals earlier (N1 latency than the control stimuli collected during an ergometer training. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: It is concluded that the processing of chemosensory anxiety signals requires enhanced neuronal energy. Socially anxious individuals show an early processing bias towards social fear signals, resulting in a repression of late attentional stimulus processing.

The Social Construction of Teachers' Individualism: How to Transcend Traditional Boundaries of Teachers' Identity?

Science.gov (United States)

Diniz-Pereira, Emilio Julio

This paper addresses the social construction of individualism as one of the strongest marks of traditional teacher identity. It discusses, through an educational literature review, why individualism is one of the strongest marks of traditional teacher identity, how this feature has been historically and socially constructed, why it has been so…

The view from everywhere: disciplining diversity in post-World War II international social science.

Science.gov (United States)

Selcer, Perrin

2009-01-01

This paper explores the attempt of social scientists associated with Unesco to create a system of knowledge production to provide the international perspective necessary for democratic governance of a world community. Social scientists constructed a federal system of international associations that institutionalized American disciplines on an international scale. An international perspective emerged through the process of interdisciplinary international research. I call this ideal of coordinating multiple subjectivities to produce objectivity the "view from everywhere." Influenced by social psychological "action-research," collaborative research was group therapy. The attempt to operationalize internationalists' rallying slogan, "unity in diversity," illuminated tensions inherent in the mobilization of science for social and political reform.

Social motivation in individuals with isolated cleft lip and palate.

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van der Plas, Ellen; Koscik, Timothy R; Conrad, Amy L; Moser, David J; Nopoulos, Peg

2013-01-01

Social isolation is common among individuals with isolated cleft lip and palate (ICLP), but the available data on why this may be are mixed. We present a novel theory relating to reduced social motivation in ICLP, called the social abulia hypothesis. Based on this hypothesis, we predicted that reduced social motivation would lead to reduced responsiveness to negative social feedback, in terms of both explicit responses and noncontrolled, psychophysiological responses. Twenty males with ICLP and 20 normal comparison males between 13 and 25 years old participated in the study. Social motivation was examined by measuring participants' response to negative social feedback (social exclusion). Additionally, psychophysiological reactivity to positive and negative social stimuli was measured. In order to rule out other potential contributors to social isolation, we tested basic social perception, emotion recognition, and social anxiety. In line with the social abulia hypothesis, we show that negative social feedback had less of an effect on males with ICLP than on healthy male peers, which was evident in explicit responses and noncontrolled, psychophysiological responses to negative social feedback. Our results could not be attributed to problems in social perception, a lack of understanding facial expressions, or increased social anxiety, as groups did not differ on these constructs. This study suggests that current views on social isolation in ICLP may need to be reconsidered to include the possibility that isolation in this population may be the direct result of reduced social motivation.

Behavioural plasticity across social contexts is regulated by the directionality of inter-individual differences.

Science.gov (United States)

Guayasamin, Olivia L; Couzin, Iain D; Miller, Noam Y

2017-08-01

An individual's behavioural phenotype is a combination of its unique behavioural propensities and its responsiveness to environmental variation, also known as behavioural plasticity. In social species, we must not only explore how individuals respond to variations in the physical environment but also how they react to changes in their social environment. A growing body of work has demonstrated that the behavioural heterogeneity of a group can alter its responsiveness, decision making, and fitness. Whether an individual is more or less extreme than a partner - what we term its 'relative personality' - may also alter individual behavioural responses. We determined exploratory tendencies of individual zebrafish (Danio rerio) and then constructed pairs with varying differences in 'relative personality' to determine the effect of differences between partners on behavioural plasticity. We find that relative personality, but not the magnitude of the difference between partners, is the most important determinant of behavioural plasticity across social treatments. Despite this overall effect, pairs of fish exhibited no predictable leader-follower interactions, suggesting that details of the experimental paradigm may be important in shaping social dynamics. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Designing Virtual Worlds

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Gürsimsek, Remzi Ates

2014-01-01

The online social platforms known as virtual worlds present their users various affordances for avatar based co-presence, social interaction and provide tools for collaborative content creation, including objects, textures and animations. The users of these worlds navigate their avatars as personal...... the audio-visual characteristics of designing in multi-user virtual environments generate experiential, interpersonal and textual meaning potentials....... mediators in 3D virtual space to collaborate and co-design the digital content. These co-designers are also the residents of these worlds, as they socialize by building inworld friendships. This article presents a social semiotic analysis of the three-dimensional virtual places and artifacts in the virtual...

Exploratory community sensing in social networks

Science.gov (United States)

Khrabrov, Alexy; Stocco, Gabriel; Cybenko, George

2010-04-01

Social networks generally provide an implementation of some kind of groups or communities which users can voluntarily join. Twitter does not have this functionality, and there is no notion of a formal group or community. We propose a method for identification of communities and assignment of semantic meaning to the discussion topics of the resulting communities. Using this analysis method and a sample of roughly a month's worth of Tweets from Twitter's "gardenhose" feed, we demonstrate the discovery of meaningful user communities on Twitter. We examine Twitter data streaming in real time and treat it as a sensor. Twitter is a social network which pioneered microblogging with the messages fitting an SMS, and a variety of clients, browsers, smart phones and PDAs are used for status updates by individuals, businesses, media outlets and even devices all over the world. Often an aggregate trend of such statuses may represent an important development in the world, which has been demonstrated with the Iran and Moldova elections and the anniversary of the Tiananmen in China. We propose using Twitter as a sensor, tracking individuals and communities of interest, and characterizing individual roles and dynamics of their communications. We developed a novel algorithm of community identification in social networks based on direct communication, as opposed to linking. We show ways to find communities of interest and then browse their neighborhoods by either similarity or diversity of individuals and groups adjacent to the one of interest. We use frequent collocations and statistically improbable phrases to summarize the focus of the community, giving a quick overview of its main topics. Our methods provide insight into the largest social sensor network in the world and constitute a platform for social sensing.

Our World of 7 Billion: Population Studies in Today's Social Studies Classroom

Science.gov (United States)

Wasserman, Pamela

2011-01-01

The study of world population integrates so many themes and disciplines in the social studies because it encompasses all of human history--the rise of agriculture and civilizations, scientific progress, territorial conflicts, changing gender roles and more. It is also at the heart of human geography and how people came to dominate and alter the…

VIRTUAL WORLD MARKETING: THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING ON SOCIAL NETWORKS

OpenAIRE

EVERTON DAMIÃO TAVANO SANTOS; JOÃO PAULO DA SILVA GOMES; CARLOS EDUARDO CICCONE

2012-01-01

Increasingly present at peolpe´s daily life and seeking to satisfy their wishes, marketing is searching to adapt itself to consumer´s real necessities as well as to the environments currently used by them. With the growing use of technology and internet access, marketing ceases to act only on physical media such as magazines, newspapers and pamphlets to go further, searching for a new environment where customers go like social networking in virtual world where the dissemination of informa...

Relationship between Psychological Hardiness and Social Support with Adaptation: A Study on Individuals with Multiple Sclerosis

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

N hasan neghad

2013-10-01

Full Text Available Introduction: Psychological hardiness is a personal factor and social support is regarded as an environmental factor that can facilitate adjustment to disease. This study aimed to investigate the relationship between adaptation with psychological hardiness and social support in individuals with Multiple sclerosis (MS. Methods: Seventy two females with MS and 25 males with MSwere selected through randomized sampling from two MS centers. Main variables of the study including adaptation, psychological hardiness, and social supportwere assessed respectively by Adaptation Inventory, Personal Attitudes Survey, and Social Support Questionnaire. Results: Spearman correlation coefficients revealed that there are significant relationships between adaptation and psychological hardiness (p<0.0001, as well as between adaptation and social support (p<0.0001. In addition, Multiple linear Regression showed that psychological hardiness (β= -0.483 and social support (β= -0.240 can explain 35/1% of adaptation variance in individuals with MS. Psychological hardinessproved to have a more important role in adaptation of individuals with MS. Conclusion: The study data demonstrated that personal factors like psychological hardiness and environmental factors such as social support can predict adjustment in individuals with MS. In order to clarify mechanisms of these factors on adaptation in individuals with MS, morelongitudinal and experimental studiesare required. These results are alsoapplicable in designing therapeutic programs for individuals with MS.

Investigation on Requirements of Robotic Platforms to Teach Social Skills to Individuals with Autism

Science.gov (United States)

Nikolopoulos, Chris; Kuester, Deitra; Sheehan, Mark; Dhanya, Sneha

This paper reports on some of the robotic platforms used in the project AUROSO which investigates the use of robots as educationally useful interventions to improve social interactions for individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). Our approach to treatment uses an educational intervention based on Socially Assistive Robotics (SAR), the DIR/Floortime intervention model and social script/stories. Requirements are established and a variety of robotic models/platforms were investigated as to the feasibility of an economical, practical and efficient means of helping teach social skills to individuals with ASD for use by teachers, families, service providers and other community organizations.

Assessing Individual Social Capital Capacity: The Development and Validation of a Network Accessibility Scale

Science.gov (United States)

Hatala, John-Paul

2009-01-01

Any organization that is able to promote the importance of increased levels of social capital and individuals who can leverage and use the resources that exist within the network may experience higher levels of performance. This study sought to add to our knowledge about individuals' accessing social resources for the purpose of accomplishing…

THE CONCEPT OF INDIVIDUAL AND INDIVIDUALIZATION IN THE THEORY OF Z. BAUMAN AND U. BECK

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

A. A. Batsenkova

2018-01-01

Full Text Available One of the major trends of the modern world is a process of individualization. Despite the fact that the term “individualization” has existed since the XVII century, it is often confused, mixing with the concept of “individualism”, “individuation” and “individuality”. But individualization is not a political or moral worldview, it is not a process of identity formation, and it is the natural multi-level complex social process associated with defined design conditions of life of the individual and the conditions of its existence.The purpose of this paper is to, based on the works of U. Beck and Z. Bauman, to define the process of individualization, to consider the process of occurrence and development of individualization in the modern society. To reveal features of this process at the present stage of development of society, where the process of individualization acquires new features.According to sociologists, the process of individualization affects all aspects of society and has two levels of its manifestation. The first level the author calls structural or objective level, because it is independent on the actions of individuals and the inertia phenomenon associated with the spreading of social space, social differentiation, division of labor, with the processes of globalization and modernization.The second level is the sphere of individual action. At this level the meaning of individualization is the expansion of individual rights and opportunities and the liberation of the individual from traditional social forms and relationships that defined his model of behavior in the modern society. Due to the change in “life situations”, there is an increase of opportunities of the individual for independent decision-making, self-selection and successful action. The change in “life situations” (under U. Beck due to detraditionalization life spheres and emergence of new “spaces of freedom”, which create new challenges for

Social reorientation in adolescence: neurobiological changes and individual differences in empathic concern

OpenAIRE

Overgaauw, Sandy

2015-01-01

One of the most prominent changes in adolescence is social reorientation. In other words, adolescents develop more intimate relationships with peers, they discover what it is like to be involved in a romantic relationship, and they take (social) risks by for example showing risky driving in the presence of friends. Given that social networks with peers become central elements in the adolescent’s life, investigating the role of individual differences related to the development of social reorie...

O 2º Fórum Social Mundial de Porto Alegre e os desafios do movimento social global The 2nd Porto Alegre World Social Forum and the challenges of the global social movement

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

José María Gómez

2002-12-01

Full Text Available O artigo se propõe a utilizar elementos analíticos relativos ao significado, alcance e perspectivas do movimento social transnacional contra a globalização neoliberal no conturbado contexto pós-11 de setembro da política mundial. Nas condições extremamente adversas desse novo contexto, a segunda edição do Fórum Social Mundial tornou-se um acontecimento político revelador, tanto da vitalidade e do potencial transformador do "movimento dos movimentos" contra-hegemônico, ainda em processo de constituição, como de suas limitações, contradições e dilemas.The article suggests a framework of analysis to evaluate the meaning, scope and perspectives of the transnational social movement against neoliberal globalization in post-September 11 world politics. In the adverse conditions of this context, the second edition of the World Social Forum revealed the vitality and the potential of transformation of the counter-hegemonic "movement of movements". It revealed, as well, its limits, contradictions and dilemmas.

Shifting Stakes: Understanding the Dynamic Roles of Individuals and Organizations in Social Media Protests.

Science.gov (United States)

Spiro, Emma S; Monroy-Hernández, Andrés

2016-01-01

In this paper we examine two protests characterized by substantial social media presence and distributed participation frameworks via two core questions: what roles did organizations and individuals play, and how did participants' social interactions change over the course of the protests? To answer these questions, we analyzed a large Twitter activity dataset for the #YoSoy132 student uprising in Mexico and Brazil's "bus rebellion." Results indicate that individuals initially took prominence at the protests but faded in importance as the movements dwindled and organizations took over. Regarding the dynamics and structure of the interactions, we found that key time points with unique social structures often map to exogenous events such as coordinated protests in physical locations. Our results have important consequences for the visibility of such social movements and their ability to attract continued participation by individuals and organizations.

Local communities obstruct global consensus: Naming game on multi-local-world networks

Science.gov (United States)

Lou, Yang; Chen, Guanrong; Fan, Zhengping; Xiang, Luna

2018-02-01

Community structure is essential for social communications, where individuals belonging to the same community are much more actively interacting and communicating with each other than those in different communities within the human society. Naming game, on the other hand, is a social communication model that simulates the process of learning a name of an object within a community of humans, where the individuals can generally reach global consensus asymptotically through iterative pair-wise conversations. The underlying network indicates the relationships among the individuals. In this paper, three typical topologies, namely random-graph, small-world and scale-free networks, are employed, which are embedded with the multi-local-world community structure, to study the naming game. Simulations show that (1) the convergence process to global consensus is getting slower as the community structure becomes more prominent, and eventually might fail; (2) if the inter-community connections are sufficiently dense, neither the number nor the size of the communities affects the convergence process; and (3) for different topologies with the same (or similar) average node-degree, local clustering of individuals obstruct or prohibit global consensus to take place. The results reveal the role of local communities in a global naming game in social network studies.

Impairment of Social Function in Young Females With Recent-Onset Anorexia Nervosa and Recovered Individuals

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Bentz, Mette; Jepsen, Jens Richardt Moellegaard; Pedersen, Tine

2017-01-01

PURPOSE: A subgroup of individuals with anorexia nervosa (AN) displays social difficulties; however, it is not clear if individuals with comorbid autism spectrum disorders account for these difficulties. METHODS: We compared social function using the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule in 43...

Feasibility Study of a Socially Assistive Humanoid Robot for Guiding Elderly Individuals during Walking

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Chiara Piezzo

2017-07-01

Full Text Available The impact of the world-wide ageing population has commenced with respect to society in developed countries. Several researchers focused on exploring new methods to improve the quality of life of elderly individuals by allowing them to remain independent and healthy to the maximum possible extent. For example, new walking aids are designed to allow elderly individuals to remain mobile in a safe manner because the importance of walking is well-known. The aim of the present study involves designing a humanoid robot guide as a walking trainer for elderly individuals. It is hypothesized that the same service robot provides an assistive and social contribution with respect to interaction between elderly users by motivating them to walk more and simultaneously provides assistance, such as physical assistance and gait monitoring, while walking. This study includes a detailed statement of the research problem as well as a literature review of existing studies related to walking companion robots. A user-centred design approach is adopted to report the results of the current first feasibility study by using a commercially available humanoid robot known as Pepper developed by Softbank-Aldebaran. A quantitative questionnaire was used to investigate all elements that assess intrinsic motivation in users while performing a given activity. Conversely, basic gait data were acquired through a video analysis to test the capability of the robot to modify the gait of human users. The results in terms of the feedback received from elderly subjects and the literature review improve the design of the walking trainer for elderly individuals.

Hello, world: Harnessing social media for the Rosetta mission

Science.gov (United States)

Baldwin, Emily; Mignone, Claudia; O'Flaherty, Karen; Homfeld, Anne-Mareike; Bauer, Markus; McCaughrean, Mark

2015-04-01

The European Space Agency's (ESA) comet-chasing Rosetta mission was launched in 2004, before social media became a popular tool for mainstream communication. By harnessing a range of platforms for communicating the key messages of this unprecedented mission as it reached its destination ten years later, new audiences were reached and a global impact was achieved. Rosetta-specific social media accounts - @ESA_Rosetta on Twitter, the Rosetta Mission Facebook page and the rosettamission Instagram account - were developed during 2013/14 and used alongside the traditional reporting line of the main ESA website and the Rosetta blog to build awareness about the mission. Coordinated with ESA's existing social media channels (Flickr, YouTube, G+, Twitter, Facebook and Livestream) and with the support of ESA's country desks and Rosetta partner agency accounts (including @philae2014), information could be shared in a number of European languages, ensuring a wide reach across Europe - and the world. We discuss the roles of the various social media accounts in supporting and promoting the competitions and social media campaigns that were built around the key mission milestones of 2014: waking up from deep space hibernation (January), arriving at Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko (August) and naming the landing site for Philae ahead of the landing event in November. We discuss the different approach to each channel, such as the first person twitter accounts, the dialogue with and between blog users, and the discussions held live via G+ Hangouts with leading scientists and spacecraft operators. We compare and contrast the audiences, the interaction we had with them and how challenges were overcome. We also use the science-fiction-meets-science-fact Ambition short movie, and its "undercover" dissemination on social media, as an example of how the profile of the Rosetta mission was raised in a unique way. By using a variety of social media platforms to target different audiences with

Predicting Individual Characteristics from Digital Traces on Social Media: A Meta-Analysis.

Science.gov (United States)

Settanni, Michele; Azucar, Danny; Marengo, Davide

2018-04-01

The increasing utilization of social media provides a vast and new source of user-generated ecological data (digital traces), which can be automatically collected for research purposes. The availability of these data sets, combined with the convergence between social and computer sciences, has led researchers to develop automated methods to extract digital traces from social media and use them to predict individual psychological characteristics and behaviors. In this article, we reviewed the literature on this topic and conducted a series of meta-analyses to determine the strength of associations between digital traces and specific individual characteristics; personality, psychological well-being, and intelligence. Potential moderator effects were analyzed with respect to type of social media platform, type of digital traces examined, and study quality. Our findings indicate that digital traces from social media can be studied to assess and predict theoretically distant psychosocial characteristics with remarkable accuracy. Analysis of moderators indicated that the collection of specific types of information (i.e., user demographics), and the inclusion of different types of digital traces, could help improve the accuracy of predictions.

The interactive effects of negative symptoms and social role functioning on suicide ideation in individuals with schizophrenia.

Science.gov (United States)

Jahn, Danielle R; Bennett, Melanie E; Park, Stephanie G; Gur, Raquel E; Horan, William P; Kring, Ann M; Blanchard, Jack J

2016-02-01

Findings regarding the protective effect of social role functioning on suicide ideation in individuals with schizophrenia have been mixed. One reason for such inconsistencies in the literature may be that individuals with prominent negative symptoms of schizophrenia may not experience a desire for social closeness, and therefore social role functioning may not influence suicide risk in these individuals. The aim of this study was to examine the moderating effects of self-reported desire for social closeness and interviewer-rated negative symptoms on the relationship between social role functioning and suicide ideation. Our sample consisted of 162 individuals who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia-spectrum disorders; all participants completed self-report questionnaires and clinician-administered interviews, and moderation hypotheses were tested with a non-parametric procedure. The results indicated that motivation and pleasure-related negative symptoms moderated the relationship between social role functioning and suicide ideation; self-reported desire for social closeness and negative symptoms related to expression did not have such a moderating effect. Specifically, better social role functioning was associated with less suicide ideation only in those individuals who had low motivation and pleasure-related negative symptoms; no significant relationship was observed between social role functioning and suicide ideation among those with elevated motivation and pleasure-related negative symptoms. These findings suggest that assessing for negative symptoms and social role functioning may inform suicide risk assessments in individuals with schizophrenia, and improving social role functioning may reduce suicide ideation among those with few motivation and pleasure-related negative symptoms. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Validating agent based models through virtual worlds.

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Lakkaraju, Kiran; Whetzel, Jonathan H.; Lee, Jina; Bier, Asmeret Brooke; Cardona-Rivera, Rogelio E.; Bernstein, Jeremy Ray Rhythm

2014-01-01

As the US continues its vigilance against distributed, embedded threats, understanding the political and social structure of these groups becomes paramount for predicting and dis- rupting their attacks. Agent-based models (ABMs) serve as a powerful tool to study these groups. While the popularity of social network tools (e.g., Facebook, Twitter) has provided extensive communication data, there is a lack of ne-grained behavioral data with which to inform and validate existing ABMs. Virtual worlds, in particular massively multiplayer online games (MMOG), where large numbers of people interact within a complex environ- ment for long periods of time provide an alternative source of data. These environments provide a rich social environment where players engage in a variety of activities observed between real-world groups: collaborating and/or competing with other groups, conducting battles for scarce resources, and trading in a market economy. Strategies employed by player groups surprisingly re ect those seen in present-day con icts, where players use diplomacy or espionage as their means for accomplishing their goals. In this project, we propose to address the need for ne-grained behavioral data by acquiring and analyzing game data a commercial MMOG, referred to within this report as Game X. The goals of this research were: (1) devising toolsets for analyzing virtual world data to better inform the rules that govern a social ABM and (2) exploring how virtual worlds could serve as a source of data to validate ABMs established for analogous real-world phenomena. During this research, we studied certain patterns of group behavior to compliment social modeling e orts where a signi cant lack of detailed examples of observed phenomena exists. This report outlines our work examining group behaviors that underly what we have termed the Expression-To-Action (E2A) problem: determining the changes in social contact that lead individuals/groups to engage in a particular behavior

A Study on the Social Belonging of People to Iranian Society and its Relationship with Social Trust and Individualism

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Pari Naz Bidel

2012-09-01

Full Text Available The aim of The present study investigated the extent of social belonging of people of Mashhad to Iran society and the relationship with social trust and individualism has been. Research has been Survey and data was collected through questionnaires. The Statistical Society' who was twenty years in Mashhad with a population 1530827 equals the number 384 as the sample size by using multi-stage cluster sampling is the selection and Specified. The results show the average amount of social belonging, respondents scored2/7, and to a maximum of5 points, the value of 2/3 is the score. The social belonging of the people of Mashhad to Iran is in the middle. Social belonging with increasing age and also social belonging in the Persians than other ethnic groups as well as practitioners than other people and in The middle class than other classes more have been. Overall, the independent variables were entered into multiple regression coefficients with 40% of the changes made to explain the dependent variable (R2=0/40 the variable «social trust» by a factor of 0/61 had the greatest impact on social belonging and then « extreme individualism «-0/1 8 determining factor influencing the next time it is used, thus increasing social distrust of the people most affected has had on their social belonging.

"My World Has Expanded Even Though I'm Stuck at Home": Experiences of Individuals With Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis Who Use Augmentative and Alternative Communication and Social Media.

Science.gov (United States)

Caron, Jessica; Light, Janice

2015-11-01

This study aimed to expand the current understanding of how persons with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (pALS) use augmentative and alternative communication and social media to address their communication needs. An online focus group was used to investigate the experiences of 9 pALS who use augmentative and alternative communication and social media. Questions posed to the group related to (a) current use of social media, (b) advantages of social media, (c) barriers to independent use, (d) supports to independent use, and (e) recommendations for developers, policy makers, and other pALS. Participants primarily reported that use of social media was a beneficial tool that provided increased communication opportunities, connections to communication partners, and networks of support. Specific results are discussed with reference to the research as well as implications for practice and recommendations for future research. As individuals with ALS experience loss of function, some communication modes may no longer be viable. Providing access to different modes of communication, including social media, can allow independence, participation and better quality of life.

Individual Differences and Social Influences on the Neurobehavioral Pharmacology of Abused Drugs

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Neisewander, J. L.; Kelly, T. H.

2013-01-01

The interaction of drugs with biologic targets is a critical area of research, particularly for the development of medications to treat substance use disorders. In addition to understanding these drug-target interactions, however, there is a need to understand more fully the psychosocial influences that moderate these interactions. The first section of this review introduces some examples from human behavioral pharmacology that illustrate the clinical importance of this research. The second section covers preclinical evidence to characterize some of the key individual differences that alter drug sensitivity and abuse vulnerability, related primarily to differences in response to novelty and impulsivity. Evidence is presented to indicate that critical neuropharmacological mechanisms associated with these individual differences involve integrated neurocircuits underlying stress, reward, and behavioral inhibitory processes. The third section covers social influences on drug abuse vulnerability, including effects experienced during infancy, adolescence, and young adulthood, such as maternal separation, housing conditions, and social interactions (defeat, play, and social rank). Some of the same neurocircuits involved in individual differences also are altered by social influences, although the precise neurochemical and cellular mechanisms involved remain to be elucidated fully. Finally, some speculation is offered about the implications of this research for the prevention and treatment of substance abuse. PMID:23343975

Relational Interdependence between Social and Individual Agency in Work and Working Life

Science.gov (United States)

Billett, Stephen

2006-01-01

A greater acknowledgment of relational interdependence between individual and social agencies is warranted within conceptions of learning throughout working life. Currently, some accounts of learning tend to overly privilege social agency in the form of situational contributions. This de-emphasises the contributions of the more widely socially…

Evolution of learning in fluctuating environments: when selection favors both social and exploratory individual learning.

Science.gov (United States)

Borenstein, Elhanan; Feldman, Marcus W; Aoki, Kenichi

2008-03-01

Cumulative cultural change requires organisms that are capable of both exploratory individual learning and faithful social learning. In our model, an organism's phenotype is initially determined innately (by its genotypic value) or by social learning (copying a phenotype from the parental generation), and then may or may not be modified by individual learning (exploration around the initial phenotype). The environment alternates periodically between two states, each defined as a certain range of phenotypes that can survive. These states may overlap, in which case the same phenotype can survive in both states, or they may not. We find that a joint social and exploratory individual learning strategy-the strategy that supports cumulative culture-is likely to spread when the environmental states do not overlap. In particular, when the environmental states are contiguous and mutation is allowed among the genotypic values, this strategy will spread in either moderately or highly stable environments, depending on the exact nature of the individual learning applied. On the other hand, natural selection often favors a social learning strategy without exploration when the environmental states overlap. We find only partial support for the "consensus" view, which holds that individual learning, social learning, and innate determination of behavior will evolve at short, intermediate, and long environmental periodicities, respectively.

Social learning and the development of individual and group behaviour in mammal societies.

Science.gov (United States)

Thornton, Alex; Clutton-Brock, Tim

2011-04-12

As in human societies, social learning may play an important role in shaping individual and group characteristics in other mammals. Here, we review research on non-primate mammals, concentrating on work at our long-term meerkat study site, where longitudinal data and field experiments have generated important insights into the role of social learning under natural conditions. Meerkats live under high predation pressure and occupy a difficult foraging niche. Accordingly, pups make extensive use of social information in learning to avoid predation and obtain food. Where individual learning is costly or opportunities are lacking, as in the acquisition of prey-handling skills, adults play an active role in promoting learning through teaching. Social learning can also cause information to spread through groups, but our data suggest that this does not necessarily result in homogeneous, group-wide traditions. Moreover, traditions are commonly eroded by individual learning. We suggest that traditions will only persist where there are high costs of deviating from the group norm or where skill development requires extensive time and effort. Persistent traditions could, theoretically, modify selection pressures and influence genetic evolution. Further empirical studies of social learning in natural populations are now urgently needed to substantiate theoretical claims.

Training for Social Development Staff at the World Bank, Volume 2. Annexes

OpenAIRE

Gross, Daniel R.; LeDuc, Matthew

2010-01-01

The social development family is facing a major challenge given the significant increase in lending made by the Bank in the last five years. Lending overall has more than doubled between FY05 and FY09; investment lending has increased by 82 percent and infrastructure lending by 125 percent. In this report, International Evaluation Group (IEG) suggests that the World Bank's safeguard policies ...

Social cognition and individual effectiveness in interpersonal scenarios: A conceptual review

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Nilamadhab Kar

2017-01-01

Full Text Available Social cognition, the ability to act wisely in social interaction, is being actively researched in various fields besides the clinical, behavioral, and psychological sciences. The objectives of this paper are to review the conceptual basis of social cognition and its applicability in the areas of social competence and effectiveness in interpersonal environments. Social cognitive skills enable understanding of social situations. The relationship between social cognitive skills and ability of emotional decoding of self and others has been explored. The paper discusses various processes that are operative in the interactional scenarios and have relevance in individual effectiveness. Concepts such as emotional intelligence, trait transference, person-perception, categorical thinking, and knowledge construction have been discussed in relation to social cognition and effectiveness. The role of thoughts, feelings, expectations, and relational schemas in interpersonal situations has been linked to performances. In addition, effectiveness is influenced by motivated social cognitions, ego-tasks, global, and context-specific goals. Various strategies such as cognitive and social problem-solving and proactive-coping have been elaborated which lead to better outcomes in interpersonal environments.

Attention Training in Individuals with Generalized Social Phobia: A Randomized Controlled Trial

Science.gov (United States)

Amir, Nader; Beard, Courtney; Taylor, Charles T.; Klumpp, Heide; Elias, Jason; Burns, Michelle; Chen, Xi

2009-01-01

The authors conducted a randomized, double-blind placebo-controlled trial to examine the efficacy of an attention training procedure in reducing symptoms of social anxiety in 44 individuals diagnosed with generalized social phobia (GSP). Attention training comprised a probe detection task in which pictures of faces with either a threatening or…

Education Technologies in Addressing the Problem of Forming the Socially Active Individual

Science.gov (United States)

Popova, Irina N.

2016-01-01

The article is devoted to the analysis of technological support of the educational process in solving the problem of forming the socially active individual. The authors studied the value of the category "social activity" and analyzed educational technologies that have an impact on its formation. The obtained results gave the possibility…

Neuropeptide diversity and the regulation of social behavior in New World primates

Science.gov (United States)

French, Jeffrey A.; Taylor, Jack H.; Mustoe, Aaryn C.; Cavanaugh, Jon

2016-01-01

Oxytocin (OT) and vasopressin (AVP) are important hypothalamic neuropeptides that regulate peripheral physiology, and have emerged as important modulators of brain function, particularly in the social realm. OT structure and the genes that ultimately determine structure are highly conserved among diverse eutherian mammals, but recent discoveries have identified surprising variability in OT and peptide structure in New World monkeys (NWM), with five new OT variants identified to date. This review explores these new findings in light of comparative OT/AVP ligand evolution, documents coevolutionary changes in the oxytocin and vasopressin receptors (OTR and V1aR), and highlights the distribution of neuropeptidergic neurons and receptors in the primate brain. Finally, the behavioral consequences of OT and AVP in regulating NWM sociality are summarized, demonstrating important neuromodulatory effects of these compounds and OT ligand-specific influences in certain social domains. PMID:27020799

The influence of social capital on individual health: is it the neighbourhood or the network?

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Mohnen, S.M.; Völker, B.; Flap, H.; Subramanian, S.V.; Groenewegen, P.P.

2015-01-01

We examined the influence of both individual and neighbourhood social capital on individual health and analysed whether effects of one type of social capital are contingent upon the other. The Dutch 'Housing and Living Survey' (WoON 2006, n = 53,269) was used and combined with information on

The Influence of Social Capital on Individual Health : Is it the Neighbourhood or the Network?

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Mohnen, Sigrid M.; Volker, Beate; Flap, Henk; Subramanian, S. V.; Groenewegen, Peter P.

2015-01-01

We examined the influence of both individual and neighbourhood social capital on individual health and analysed whether effects of one type of social capital are contingent upon the other. The Dutch 'Housing and Living Survey' (WoON 2006, n = 53,269) was used and combined with information on

Individualism and sociocultural adaptation: Discrimination and social capital as moderators among rural-to-urban migrants in China.

Science.gov (United States)

Du, Hongfei; Li, Xiaoming; Lin, Danhua

2015-06-01

This study examined the associations of sociocultural adaptation with individualism and collectivism and the moderating roles of discrimination and social capital in the associations among rural-to-urban migrants ( N = 641) in Beijing, China. Results indicated that individualism was associated with poorer adaptation for migrants reporting low perceived discrimination or low social capital. However, migrants reporting high perceived discrimination showed poorer adaptation, regardless of individualism; and migrants reporting high social capital showed better adaptation, regardless of individualism. Collectivism was not related to adaptation. Findings suggest that individualism may be detrimental to migrants' adjustment to a collectivistic society.

Social Values Priorities and Orientation towards Individualism and Collectivism of Greek University Students

Science.gov (United States)

Papastylianou, Dona; Lampridis, Efthymios

2016-01-01

The study aimed to explore the value priorities of Greek young adults and their orientation towards individualism and collectivism and to investigate for possible relationships between value types and individualism and collectivism. Greek undergraduate students (n = 484) completed the Social Values Survey, the Auckland's Individualism and…

Marginalies concerning problem of individual in open societies

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Milić Anđelka

2004-01-01

Full Text Available The basic goal of the paper is to discuss the actual position and prospects of individuals in post-modern surroundings, from the perspective of their social integration, responsible social participation and acquiring and preserving of personal identity. Contemporary sociological theories that talk about "the end of history", "open society", globalization as world-historical process, as well as the ruling liberal-democratic ideological-political doctrine, also talk a lot about and put in their fundaments the thesis of finally liberated individual, of autonomous person of "our age", that in the conditions of free market exchange and deal freely chooses and creates his own, plural identity and defines his present and even more, his future. The fact that in post-modern époque individuals manage or try to find restrictions of wider group collectivities and their identities trough their own ways of living doesn’t mean that individuals in this époque really reached the stadium of freedom where they can freely commit to building of alternative social values and orders.

Lay theories about social class buffer lower-class individuals against poor self-rated health and negative affect.

Science.gov (United States)

Tan, Jacinth J X; Kraus, Michael W

2015-03-01

The economic conditions of one's life can profoundly and systematically influence health outcomes over the life course. Our present research demonstrates that rejecting the notion that social class categories are biologically determined-a nonessentialist belief-buffers lower-class individuals from poor self-rated health and negative affect, whereas conceiving of social class categories as rooted in biology-an essentialist belief-does not. In Study 1, lower-class individuals self-reported poorer health than upper-class individuals when they endorsed essentialist beliefs but showed no such difference when they rejected such beliefs. Exposure to essentialist theories of social class also led lower-class individuals to report greater feelings of negative self-conscious emotions (Studies 2 and 3), and perceive poorer health (Study 3) than upper-class individuals, whereas exposure to nonessentialist theories did not lead to such differences. Discussion considers how lay theories of social class potentially shape long-term trajectories of health and affect of lower-class individuals. © 2015 by the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Inc.

Social Media and Nurses: Insights for Promoting Health for Individual and Professional Use.

Science.gov (United States)

Jackson, Jennifer; Fraser, Robert; Ash, Peter

2014-09-30

Social media use can have a significant impact on the health of nurses, both at the individual level and in the workplace. There are positive and negative consequences of social media use for nurses, including potential health consequences. This article provides a brief overview of social media and then explores nursing health and social media and risks for nurses. Social media use also extends to healthcare organizations; with implications for consumers of healthcare delivery. A variety of emerging best practices can guide social media use for nurses. The authors also discuss suggestions for using social media carefully, and future directions for research.

Putting Social Media in Its Place: A Curatorial Theory for Media’s Noisy Social Worlds

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Mary L. Gray

2015-04-01

Full Text Available The quest to make sense of media’s impact—what it does to us—dominates communication theories and popular discourse about media. But the impulse to collar, cultivate, domesticate, or measure the impact of media on individuals and society can have pernicious effects, too. This essay calls for a set of new analytical models to account for media as messy instantiations of social interaction transforming before our very eyes. We need to shift from a media effects paradigm that narrowly focuses on the brightest signals of social media use and turn to what I will call here a curatorial theory of social media. This approach, inspired by research from several founding editors of Social Media + Society , focuses on media’s cultural work and myriad manifestations—from its technologies to the discourses that flow through and from them. Let us attend to the more elusive, noisy cultural and social forces that bring some aspects of media sharply into focus while obscuring others. And, above all, let us pay attention to the curatorial reworking of media that happens in particular places—nations, towns, bodies.

The Aggregation of Individual Distributive Preferences through the Distributive Liberal Social Contract : Normative Analysis.

OpenAIRE

Jean Mercier-Ythier

2010-01-01

We consider abstract social systems of private property, made of n individuals endowed with non-paternalistic interdependent preferences, who interact through exchanges on competitive markets and Pareto-efficient lumpsum transfers. The transfers follow from a distributive liberal social contract defined as a redistribution of initial endowments such that the resulting market equilibrium allocation is both Pareto-efficient relative to individual interdependent preferences, and unanimously weak...

Individual differences in the ability to recognise facial identity are associated with social anxiety.

Science.gov (United States)

Davis, Joshua M; McKone, Elinor; Dennett, Hugh; O'Connor, Kirsty B; O'Kearney, Richard; Palermo, Romina

2011-01-01

Previous research has been concerned with the relationship between social anxiety and the recognition of face expression but the question of whether there is a relationship between social anxiety and the recognition of face identity has been neglected. Here, we report the first evidence that social anxiety is associated with recognition of face identity, across the population range of individual differences in recognition abilities. Results showed poorer face identity recognition (on the Cambridge Face Memory Test) was correlated with a small but significant increase in social anxiety (Social Interaction Anxiety Scale) but not general anxiety (State-Trait Anxiety Inventory). The correlation was also independent of general visual memory (Cambridge Car Memory Test) and IQ. Theoretically, the correlation could arise because correct identification of people, typically achieved via faces, is important for successful social interactions, extending evidence that individuals with clinical-level deficits in face identity recognition (prosopagnosia) often report social stress due to their inability to recognise others. Equally, the relationship could arise if social anxiety causes reduced exposure or attention to people's faces, and thus to poor development of face recognition mechanisms.

The Activists’ Use of Social Networking Sites in the Arab World

OpenAIRE

Alatrash, Adib Barakat

2015-01-01

Social Networking Sites (SNS) became one of the most important tools to activate people in various issues including political and social causes. SNS is widely used by activist; individuals or groups, especially in the regions of conflict and chaos. Arab Spring is one of the recent and crucial examples to see how SNS is being used in activating and mobilizing societies against the autocratic state authorities. Thus, the roles that SNS can play by activists have been increasing day by day to th...

Your Health Buddies Matter: Preferential Selection and Social Influence on Weight Management in an Online Health Social Network.

Science.gov (United States)

Meng, Jingbo

2016-12-01

A growing number of online social networks are designed with the intention to promote health by providing virtual space wherein individuals can seek and share information and support with similar others. Research has shown that real-world social networks have a significant influence on one's health behavior and outcomes. However, there is a dearth of studies on how individuals form social networks in virtual space and whether such online social networks exert any impact on individuals' health outcomes. Built on the Multi-Theoretical Multilevel (MTML) framework and drawing from literature on social influence, this study examined the mechanisms underlying the formation of an online health social network and empirically tested social influence on individual health outcomes through the network. Situated in a weight management social networking site, the study tracked a health buddy network of 709 users and their weight management activities and outcomes for 4 months. Actor-based modeling was used to test the joint dynamics of preferential selection and social influence among health buddies. The results showed that baseline, inbreeding, and health status homophily significantly predicted preferential selection of health buddies in the weight management social networking site, whereas self-interest in seeking experiential health information did not. The study also found peer influence of online health buddy networks on individual weight outcomes, such that an individual's odds of losing weight increased if, on average, the individual's health buddies were losing weight.

Individual Characteristics, Family Factors, and Classroom Experiences as Predictors of Low-Income Kindergarteners’ Social Skills

Science.gov (United States)

Griffith, Shayl; Arnold, David; Voegler-Lee, Mary-Ellen; Kupersmidt, Janis

2017-01-01

There has been increasing awareness of the need for research and theory to take into account the intersection of individual characteristics and environmental contexts when examining predictors of child outcomes. The present longitudinal, multi-informant study examined the cumulative and interacting contributions of child characteristics (language skills, inattention/hyperactivity, and aggression) and preschool and family contextual factors in predicting kindergarten social skills in 389 low-income preschool children. Child characteristics and classroom factors, but not family factors, predicted teacher-rated kindergarten social skills, while child characteristics alone predicted change in teacher-rated social skills from preschool to kindergarten. Child characteristics and family factors, but not classroom factors, predicted parent-rated kindergarten social skills. Family factors alone predicted change in parent-rated social skills from preschool to kindergarten. Individual child characteristics did not interact with family or classroom factors in predicting parent- or teacher-rated social skills, and support was therefore found for an incremental, rather than an interactive, predictive model of social skills. The findings underscore the importance of assessing outcomes in more than one context, and of considering the impact of both individual and environmental contextual factors on children’s developing social skills when designing targeted intervention programs to prepare children for kindergarten. PMID:28804528

Individual Characteristics, Family Factors, and Classroom Experiences as Predictors of Low-Income Kindergarteners' Social Skills.

Science.gov (United States)

Griffith, Shayl; Arnold, David; Voegler-Lee, Mary-Ellen; Kupersmidt, Janis

2016-01-01

There has been increasing awareness of the need for research and theory to take into account the intersection of individual characteristics and environmental contexts when examining predictors of child outcomes. The present longitudinal, multi-informant study examined the cumulative and interacting contributions of child characteristics (language skills, inattention/hyperactivity, and aggression) and preschool and family contextual factors in predicting kindergarten social skills in 389 low-income preschool children. Child characteristics and classroom factors, but not family factors, predicted teacher-rated kindergarten social skills, while child characteristics alone predicted change in teacher-rated social skills from preschool to kindergarten. Child characteristics and family factors, but not classroom factors, predicted parent-rated kindergarten social skills. Family factors alone predicted change in parent-rated social skills from preschool to kindergarten. Individual child characteristics did not interact with family or classroom factors in predicting parent- or teacher-rated social skills, and support was therefore found for an incremental, rather than an interactive, predictive model of social skills. The findings underscore the importance of assessing outcomes in more than one context, and of considering the impact of both individual and environmental contextual factors on children's developing social skills when designing targeted intervention programs to prepare children for kindergarten.

Spatial prisoner's dilemma optimally played in small-world networks

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Masuda, Naoki; Aihara, Kazuyuki

2003-01-01

Cooperation is commonly found in ecological and social systems even when it apparently seems that individuals can benefit from selfish behavior. We investigate how cooperation emerges with the spatial prisoner's dilemma played in a class of networks ranging from regular lattices to random networks. We find that, among these networks, small-world topology is the optimal structure when we take into account the speed at which cooperative behavior propagates. Our results may explain why the small-world properties are self-organized in real networks

Tracking and Analyzing Individual Distress Following Terrorist Attacks Using Social Media Streams.

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Lin, Yu-Ru; Margolin, Drew; Wen, Xidao

2017-08-01

Risk research has theorized a number of mechanisms that might trigger, prolong, or potentially alleviate individuals' distress following terrorist attacks. These mechanisms are difficult to examine in a single study, however, because the social conditions of terrorist attacks are difficult to simulate in laboratory experiments and appropriate preattack baselines are difficult to establish with surveys. To address this challenge, we propose the use of computational focus groups and a novel analysis framework to analyze a social media stream that archives user history and location. The approach uses time-stamped behavior to quantify an individual's preattack behavior after an attack has occurred, enabling the assessment of time-specific changes in the intensity and duration of an individual's distress, as well as the assessment of individual and social-level covariates. To exemplify the methodology, we collected over 18 million tweets from 15,509 users located in Paris on November 13, 2015, and measured the degree to which they expressed anxiety, anger, and sadness after the attacks. The analysis resulted in findings that would be difficult to observe through other methods, such as that news media exposure had competing, time-dependent effects on anxiety, and that gender dynamics are complicated by baseline behavior. Opportunities for integrating computational focus group analysis with traditional methods are discussed. © 2017 Society for Risk Analysis.

Social class, power, and selfishness: when and why upper and lower class individuals behave unethically.

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Dubois, David; Rucker, Derek D; Galinsky, Adam D

2015-03-01

Are the rich more unethical than the poor? To answer this question, the current research introduces a key conceptual distinction between selfish and unethical behavior. Based on this distinction, the current article offers 2 novel findings that illuminate the relationship between social class and unethical behavior. First, the effects of social class on unethical behavior are not invariant; rather, the effects of social class are moderated by whether unethical behavior benefits the self or others. Replicating past work, social class positively predicted unethical behavior; however, this relationship was only observed when that behavior was self-beneficial. When unethical behavior was performed to benefit others, social class negatively predicted unethical behavior; lower class individuals were more likely than upper class individuals to engage in unethical behavior. Overall, social class predicts people's tendency to behave selfishly, rather than predicting unethical behavior per se. Second, individuals' sense of power drove the effects of social class on unethical behavior. Evidence for this relationship was provided in three forms. First, income, but not education level, predicted unethical behavior. Second, feelings of power mediated the effect of social class on unethical behavior, but feelings of status did not. Third, two distinct manipulations of power produced the same moderation by self-versus-other beneficiary as was found with social class. The current theoretical framework and data both synthesize and help to explain a range of findings in the social class and power literatures. PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved.

The social world of Australian practice nurses and the influence of medical dominance: an analysis of the literature.

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Mills, Jane; Hallinan, Christine

2009-12-01

In Australia, the number of practice nurses is growing at a rapid rate. On the nursing landscape, this group of nurses stand out because of their relationship with the Australian Government who both fund them, and concern themselves with their continuing professional development. This paper provides a construction of the social world of Australian practice nurses, identifying stakeholders in the business of practice nursing. Literature produced by the various social world segments is analysed for the influence of medical dominance on the role, image, power and politics of practice nurses.

FEMALE SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP AND SOCIO-CULTURAL CONTEXT: AN INTERNATIONAL ANALYSIS

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David Urbano Pulido

2014-12-01

Full Text Available In this article we analyse the socio-cultural factors that influence the likelihood of women becoming social entrepreneurs, using institutional economics. Binary logistic regression has been applied as the statistical method to test the hypotheses proposed, using data (40 countries and 56,875 individuals from the World Value Survey (WVS and the World Bank (WB. The main findings of the study reaffirm the relevance of socio-cultural factors to social entrepreneurship. Particularly, we have found that altruistic attitudes and being a member of a social organization are the most relevant socio-cultural factors for social female entrepreneurship.

Freedom and Safety of an Individual in the Attitude of Liberalism and Christian Social S

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Valdas Pruskus

2011-02-01

Full Text Available The article deals with the freedom and safety of an individual under market conditions and ethical limits of market expression in the attitude of liberalism and Christian social science.Liberalism and Christian social teaching admits that market and its mechanism gives an individual and society an opportunity to fulfil their needs better, but differently estimates ethical limits of market expression. It is shown that in the attitude of Christian social teaching the goal of economic action is not only to create welfare for society and the individual but also to secure its safety. In its turn, creation of safety is associated with the necessity to overcome the single-acting dominance of economic values in the market society: ethic values by which economic action of the individual and society should be measured have to penetrate into economic space. 

49 CFR Appendix E to Part 26 - Individual Determinations of Social and Economic Disadvantage

Science.gov (United States)

2010-10-01

... Disadvantage E Appendix E to Part 26 Transportation Office of the Secretary of Transportation PARTICIPATION BY... Appendix E to Part 26—Individual Determinations of Social and Economic Disadvantage The following guidance... disadvantage determinations (see 13 CFR 124.103(c) and 124.104). Social Disadvantage I. Socially disadvantaged...

Developing Social Interaction and Understanding in Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Groupwork Intervention

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MacKay, Tommy; Knott, Fiona; Dunlop, Aline-Wendy

2007-01-01

Background: Difficulties with social interaction and understanding lie at the heart of the communication disorder that characterises the autism spectrum. This study sought to improve social communication for individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) by means of a groupwork intervention focusing on social and emotional perspective-taking,…

Individual, Social, and Environmental Correlates of Healthy and Unhealthy Eating

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Trapp, Georgina S. A.; Hickling, Siobhan; Christian, Hayley E.; Bull, Fiona; Timperio, Anna F.; Boruff, Bryan; Shrestha, Damber; Giles-Corti, Billie

2015-01-01

Background: Few studies use comprehensive ecological approaches considering multilevel factors to understand correlates of healthy (and unhealthy) dietary intake. The aim of this study was to examine the association between individual, social, and environmental factors on composite measures of healthy and unhealthy dietary intake in adults.…

Primate social attention: Species differences and effects of individual experience in humans, great apes, and macaques.

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Fumihiro Kano

Full Text Available When viewing social scenes, humans and nonhuman primates focus on particular features, such as the models' eyes, mouth, and action targets. Previous studies reported that such viewing patterns vary significantly across individuals in humans, and also across closely-related primate species. However, the nature of these individual and species differences remains unclear, particularly among nonhuman primates. In large samples of human and nonhuman primates, we examined species differences and the effects of experience on patterns of gaze toward social movies. Experiment 1 examined the species differences across rhesus macaques, nonhuman apes (bonobos, chimpanzees, and orangutans, and humans while they viewed movies of various animals' species-typical behaviors. We found that each species had distinct viewing patterns of the models' faces, eyes, mouths, and action targets. Experiment 2 tested the effect of individuals' experience on chimpanzee and human viewing patterns. We presented movies depicting natural behaviors of chimpanzees to three groups of chimpanzees (individuals from a zoo, a sanctuary, and a research institute differing in their early social and physical experiences. We also presented the same movies to human adults and children differing in their expertise with chimpanzees (experts vs. novices or movie-viewing generally (adults vs. preschoolers. Individuals varied within each species in their patterns of gaze toward models' faces, eyes, mouths, and action targets depending on their unique individual experiences. We thus found that the viewing patterns for social stimuli are both individual- and species-specific in these closely-related primates. Such individual/species-specificities are likely related to both individual experience and species-typical temperament, suggesting that primate individuals acquire their unique attentional biases through both ontogeny and evolution. Such unique attentional biases may help them learn

Primate social attention: Species differences and effects of individual experience in humans, great apes, and macaques.

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Kano, Fumihiro; Shepherd, Stephen V; Hirata, Satoshi; Call, Josep

2018-01-01

When viewing social scenes, humans and nonhuman primates focus on particular features, such as the models' eyes, mouth, and action targets. Previous studies reported that such viewing patterns vary significantly across individuals in humans, and also across closely-related primate species. However, the nature of these individual and species differences remains unclear, particularly among nonhuman primates. In large samples of human and nonhuman primates, we examined species differences and the effects of experience on patterns of gaze toward social movies. Experiment 1 examined the species differences across rhesus macaques, nonhuman apes (bonobos, chimpanzees, and orangutans), and humans while they viewed movies of various animals' species-typical behaviors. We found that each species had distinct viewing patterns of the models' faces, eyes, mouths, and action targets. Experiment 2 tested the effect of individuals' experience on chimpanzee and human viewing patterns. We presented movies depicting natural behaviors of chimpanzees to three groups of chimpanzees (individuals from a zoo, a sanctuary, and a research institute) differing in their early social and physical experiences. We also presented the same movies to human adults and children differing in their expertise with chimpanzees (experts vs. novices) or movie-viewing generally (adults vs. preschoolers). Individuals varied within each species in their patterns of gaze toward models' faces, eyes, mouths, and action targets depending on their unique individual experiences. We thus found that the viewing patterns for social stimuli are both individual- and species-specific in these closely-related primates. Such individual/species-specificities are likely related to both individual experience and species-typical temperament, suggesting that primate individuals acquire their unique attentional biases through both ontogeny and evolution. Such unique attentional biases may help them learn efficiently about their

Positive and negative associations of individual social capital factors with health among community-dwelling older people.

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Kabayama, Mai; Watanabe, Chie; Ryuno, Hirochika; Kamide, Kei

2017-12-01

Previous literature has found positive correlations between social capital and health in older adults, fewer studies have investigated the subdimension's effects of social capital on health. We aimed to determine the individual social capital subfactors in community-dwelling older adults in Japan, and to analyze the associations of these factors with physical and mental health. We sent a self-administered questionnaire assessing their perception of social group activity as the individual social capital, and mental and physical health (measured by the Medical Outcomes Study Short Form-36) to 4320 randomly selected older people. There were 1836 valid responses. We clarified that people who participated in any social activity group were in significantly better physical and mental health compared with the people who did not. By the factor analysis of the perception for the social group activity, we identified three components of the individual social capital aspect that we termed harmonious, hierarchic and diversity. Using multiple linear regression, we found the hierarchic aspect was significantly negatively associated with mental health, whereas the harmonious aspect was significantly positively associated with mental and physical health, and diversity was significantly positively associated with mental health. As the previous research literature on social capital has mainly emphasized its positive health consequences, the present findings provide a novel demonstration that some aspects of individual social capital can have negative associations with health outcomes in community-dwelling older people. For the practical application of promoting a healthier society, it is important to consider both the positive and negative sides of social capital. Geriatr Gerontol Int 2017; 17: 2427-2434. © 2017 Japan Geriatrics Society.

Socialization of Physical and Social Aggression in Early Adolescents' Peer Groups: High-Status Peers, Individual Status, and Gender

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Shi, Bing; Xie, Hongling

2012-01-01

The influence of high-status peers on a target individual's physical and manipulative social aggression in peer groups was examined in a diverse sample of seventh-grade students. A total of 245 individual members belonging to 65 groups were included in analyses. Aggression was assessed by peer and victim nominations in the fall and spring…

Individuality as expression of human emancipation. Reflection on the conception of Jan Szczepański

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Tomasz Leszniewski

2017-01-01

Full Text Available The paper raises the issue of “the individual factor” in the sociological reflection on social reality. Referring to Jan Szczepański's concept of individuality it analyzes the problem of human nature and the inner world as a source of resistance to the negative consequences of collective mechanisms. The paper presents the thesis that individuality is the culmination of the process of human development. However, in the context of socio-cultural category of individuality, it is an attempt to transcend the current data and the tension between individual- ism and collectivism. Human Individuality is a potential criticism regarding the public order and social change.

Deficiencies in social relationships of individuals with neurosis

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Srivastava, Sunil

2006-01-01

Background: Social interaction and network of individuals with neurosis have been reported to be inadequate. Aim: To measure deficiencies in the social network of individuals with neurosis. Methods: Fifty consecutive patients with neurosis attending the OPD of the Department of Psychiatry, King George's Medical College, Lucknow, who were diagnosed as per the criteria of ICD-9, were included in the study. A control group of 40 healthy persons matched for age, sex, education and marital status was also taken. Interaction with the primary group (defined as consisting of all kin, nominated friends, work associates and neighbours) was measured by the Social Interaction Schedule of Henderson et al. as modified for the Indian population. Results: Patients reported significantly higher mean duration of unpleasant but affectively intense interaction with one person within or outside the primary group and affectively unpleasant and intense interaction with more than one person within or outside the primary group or affectively superficial but unpleasant interaction with one or more person of the primary group. Healthy subjects reported more of pleasant interaction with one person within or outside the primary group and affectively intense and pleasant interaction with more than one person within or outside the primary group or affectively superficial but pleasant interaction with one or more persons of the primary group; the difference was statistically significant as compared to patients with neurosis. Conclusion: The primary group of patients with neurosis was significantly smaller in numerical size as compared with that of controls and in terms of the total time spent with members of the primary group, patients with neurosis reported more interactions of unpleasant type and less of pleasant type as compared with healthy controls. PMID:20844645

Safeguards in a world of ambient intelligence: A social, economic, legal, and ethical perspective

NARCIS (Netherlands)

van den Broek, Egon

2011-01-01

The book "Safeguards in a world of ambient intelligence" is unique in its kind. It discusses social, economic, legal, technological and ethical issues related to identity, privacy and security in Ambient Intelligence (AmI). It introduces AmI and, subsequently, makes it vivid by describing four

Neighborhood Walking and Social Capital: The Correlation between Walking Experience and Individual Perception of Social Capital

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Heechul Kim

2017-04-01

Full Text Available The purpose of this study was to analyze the relationship between people’s actual walking experience and their social capital levels in order to examine the possibility of restoring weakened social functions of streets and public spaces in a walking-friendly urban environment. Based on the survey data of 591 residents of Seoul, we empirically analyzed the relationship between walking experience for various purposes and individual perceptions of social capital using one-way ANOVA and OLS regression models. As a result of the analysis, we found that the levels of neighborly trust and networking of people who experienced leisure walking were higher than those of people who did not, while there was no difference in the level of social capital according to walking experiences for other purposes. This result is significant in that it shows the basis for the restoration of the social function of neighborhoods through social capital formation of people as an effect of walking. Hence, it is important to create a walking environment that supports leisure activities.

Nutritional ecology beyond the individual: a conceptual framework for integrating nutrition and social interactions.

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Lihoreau, Mathieu; Buhl, Jerome; Charleston, Michael A; Sword, Gregory A; Raubenheimer, David; Simpson, Stephen J

2015-03-01

Over recent years, modelling approaches from nutritional ecology (known as Nutritional Geometry) have been increasingly used to describe how animals and some other organisms select foods and eat them in appropriate amounts in order to maintain a balanced nutritional state maximising fitness. These nutritional strategies profoundly affect the physiology, behaviour and performance of individuals, which in turn impact their social interactions within groups and societies. Here, we present a conceptual framework to study the role of nutrition as a major ecological factor influencing the development and maintenance of social life. We first illustrate some of the mechanisms by which nutritional differences among individuals mediate social interactions in a broad range of species and ecological contexts. We then explain how studying individual- and collective-level nutrition in a common conceptual framework derived from Nutritional Geometry can bring new fundamental insights into the mechanisms and evolution of social interactions, using a combination of simulation models and manipulative experiments. © 2015 The Authors. Ecology Letters published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd and CNRS.

The case for the World Health Organization's Commission on Social Determinants of Health to address gender identity.

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Pega, Frank; Veale, Jaimie F

2015-03-01

We analyzed the case of the World Health Organization's Commission on Social Determinants of Health, which did not address gender identity in their final report. We argue that gender identity is increasingly being recognized as an important social determinant of health (SDH) that results in health inequities. We identify right to health mechanisms, such as established human rights instruments, as suitable policy tools for addressing gender identity as an SDH to improve health equity. We urge the World Health Organization to add gender identity as an SDH in its conceptual framework for action on the SDHs and to develop and implement specific recommendations for addressing gender identity as an SDH.

The Connection Between Introversion/Extraversion and Social Capital Outcomes of Playing World of Warcraft.

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Reer, Felix; Krämer, Nicole C

2017-02-01

Some studies indicated that playing online games yields a "rich-get-richer effect" and is especially socially beneficial for extraverted players, while other authors argue that online gaming could have compensational effects for introverted players. The current survey study (N = 409) investigates the connection between introversion/extraversion and social capital outcomes of playing the popular role-playing game World of Warcraft and shows that the rich-get-richer and the compensation perspective are not mutually exclusive. Path analysis revealed that extraverted players communicated and self-disclosed more extensively, more often engaged in team play, and, hence, had better chances to build up social capital than introverts. However, at least some of the introverted players used the game for social compensation. These players chose a more social playing style, which increased their chances to acquire social capital. The results demonstrate that the group of introverted players is more heterogeneous than previously thought and that the links between personality aspects and social outcomes of playing are quite complex and rather indirect than direct.

Individual differences in the ability to recognise facial identity are associated with social anxiety.

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Joshua M Davis

Full Text Available Previous research has been concerned with the relationship between social anxiety and the recognition of face expression but the question of whether there is a relationship between social anxiety and the recognition of face identity has been neglected. Here, we report the first evidence that social anxiety is associated with recognition of face identity, across the population range of individual differences in recognition abilities. Results showed poorer face identity recognition (on the Cambridge Face Memory Test was correlated with a small but significant increase in social anxiety (Social Interaction Anxiety Scale but not general anxiety (State-Trait Anxiety Inventory. The correlation was also independent of general visual memory (Cambridge Car Memory Test and IQ. Theoretically, the correlation could arise because correct identification of people, typically achieved via faces, is important for successful social interactions, extending evidence that individuals with clinical-level deficits in face identity recognition (prosopagnosia often report social stress due to their inability to recognise others. Equally, the relationship could arise if social anxiety causes reduced exposure or attention to people's faces, and thus to poor development of face recognition mechanisms.

Hambre individual, subjetivo y social (reflexiones alrededor de las aristas límite del cuerpo

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Martín Eynard

2011-08-01

Full Text Available We conceive in this paper hunger as a social and geopolitical problem. In this regard, it is theoretically possible to connect the (lack of nutrients, with social conflict, through a complexification of the concept of hunger. Thus, we rebuild the notion of hunger in three different and interconnec-ted levels: individual hunger, subjective hunger and social hunger. From this transaction, it is possible to understand the passage from individual hunger to the social conflict created by it and which is linked to social and subjective hunger, since it makes visible the plot that structures nutrient deficiency as further evidence of the various mechanisms of body energy appropriation and their paths in the current phase of neocolonial capita-lism.

Lived Culture and Psychology: Sharedness and Normativity as Discursive, Embodied and Affective Engagements with the World in Social Interaction

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

2018-01-01

Topic, we want to examine closer what exactly can be understood by “sharedness” and “normativity” by taking a closer look at discursive, embodied and affective engagements with the world in social interaction. As Charles Goodwin has convincingly shown, these discursive practices need to be understood...... of certain ways of understanding the world and the normative dimension of social life as action based, as processual, mutually shaped, dynamic and fluid, ever evolving meaning making in situated social interaction (cp. Bakhtin, Garfinkel and Wittgenstein). Within the broader field of Cultural Psychology......, this Research Topic considers approaches that deem the nature of psychological phenomena to be dialogically intertwined with discursive and embodied practices in social interaction, the shape of which is always situational, ecologically embedded. We specifically want to address the question of methodology. What...

The Role of Individual and Social Factors in Classroom Loneliness

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Stoeckli, Georg

2009-01-01

The author investigated the role of individual characteristics (self-esteem, social anxiety, and self-reported classroom participation) and peer reactions (peer-perceived shyness, peer nominations) in classroom loneliness in a sample of 704 preadolescent boys (360) and girls (344). It was hypothesized that classroom participation functions as a…

Complexity in Individual Trajectories toward Online Extremism

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Z. Cao

2018-01-01

Full Text Available Society faces a fundamental global problem of understanding which individuals are currently developing strong support for some extremist entity such as ISIS (Islamic State, even if they never end up doing anything in the real world. The importance of online connectivity in developing intent has been confirmed by recent case studies of already convicted terrorists. Here we use ideas from Complexity to identify dynamical patterns in the online trajectories that individuals take toward developing a high level of extremist support, specifically, for ISIS. Strong memory effects emerge among individuals whose transition is fastest and hence may become “out of the blue” threats in the real world. A generalization of diagrammatic expansion theory helps quantify these characteristics, including the impact of changes in geographical location, and can facilitate prediction of future risks. By quantifying the trajectories that individuals follow on their journey toward expressing high levels of pro-ISIS support—irrespective of whether they then carry out a real-world attack or not—our findings can help move safety debates beyond reliance on static watch-list identifiers such as ethnic background or immigration status and/or postfact interviews with already convicted individuals. Given the broad commonality of social media platforms, our results likely apply quite generally; for example, even on Telegram where (like Twitter there is no built-in group feature as in our study, individuals tend to collectively build and pass through the so-called super-group accounts.

Quality and quantity: the role of social interactions in individual health

OpenAIRE

Damiano, Fiorillo; Fabio, Sabatini

2011-01-01

The public health literature focusing on the detrimental effects of social isolation has shown that the quantity of social connections is positively correlated with individual health. Drawing on pooled cross-sectional data, we test this hypothesis on a representative sample of the Italian population. Our findings show that, besides the quantity of interactions, it is their quality – as measured by subjective satisfaction derived from relationships with friends – that works as the best pre...

Feeling safe but appearing anxious: Differential effects of alcohol on anxiety and social performance in individuals with social anxiety disorder.

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Stevens, Stephan; Cooper, Ruth; Bantin, Trisha; Hermann, Christiane; Gerlach, Alexander L

2017-07-01

Social anxiety disorder (SAD) and alcohol use disorders (AUD) co-occur frequently and there is preliminary evidence that alcohol might reduce social anxiety. It is, however, unclear which mechanisms contribute to the anxiety reducing effect, particularly regarding key aspects of social anxiety such as deficits in social performance. We compared self-rated and physiological measures of anxiety as well as self- and observer-rated social performance in a sample of 62 individuals with SAD and 60 nonanxious control participants during a speech task after receiving either alcohol, an alcohol-free placebo drink or orange juice. SAD patients reported more anxiety during the speech task than did control participants. Furthermore, SAD patients underestimated their performance in comparison to observer ratings. Alcohol reduced self-report anxiety only in SAD patients, while observers rated all participants as less competent when intoxicated. Although individuals with SAD experience a reduction in anxiety when drinking alcohol, simultaneous decreases in social performance might contribute to negative reactions from others and consequently increase the risk of further alcohol use to cope with these negative reactions. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

"Social Media has Opened a World of 'Open communication:'" experiences of Adults with Cerebral Palsy who use Augmentative and Alternative Communication and Social Media.

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Caron, Jessica; Light, Janice

2016-01-01

An online focus group was used to investigate the experiences of nine individuals with cerebral palsy who use augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) and social media. Information was gathered related to (a) advantages of social media, (b) disadvantages of social media, (c) barriers to successful use, (d) supports to successful use, and (e) recommendations for other individuals using AAC, support personnel, policy makers, and technology developers. Participants primarily chose to focus on social media as a beneficial tool and viewed it as an important form of communication. The participants did describe barriers to social media use (e.g., technology). Despite barriers, all the participants in this study took an active role in learning to use social media. The results are discussed as they relate to themes and with reference to published literature.

Transmission of severe acute respiratory syndrome in dynamical small-world networks

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Masuda, Naoki; Konno, Norio; Aihara, Kazuyuki

2004-03-01

The outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) is still threatening the world because of a possible resurgence. In the current situation that effective medical treatments such as antiviral drugs are not discovered yet, dynamical features of the epidemics should be clarified for establishing strategies for tracing, quarantine, isolation, and regulating social behavior of the public at appropriate costs. Here we propose a network model for SARS epidemics and discuss why superspreaders emerged and why SARS spread especially in hospitals, which were key factors of the recent outbreak. We suggest that superspreaders are biologically contagious patients, and they may amplify the spreads by going to potentially contagious places such as hospitals. To avoid mass transmission in hospitals, it may be a good measure to treat suspected cases without hospitalizing them. Finally, we indicate that SARS probably propagates in small-world networks associated with human contacts and that the biological nature of individuals and social group properties are factors more important than the heterogeneous rates of social contacts among individuals. This is in marked contrast with epidemics of sexually transmitted diseases or computer viruses to which scale-free network models often apply.

Social Cooperative – an Important Entity of the Social Economy

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Florina Oana Virlanuta

2014-11-01

Full Text Available Contemporary society is characterized by a number of social problems that have multiple causes that range from structural weaknesses of purely individual factors. In the challenges of globalization phenomenon and in the context of sustainable development needs of humanity, the cooperative movement has an important role. Cooperative organizations have the ability to provide viable alternatives, being the main actors of social economy, along with associations and foundations, putting the human in the center of the activity and bringing another report in the process of creating economic value. Also, the cooperative movement is a solution for the multiple and the difficult economic and social issues of the contemporary world.

Images of World Society: A Third World View.

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Gopal, Sarvepalli

1982-01-01

Discusses conditions in the Third World which prevent the development of a harmonious world society. The effects of nationalism, nuclear proliferation, racism, political and economic inequities, and social and religious conservatism on the growth of a global outlook are considered. (AM)

Consistent individual differences and population plasticity in network-derived sociality: An experimental manipulation of density in a gregarious ungulate

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O’Brien, Paul P.; Vander Wal, Eric

2018-01-01

In many taxa, individual social traits appear to be consistent across time and context, thus meeting the criteria for animal personality. How these differences are maintained in response to changes in population density is unknown, particularly in large mammals, such as ungulates. Using a behavioral reaction norm (BRN) framework, we examined how among- and within-individual variation in social connectedness, measured using social network analyses, change as a function of population density. We studied a captive herd of elk (Cervus canadensis) separated into a group of male elk and a group of female elk. Males and females were exposed to three different density treatments and we recorded social associations between individuals with proximity-detecting radio-collars fitted to elk. We constructed social networks using dyadic association data and calculated three social network metrics reflective of social connectedness: eigenvector centrality, graph strength, and degree. Elk exhibited consistent individual differences in social connectedness across densities; however, they showed little individual variation in their response to changes in density, i.e., individuals oftentimes responded plastically, but in the same manner to changes in density. Female elk had highest connectedness at an intermediate density. In contrast, male elk increased connectedness with increasing density. Whereas this may suggest that the benefits of social connectedness outweigh the costs of increased competition at higher density for males, females appear to exhibit a threshold in social benefits (e.g. predator detection and forage information). Our study illustrates the importance of viewing social connectedness as a density-dependent trait, particularly in the context of plasticity. Moreover, we highlight the need to revisit our understanding of density dependence as a population-level phenomenon by accounting for consistent individual differences not only in social connectedness, but likely

Training for Social Development Staff at the World Bank, Volume 1. Main Report

OpenAIRE

Daniel R. Gross; Matthew LeDuc

2010-01-01

The social development family is facing a major challenge given the significant increase in lending made by the Bank in the last five years. Lending overall has more than doubled between FY05 and FY09; investment lending has increased by 82 percent and infrastructure lending by 125 percent. In this report, International Evaluation Group (IEG) suggests that the World Bank's safeguard policies ...

Familiarity and prevalence of Facebook use for social networking among individuals with traumatic brain injury.

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Tsaousides, Theodore; Matsuzawa, Yuka; Lebowitz, Matthew

2011-01-01

To examine use of Facebook among individuals with traumatic brain injury (TBI) and to identify barriers preventing Facebook use. An online survey was developed assessing frequency and barriers to use of Facebook. The survey was distributed electronically to individuals with TBI through four state brain injury associations. Ninety-six individuals with TBI completed the survey (60% female, age range: 23-70). The relative majority of respondents (60%) reported using Facebook on a regular basis. Among those who reported not using Facebook, the most commonly reported barriers were security concerns and cognitive deficits. Approximately half of non-users indicated interest in learning to use the site, with 70% reporting that they would use it more if they were more knowledgeable about it. Both users and non-users indicated that they would be interested in receiving training to learn how to use Facebook better. Social networking sites are increasingly important in creating and maintaining social networks. A significant number of survey respondents expressed interest in further training on Facebook use. Increased use of social networking may have important implications for social integration among individuals with TBI.

Social Gains from Female Education: A Cross-National Study. World Bank Discussion Papers 194.

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Subbarao, K.; Raney, Laura

This paper on the social gains from female education is part of a series, prepared by the World Bank, on the benefits of improving opportunities for women. The paper suggests that expanding women's opportunities enhances their productivity and earning potential and thus contributes to better economic performance and poverty alleviation. Education…

Social capital, Chinese style: individualism, relational collectivism and the cultural embeddedness of the institutions-performance link

OpenAIRE

Herrmann-Pillath, Carsten

2009-01-01

China is the odd man out in the research on social capital and economic performance. A brief survey of recent World Values Survey data depicts China to be a high-trust, achievement oriented society, which does not fit into popular pictures of rampant corruption and abuses of power. I argue that one difficulty results from methodological issues in research on social capital, where a universally accepted theory of social capital is lacking, including theoretically grounded methods of measuremen...

[Resilience in Individuals with Gender Dysphoria: Association with Perceived Social Support and Discrimination].

Science.gov (United States)

Başar, Koray; Öz, Gökhan

2016-01-01

Psychological distress associated with discrimination is proposed to have an indirect effect on the development of mental disorders, through its negative influence on individual's cognitive, affective and social coping strategies. The aim of this study was to investigate the association between resilience, perceived social support, and perceived discrimination in individuals with gender dysphoria. Individuals with gender dysphoria were assessed with Turkish validated forms of Resilience Scale for Adults (RSA), Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support (MSPSS), Perceived Discrimination Scale (PDS), and Beck Depression Inventory (BDI). Diagnoses of mental disorders, history of suicide attempt and non-suicidal self injury were assessed with clinical interviews. Self-report forms were used to obtain demographic information and gender transition related features. Participants' (n=116, 88 trans men) median age was 25. Significantly low RSA scores, indicating poor resilience, were obtained in participants with lifetime (59.5 %) and present (27.6 %) diagnosis of any mental disorder, history of suicide attempt (23.3 %). There was significant direct correlation between RSA and MSPSS scores, inverse correlation with BDI and personal PDS scores, but not with group PDS. Regression analysis revealed that only friends domain score in MSPSS predicted better resilience, whereas personal perceived discrimination score predicted poor resilience. Findings support the association between poor resilience and vulnerability to mental and behavioral problems in individuals with gender dysphoria. The associations reveal the significance of addressing discrimination and assisting individuals with gender dysphoria in developing strategies to obtain peer support in providing mental health services.

What Is the Core Fear in Social Phobia? A New Model to Facilitate Individualized Case Conceptualization and Treatment

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Moscovitch, David A.

2009-01-01

What, exactly, do individuals with social phobia fear? Whereas fear of anxiety-related bodily sensations characterizes and defines panic disorder, is there a fundamental focus of anxiety that unifies individuals under the diagnostic category of social phobia? Current conceptualizations of social phobia suggest several possible candidates,…

Students' Individual and Social Behaviors with Physical Education Teachers' Personality

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Arbabisarjou, Azizollah; Sourki, Mehdi Sadeghian; Bonjar, Seyedeh Elaham Hashemi

2016-01-01

The main objective for this survey is to assess the relationship between physical education teachers' personality and students' individual with social behaviors. The statistical population of the study was all the teachers of physical education working at high schools in the academic year 2012-2013. The sample consisted of sixty teachers that were…

Social Media, Futbol, and Crisis: An exploratory case study examining the FIFA World Cup addressing player concussions

OpenAIRE

Samantha Hughey

2015-01-01

Social media strategies and practices continue to be integrated across various athletic sports, particularly futbol. One of the recent global athletic events that occurred where social media played an important role was the 2014 Fédération Internationale de Football Association World Cup in Brazil. While social media brings forth great opportunities for teams to engage with fans and share real-time updates, it also allows active fans to voice concerns around particular issues like player safe...

Individual and Social Predictors of Prosocial Behavior among Chinese Adolescents in Hong Kong

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Lai, Frank H. Y.; Siu, Andrew M. H.; Shek, Daniel T. L.

2015-01-01

Based on the human ecological model, this study hypothesized that individual competence in empathy, prosocial moral reasoning, and social influence from parents, peers, and school are the key determinants of prosocial behavior among Chinese adolescents in Hong Kong. We recruited a sample of high school students who engaged in volunteering activities regularly (N = 580). They completed a self-administrated questionnaire designed to measure prosocial behavior and its hypothesized predictors using a number of standardized instruments. The results of multiple regression show that social influence factors, including peer, school, and parent influence, are strong predictors of helping intention and prosocial behavior, while individual competence factors like empathy and prosocial moral reasoning are not. Male participants had higher empathy scores and helping intention than females, perceived their parents as more helpful, and their schools as more supportive of prosocial behavior. However, the significant predictors of prosocial behavior and helping intention were similar across gender. The findings indicate that social influence is strongly linked to prosocial behavior. This implies that socialization and social support for prosocial norms and behavior can exert a powerful influence on the behavior of young people in a Chinese population. PMID:26029684

Individual and Social Predictors of Prosocial Behaviour among Chinese Adolescents in Hong Kong

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Frank H.Y. Lai

2015-05-01

Full Text Available Based on the human ecological model, this study hypothesized that individual competence in empathy, prosocial moral reasoning, and social influence from parents, peers, and school are the key determinants of prosocial behaviour among Chinese adolescents in Hong Kong. We recruited a sample of high school students who engaged in volunteering activities regularly (N = 580. They completed a self-administrated questionnaire designed to measure prosocial behaviour and its hypothesized predictors using a number of standardized instruments. The results of multiple regression show that social influence factors, including peer, school, and parent influence, are strong predictors of helping intention and prosocial behaviour, while individual competence factors like empathy and prosocial moral reasoning are not. Male participants had higher empathy scores and helping intention than males, perceived their parents as more helpful, and their schools as more supportive of prosocial behaviour. However, the significant predictors of prosocial behaviour and helping intention were similar across gender. The findings indicate that social influence is strongly linked to prosocial behaviour. This implies that socialization and social support for prosocial norms and behaviour can exert a powerful influence on the behaviour of young people in a Chinese population.

Contextualizing Individual Competencies for Managing the Corporate Social Responsibility Adaptation Process

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Osagie, E.R.; Wesselink, R.; Blok, V.; Mulder, M.

2016-01-01

Companies committed to corporate social responsibility (CSR) should ensure that their managers possess the appropriate competencies to effectively manage the CSR adaptation process. The literature provides insights into the individual competencies these managers need but fails to prioritize them and

The effect of social support derived from World of Warcraft on negative psychological symptoms.

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Longman, Huon; O'Connor, Erin; Obst, Patricia

2009-10-01

Previous research examining players of massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) suggests that players form meaningful relationships with each other. Other research indicates that people may derive social support from online sources, and this social support has been associated with greater well-being. This study used an online survey of players (N = 206) of the MMOG World of Warcraft (WoW) to examine if social support can be derived from MMOGs and to examine its relationship with negative psychological symptoms. Players of WoW were found to derive social support from playing and a positive relationship was found between game engagement and levels of in-game social support. Higher levels of in-game social support were associated with fewer negative psychological symptoms, although this effect was not maintained after accounting for social support derived from the offline sources. Additionally, a small subsample of players (n = 21) who played for 44 to 82 hours per week (M = 63.33) was identified. These players had significantly lower levels of offline social support and higher levels of negative symptoms compared to the rest of the sample. This study provides evidence that social support can be derived from MMOGs and the associated potential to promote well-being but also highlights the potential harm from spending excessive hours playing.

Diabetes mellitus and tuberculosis in countries with high tuberculosis burdens: individual risks and social determinants.

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Goldhaber-Fiebert, Jeremy D; Jeon, Christie Y; Cohen, Ted; Murray, Megan B

2011-04-01

A growing body of evidence supports the role of type 2 diabetes as an individual-level risk factor for tuberculosis (TB), though evidence from developing countries with the highest TB burdens is lacking. In developing countries, TB is most common among the poor, in whom diabetes may be less common. We assessed the relationship between individual-level risk, social determinants and population health in these settings. We performed individual-level analyses using the World Health Survey (n = 124,607; 46 countries). We estimated the relationship between TB and diabetes, adjusting for gender, age, body mass index, education, housing quality, crowding and health insurance. We also performed a longitudinal country-level analysis using data on per-capita gross domestic product and TB prevalence and incidence and diabetes prevalence for 1990-95 and 2003-04 (163 countries) to estimate the relationship between increasing diabetes prevalence and TB, identifying countries at risk for disease interactions. In lower income countries, individuals with diabetes are more likely than non-diabetics to have TB [univariable odds ratio (OR): 2.39; 95% confidence interval (CI): 1.84-3.10; multivariable OR: 1.81; 95% CI: 1.37-2.39]. Increases in TB prevalence and incidence over time were more likely to occur when diabetes prevalence also increased (OR: 4.7; 95% CI: 1.0-22.5; OR: 8.6; 95% CI: 1.9-40.4). Large populations, prevalent TB and projected increases in diabetes make countries like India, Peru and the Russia Federation areas of particular concern. Given the association between diabetes and TB and projected increases in diabetes worldwide, multi-disease health policies should be considered.

Socialization and individual antecedents of adolescents' and young adults' moral motivation.

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Malti, Tina; Buchmann, Marlis

2010-02-01

Socialization and individual differences were examined as antecedents of moral motivation in representative samples of 15-year-old adolescents (N = 1,258; 54% female) and 21-year-old young adults (N = 584; 53% female). The adolescents' primary caregivers (N = 1,056) also participated. The strength of moral motivation was rated by participants' responses to two hypothetical moral dilemmas in terms of action decisions, emotion attributions, and justifications. Socialization was measured by the perceived quality of friendship, parent-child relationships, and educational background. The importance attached to social justice and various personality traits were also assessed. Adolescents' moral motivation was positively associated with the quality of their parent-child relationship and the importance of social justice. Young adults' moral motivation was predicted by the perceived quality of friendships, the importance of social justice, and agreeableness. For both groups, moral motivation was greater in females. The theoretical implications of the findings for the development of moral motivation are discussed.

Individualism versus Socialism in American Education: Rereading Mortimer Adler and "The Paidea Proposal."

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Weltman, Burton

2002-01-01

Discusses Adler's "The Paideia Proposal," which raised the issue of socialism versus individualism in order to rally educational reformers to move the educational debate out of a cycle of academic bickering. The paper examines the intellectual road that led Adler to socialism and reexamines the book in light of his socialist views,…

A theory of social thermoregulation in human primates.

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IJzerman, Hans; Coan, James A; Wagemans, Fieke M A; Missler, Marjolein A; van Beest, Ilja; Lindenberg, Siegwart; Tops, Mattie

2015-01-01

Beyond breathing, the regulation of body temperature-thermoregulation-is one of the most pressing concerns for many animals. A dysregulated body temperature has dire consequences for survival and development. Despite the high frequency of social thermoregulation occurring across many species, little is known about the role of social thermoregulation in human (social) psychological functioning. We outline a theory of social thermoregulation and reconsider earlier research on people's expectations of their social world (i.e., attachment) and their prediction of the social world. We provide support and outline a research agenda that includes consequences for individual variation in self-regulatory strategies and capabilities. In our paper, we discuss physiological, neural, and social processes surrounding thermoregulation. Emphasizing social thermoregulation in particular, we appeal to the economy of action principle and the hierarchical organization of human thermoregulatory systems. We close with future directions of a crucial aspect of human functioning: the social regulation of body temperature.

Social Relationships and Health: The Toxic Effects of Perceived Social Isolation.

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Cacioppo, John T; Cacioppo, Stephanie

2014-02-01

Research in social epidemiology suggests that the absence of positive social relationships is a significant risk factor for broad-based morbidity and mortality. The nature of these social relationships and the mechanisms underlying this association are of increasing interest as the population gets older and the health care costs associated with chronic disease escalate in industrialized countries. We review selected evidence on the nature of social relationships and focus on one particular facet of the connection continuum - the extent to which an individual feels isolated (i.e., feels lonely) in a social world. Evidence indicates that loneliness heightens sensitivity to social threats and motivates the renewal of social connections, but it can also impair executive functioning, sleep, and mental and physical well-being. Together, these effects contribute to higher rates of morbidity and mortality in lonely older adults.

[Social companies and solidary economy: perspectives for the work inclusion of individuals with mental disorders].

Science.gov (United States)

Lussi, Isabela Aparecida de Oliveira; Pereira, Maria Alice Ornellas

2011-04-01

The psychiatric reform process requires the implementation of public policies that guarantee the work inclusion of individuals with mental disorders. To do this, work must be understood as a promoter of autonomy, emancipation and citizenship. The objective of this study is to reflect on the theoretical concepts related to social insertion through work, with the purpose of exploring the inclusion of individuals with mental disorders in the work market. The concepts social company and solidary economy where selected as fundamental for the study. In the social company, the subject is considered to be a social being, focusing on the development process towards emancipation. In solidary economy, the objective is to develop an economy that is more just, equal and solidary. Further discussions on these concepts should be developed to support the implementation of projects for social inclusion through work.

Individual-level social capital and self-rated health in Japan: an application of the Resource Generator.

Science.gov (United States)

Kobayashi, Tomoko; Kawachi, Ichiro; Iwase, Toshihide; Suzuki, Etsuji; Takao, Soshi

2013-05-01

Despite accumulating evidence of associations between social capital and health in public health research, a criticism of the field has been that researchers have exclusively focused on concepts of social cohesion to the exclusion of individual-level approaches. In the present study, we evaluated the association between social capital measured by the Resource Generator (an individual-level assessment of access to social capital) and self-rated health among Japanese population in a cross-sectional study. A postal survey of 4000 randomly selected residents in Okayama City (western Japan) was conducted in February 2009. We divided the overall scores from the Resource Generator Japan scale into quartiles. Odds ratios (ORs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) for self-rated health were calculated separately by sex. Individuals with the highest quartile of scores had significantly lower odds of poor health compared to the lowest group after covariate adjustment among both men and women (men; OR: 0.45, 95% CI: 0.24-0.86, women; OR: 0.44, 95% CI: 0.25-0.79, respectively) and there were also significant dose-response relationships. In the sub-domains of Resource Generator Japan scale, a differential pattern was observed by sex. Women showed a clear dose-response relationship with health across all four sub-scales (domestic resources, expert advice, personal skills, and problem solving resources). In contrast, only the domain of expert advice exhibited a strong association with men's health. Among both men and women individual-level social capital measured by the Resource Generator was related to reduced odds of poor health even after taking into account individual confounders. Although we cannot exclude reverse causation due to the cross-sectional design, our study adds to the accumulating evidence of the potential utility of the Resource Generator for evaluating the relationship between individual-level access to social capital and health. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Ltd

Social Network Sites, Individual Social Capital and Happiness

NARCIS (Netherlands)

E. Arampatzi (Efstratia); M.J. Burger (Martijn); N.A. Novik (Natallia)

2016-01-01

textabstractCan online social contacts replace the importance of real-life social connections in our pursuit of happiness? With the growing use of social network sites (SNSs), attention has been increasingly drawn to this topic. Our study empirically examines the effect of SNS use on happiness for

Acknowledging individual responsibility while emphasizing social determinants in narratives to promote obesity-reducing public policy: a randomized experiment.

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Jeff Niederdeppe

Full Text Available This study tests whether policy narratives designed to increase support for obesity-reducing public policies should explicitly acknowledge individual responsibility while emphasizing social, physical, and economic (social determinants of obesity. We use a web-based, randomized experiment with a nationally representative sample of American adults (n = 718 to test hypotheses derived from theory and research on narrative persuasion. Respondents exposed to narratives that acknowledged individual responsibility while emphasizing obesity's social determinants were less likely to engage in counterargument and felt more empathy for the story's main character than those exposed to a message that did not acknowledge individual responsibility. Counterarguing and affective empathy fully mediated the relationship between message condition and support for policies to reduce rates of obesity. Failure to acknowledge individual responsibility in narratives emphasizing social determinants of obesity may undermine the persuasiveness of policy narratives. Omitting information about individual responsibility, a strongly-held American value, invites the public to engage in counterargument about the narratives and reduces feelings of empathy for a character that experiences the challenges and benefits of social determinants of obesity.

Acknowledging individual responsibility while emphasizing social determinants in narratives to promote obesity-reducing public policy: a randomized experiment.

Science.gov (United States)

Niederdeppe, Jeff; Roh, Sungjong; Shapiro, Michael A

2015-01-01

This study tests whether policy narratives designed to increase support for obesity-reducing public policies should explicitly acknowledge individual responsibility while emphasizing social, physical, and economic (social) determinants of obesity. We use a web-based, randomized experiment with a nationally representative sample of American adults (n = 718) to test hypotheses derived from theory and research on narrative persuasion. Respondents exposed to narratives that acknowledged individual responsibility while emphasizing obesity's social determinants were less likely to engage in counterargument and felt more empathy for the story's main character than those exposed to a message that did not acknowledge individual responsibility. Counterarguing and affective empathy fully mediated the relationship between message condition and support for policies to reduce rates of obesity. Failure to acknowledge individual responsibility in narratives emphasizing social determinants of obesity may undermine the persuasiveness of policy narratives. Omitting information about individual responsibility, a strongly-held American value, invites the public to engage in counterargument about the narratives and reduces feelings of empathy for a character that experiences the challenges and benefits of social determinants of obesity.

A social-cognitive perspective of terrorism risk perception and individual response in Canada.

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Lee, Jennifer E C; Lemyre, Louise

2009-09-01

The volume of research on terrorism has increased since the events of September 11, 2001. However, efforts to develop a contextualized model incorporating cognitive, social-contextual, and affective factors as predictors of individual responses to this threat have been limited. Therefore, the aim of this study was to evaluate a series of hypotheses drawn from such a model that was generated from a series of interviews with members of the Canadian public. Data of a national survey on perceived chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, and explosives (CBRNE) terrorism threat and preparedness were analyzed. Results demonstrated that worry and behavioral responses to terrorism, such as individual preparedness, information seeking, and avoidance behaviors, were each a function of cognitive and social-contextual factors. As an affective response, worry about terrorism independently contributed to the prediction of behavioral responses above and beyond cognitive and social-contextual factors, and partially mediated the relationships of some of these factors with behavioral responses. Perceived coping efficacy emerged as the cognitive factor associated with the most favorable response to terrorism. Hence, findings highlight the importance of fostering a sense of coping efficacy to the effectiveness of strategies aimed at improving individual preparedness for terrorism.

Perceived social support among patients with burn injuries: A perspective from the developing world.

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Waqas, Ahmed; Turk, Marvee; Naveed, Sadiq; Amin, Atif; Kiwanuka, Harriet; Shafique, Neha; Chaudhry, Muhammad Ashraf

2018-02-01

Social support is among the most well-established predictors of post-burn psychopathology after burn. Despite a disproportionately large burden of burns in the developing world, the nature of social support among burn patients in this context remains elusive. We, therefore, seek to investigate social support and its biopsychosocial determinants among patients with burn injuries in Pakistan. A cross-sectional study of 343 patients presenting with burn injuries at four teaching hospitals in the Punjab province of Pakistan was conducted. Patient evaluation consisted of a multi-part survey of demographic status, clinical features, and social support as measured by the validated Urdu translation of the Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support (MSPSS). Multiple regression analysis was performed to evaluate associations between patient characteristics and MSPSS score. Mean overall MSPSS score was 57.64 (std dev 13.57). Notable positive predictors of social support include male gender, Punjabi ethnicity, burn surface area, and ego resiliency. Our study reveals a troubling pattern of inadequate social support among certain subgroups of Pakistani burn patients. Addressing these inequities in the provision of social support must be prioritized as part of the global burn care agenda. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Ltd and ISBI. All rights reserved.

Uncertainty about social interactions leads to the evolution of social heuristics.

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van den Berg, Pieter; Wenseleers, Tom

2018-05-31

Individuals face many types of social interactions throughout their lives, but they often cannot perfectly assess what the consequences of their actions will be. Although it is known that unpredictable environments can profoundly affect the evolutionary process, it remains unclear how uncertainty about the nature of social interactions shapes the evolution of social behaviour. Here, we present an evolutionary simulation model, showing that even intermediate uncertainty leads to the evolution of simple cooperation strategies that disregard information about the social interaction ('social heuristics'). Moreover, our results show that the evolution of social heuristics can greatly affect cooperation levels, nearly doubling cooperation rates in our simulations. These results provide new insight into why social behaviour, including cooperation in humans, is often observed to be seemingly suboptimal. More generally, our results show that social behaviour that seems maladaptive when considered in isolation may actually be well-adapted to a heterogeneous and uncertain world.

Social Inclusion and Community Participation of Individuals with Intellectual/Developmental Disabilities

Science.gov (United States)

Amado, Angela Novak; Stancliffe, Roger J.; McCarron, Mary; McCallion, Philip

2013-01-01

As more individuals with intellectual/developmental disabilities are physically included in community life, in schools, neighborhoods, jobs, recreation, and congregations, the challenge of going beyond physical inclusion to true social inclusion becomes more apparent. This article summarizes the status of the research about community participation…

Individual autonomy in work teams : the role of team autonomy, self-efficacy, and social support

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Mierlo, van H.; Rutte, C.G.; Vermunt, J.K.; Kompier, M.A.J.; Doorewaard, J.A.C.M.

2006-01-01

Task autonomy is long recognized as a means to improve functioning of individuals and teams. Taking a multilevel approach, we unravelled the constructs of team and individual autonomy and studied the interplay between team autonomy, self-efficacy, and social support in determining individual

Individual differences in the spontaneous recruitment of brain regions supporting mental state understanding when viewing natural social scenes.

Science.gov (United States)

Wagner, Dylan D; Kelley, William M; Heatherton, Todd F

2011-12-01

People are able to rapidly infer complex personality traits and mental states even from the most minimal person information. Research has shown that when observers view a natural scene containing people, they spend a disproportionate amount of their time looking at the social features (e.g., faces, bodies). Does this preference for social features merely reflect the biological salience of these features or are observers spontaneously attempting to make sense of complex social dynamics? Using functional neuroimaging, we investigated neural responses to social and nonsocial visual scenes in a large sample of participants (n = 48) who varied on an individual difference measure assessing empathy and mentalizing (i.e., empathizing). Compared with other scene categories, viewing natural social scenes activated regions associated with social cognition (e.g., dorsomedial prefrontal cortex and temporal poles). Moreover, activity in these regions during social scene viewing was strongly correlated with individual differences in empathizing. These findings offer neural evidence that observers spontaneously engage in social cognition when viewing complex social material but that the degree to which people do so is mediated by individual differences in trait empathizing.

Social media users have different experiences, motivations, and quality of life.

Science.gov (United States)

Campisi, Jay; Folan, Denis; Diehl, Grace; Kable, Timothy; Rademeyer, Candice

2015-08-30

While the number of individuals participating in internet-based social networks has continued to rise, it is unclear how participating in social networks might influence quality of life (QOL). Individuals differ in their experiences, motivations for, and amount of time using internet-based social networks, therefore, we examined if individuals differing in social network user experiences, motivations and frequency of social network also differed in self-reported QOL. Two-hundred and thirty-seven individuals (aged 18-65) were recruited online using the online platform Mechanical Turk (MTurk). All participants completed a web-based survey examining social network use and the World Health Organization Quality of Life Scale Abbreviated Version (WHOQOL-Bref) to assess QOL. Individuals who reported positive associations with the use of social networks demonstrated higher QOL while those reporting negative associates demonstrated lower QOL. Moreover, individuals using social networks to stay connected to friends demonstrated higher QOL while those using social networking for dating purposes reported lower QOL. Frequency of social network use did not relate to QOL. These results suggest that QOL differs among social network users. Thus, participating in social networking may be a way to either promote or detract from QOL. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.

The next waves: migration theory for a changing world.

Science.gov (United States)

Zolberg, A R

1989-01-01

In the last quarter of a century, migration theory has undergone fundamental change, moving from the classic "individual relocation" genre initiated by Ravenstein a century ago, to a variety of new approaches which nevertheless share important elements: they tend to be historical, structural, globalist, and critical. Historicization implies a constant modification of theoretical concerns and emphases in the light of changing social realities, and a commitment to a critical approach entails a view of research as 1 element in a broader project concerned with the elucidation of social and political conditions. The article uses elements from 2 major theoretical traditions - a modified world-systems approach and state theory - to project current trends. Global inequality is considered as a structural given. The article then reviews major topics, including the persistence of restrictive immigration policies as barriers to movement, changing patterns of exploitation of foreign labor, liberalization of exit from the socialist world, and the refugee crisis in the developing world. It concludes with a brief consideration of the normative implications of these trends.

Differential effects of social and novelty enrichment on individual differences in impulsivity and behavioral flexibility.

Science.gov (United States)

Wang, Maya Zhe; Marshall, Andrew T; Kirkpatrick, Kimberly

2017-06-01

Early life experience profoundly impacts behavior and cognitive functions in rats. The present study investigated how the presence of conspecifics and/or novel objects, could independently influence individual differences in impulsivity and behavioral flexibility. Twenty-four rats were reared in an isolated condition, an isolated condition with a novel object, a pair-housed social condition, or a pair-housed social condition with a novel object. The rats were then tested on an impulsive choice task, a behavioral flexibility task, and an impulsive action task. Novelty enrichment produced an overall increase in impulsive choice, while social enrichment decreased impulsive choice in the absence of novelty enrichment and also produced an overall increase in impulsive action. In the behavioral flexibility task, social enrichment increased regressive errors, whereas both social and novelty enrichment reduced never-reinforced errors. Individual differences analyses indicated a significant relationship between performance in the behavioral flexibility and impulsive action tasks, which may reflect a common psychological correlate of action inhibition. Moreover, there was a relationship between delay sensitivity in the impulsive choice task and performance on the DRL and behavioral flexibility tasks, suggesting a dual role for timing and inhibitory processes in driving the interrelationship between these tasks. Overall, these results indicate that social and novelty enrichment produce distinct effects on impulsivity and adaptability, suggesting the need to parse out the different elements of enrichment in future studies. Further research is warranted to better understand how individual differences in sensitivity to enrichment affect individuals' interactions with and the resulting consequences of the rearing environment. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Theory and methodology of social, political and economic processes risks determining in different countries of the world

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Yashina Nadezhda, I.

2015-06-01

Full Text Available The study deals with the problems of the theory and methodology of social, political and economic processes risks in different countries with relative indicators of the socio-economic development level, as well as the size and condition of the public debt. Developed by the authors the methodology of determining the risks of social, political and economic processes of public policy around the world revealed close relationship between socio-economic situation of the countries and their public debt. Within the framework of this methodology two groups of factors characterizing the socio-political and economic processes in the country are being developed. After that each exponent and indicator are being processed, using expert procedures. Maximum statutory values for tentatively referenced countries with effective and ineffective government policies are identified. Then standardization (specification and definition of integral (generalized indexes of socio-political and economic processes in the country are taking place. After that the ranking of countries by aggregated standardized ratio is arranged, taking into account the significance of the developed indicators. The final phase of implementation methodology is identifying risks of social, political and economic processes of public policy around the world. This is the ranking of countries by ratio of stability in public policy (stability of economic and socio-political processes in the country. As the result of implementation methodology the following output was received: what really makes a difference is not the amount of the country's debt, but how effectively it manages this debt, whether it has a goal to improve social and economic indicators. Practical testing methodology has proven that studied indicators fully characterize the development of the countries, their political, social and economic situation on the world stage.

Collaborative adaptations in social work intervention research in real-world settings: lessons learned from the field.

Science.gov (United States)

Blank Wilson, Amy; Farkas, Kathleen

2014-01-01

Social work research has identified the crucial role that service practitioners play in the implementation of evidence-based practices. This has led some researchers to suggest that intervention research needs to incorporate collaborative adaptation strategies in the design and implementation of studies focused on adapting evidence-based practices to real-world practice settings. This article describes a collaborative approach to service adaptations that was used in an intervention study that integrated evidence-based mental health and correctional services in a jail reentry program for people with serious mental illness. This description includes a discussion of the nature of the collaboration engaged in this study, the implementation strategies that were used to support this collaboration, and the lessons that the research team has learned about engaging a collaborative approach to implementing interventions in research projects being conducted in real-world social service delivery settings.

Social determinants of sex differences in disability among older adults: a multi-country decomposition analysis using the World Health Survey

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Hosseinpoor Ahmad

2012-09-01

Full Text Available Abstract Introduction Women represent a growing proportion of older people and experience increasing disability in their longer lives. Using a universally agreed definition of disability based on the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health, this paper examines how, apart from age, social and economic factors contribute to disability differences between older men and women. Methods World Health Survey data were analyzed from 57 countries drawn from all income groups defined by the World Bank. The final sample comprises 63638 respondents aged 50 and older (28568 males and 35070 females. Item Response Theory was applied to derive a measure of disability which ensured cross country comparability. Individuals with scores at or above a threshold score were those who experienced significant difficulty in their everyday lives, irrespective of the underlying etiology. The population was then divided into “disabled” vs. “not disabled”. We firstly computed disability prevalence for males and females by socio-demographic factors, secondly used multiple logistic regression to estimate the adjusted effects of each social determinant on disability for males and females, and thirdly used a variant of the Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition technique to partition the measured inequality in disability between males and females into the “explained” part that arises because of differences between males and females in terms of age and social and economic characteristics, and an “unexplained” part attributed to the differential effects of these characteristics. Results Prevalence of disability among women compared with men aged 50+ years was 40.1% vs. 23.8%. Lower levels of education and economic status are associated with disability in women and men. Approximately 45% of the sex inequality in disability can be attributed to differences in the distribution of socio-demographic factors. Approximately 55% of the inequality results

Personality maturation around the world – A cross-cultural examination of Social- Investment Theory

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Bleidorn, W.; Klimstra, T.A.; Denissen, J.J.A.; Rentfrow, P.J.; Potter, J.; Gosling, S.D.

2013-01-01

During early adulthood, individuals from different cultures across the world tend to become more agreeable, more conscientious, and less neurotic. Two leading theories offer different explanations for these pervasive age trends: Five-factor theory proposes that personality maturation is largely

What is it like to be a person with Schizophrenia in the social world? A first-person perspective study on Schizophrenic Dissociality--part 2: methodological issues and empirical findings.

Science.gov (United States)

Stanghellini, Giovanni; Ballerini, Massimo

2011-01-01

This is an empirical study exploring the personal level of experience of social dysfunction in persons with schizophrenia. We adopted a qualitative method of inquiry based on a review of transcripts of individual therapy sessions conducted for 52 persons with chart diagnoses of schizophrenia or schizotypal disorder. In our interviews, the experience of the social world in persons with schizophrenia emerged as an overall crisis of immediate, prepredicative, prereflexive attunement, typically accompanied by feelings of invasiveness and abnormalities in bodily and emotional sensations; a hyperreflexive mode for understanding the intentions of other persons, and a sceptical, aversive and sometimes utopian attitude towards sociality. Social dysfunction in persons with schizophrenia may reflect a disorder of the process of corporeal identification/differentiation that allows both for the intersubjective understanding through body-to-body attunement and for the demarcation between self and other. Copyright © 2011 S. Karger AG, Basel.

A Study of Individual and Family Barriers to Women's Political and Social Participation: Evidence from Shirez District in Harsin City

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Hossaein Agahi

2017-04-01

Full Text Available Today, in many countries of the world, in some cases women are barred from interfering in politics and social roles. Thus, still it is necessary to place women in political, social, economic and cultural activities. The purpose of this study is to examine individual and family barriers to women's political and social participation of the Shirez District in the city of Harsin. The research methodology used is descriptive-correlation and it is carried out by using a survey. The statistical population included the women older than 6 years in the Shirez District. A sample size of 333 person was determined by using the Kerejcie and Morgan table. They have been selected using the convenience sampling method with proportional assignment. Data analysis was done by using the Spearman coefficient and multiple regression analysis. The results showed that the political participation of women is in the medium level and their social participation is in the high level. Also, the results indicated that women believe that they are not able to participate in political affairs. The inability to communicate with others, the physical weakness and other problems, high volume of activities of women at home, high volume of activities in the agricultural sector and livestock, accepting dominance, lack of experience in political and administrative affairs and unwillingness of women compared to men in management are the main barriers of the political and social participation of rural women.

A rethink of how policy and social science approach changing individuals' actions on greenhouse gas emissions

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Young, William; Middlemiss, Lucie

2012-01-01

Social scientists from all areas are developing theories and testing practical approaches to change individuals' actions to lower greenhouse gas emissions. In the UK context, policy-makers, local authorities, companies and organisations are using these theories to invest resources to change individual's actions. The problem is that social scientists are delivering fragmented science based on narrow disciplinary views and those using this science are cherry picking whatever theory suits their agenda. We argue that with substantial GHG emission reduction targets to be achieved, a multidisciplinary application and view of social science are urgently needed.

Media discourses on the World Social Forums: Towards comparative analyses

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Jan Ekecrantz

2004-12-01

Full Text Available The reflections to be presented in this and a parallel article by Maia and Castro are based on ongoing studies of Brazilian, Swedish and Russian and Chinese media materials dealing with the World Social Forums (WSF in 2001-2004. The overriding question in this paper concerns the ways mainstream media of very different societieshave re-constructed the global and local issues addressed by the Forums. Of the four market-oriented economies, Communist China and Post-Socialist Russia stand out as being almost silent about the WSF, favouring economic globalization - seemingly at odds with cultural globalization. In Brazil and Sweden the dominant media harbourcontradictory discourses reflecting different political positions visavi the WSF.

Aggregate Social Discount Rate Derived from Individual Discount Rates

OpenAIRE

Kenneth F. Reinschmidt

2002-01-01

In the economic evaluation of large public-sector projects, an aggregate social discount rate may be used in present worth comparison of alternatives. This paper uses the assumptions that individual discount rates are constant over time and approximately Normally distributed across the affected population, with mean \\mu and variance \\sigma 2 , to derive an aggregate discount function that is exponential in form but with time-dependent aggregate discount rate \\rho (t) = \\mu - \\sigma 2 t/2, whe...

IMMANUEL WALLERSTEIN'S WORLD SYSTEM THEORY

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Cosma Sorinel

2010-12-01

Full Text Available World-systems analysis is not a theory, but an approach to social analysis and social change developed, among others by the Immanuel Wallerstein. Professor Wallerstein writes in three domains of world-systems analysis: the historical development of the modern world-system; the contemporary crisis of the capitalist world-economy; the structures of knowledge. The American anlyst rejects the notion of a "Third World", claiming there is only one world connected by a complex network of economic exchange relationship. Our world system is characterized by mechanisms which bring about a redistribution of resources from the periphery to the core. His analytical approach has made a significant impact and established an institutional base devoted to the general approach.

Individual and social determinants of obesity in strategic health messages: Interaction with political ideology.

Science.gov (United States)

Young, Rachel; Hinnant, Amanda; Leshner, Glenn

2016-07-01

Antiobesity health communication campaigns often target individual behavior, but these ads might inflate the role of individual responsibility at the expense of other health determinants. In a 2 × 2 full-factorial, randomized, online experiment, 162 American adults viewed antiobesity advertisements that varied in emphasizing social or individual causation for obesity through text and images. Locus for attribution of responsibility for obesity causes and solutions was measured, as was how these responses were moderated by political ideology. Participants who viewed text emphasizing individual responsibility were less likely to agree that genetic factors caused obesity. Conservative participants who viewed images of overweight individuals were less likely than liberal participants to agree that social factors were responsible for causing obesity. In addition, among conservative participants who viewed images of fast food versus images of overweight individuals, agreement that the food industry bore some responsibility mediated support for policy solutions to obesity. These findings, among others, demonstrate that awareness of multilevel determinants of health outcomes can be a precursor of support for policy solutions to obesity among those not politically inclined to support antiobesity policy. In addition, stigmatizing images of overweight individuals in antiobesity campaigns might overemphasize the role of individual behavior in obesity at the expense of other factors.

Analyzing Social Media Networks with NodeXL Insights from a Connected World

CERN Document Server

Hansen, Derek; Smith, Marc A

2010-01-01

Businesses, entrepreneurs, individuals, and government agencies alike are looking to social network analysis (SNA) tools for insight into trends, connections, and fluctuations in social media. Microsoft's NodeXL is a free, open-source SNA plug-in for use with Excel. It provides instant graphical representation of relationships of complex networked data. But it goes further than other SNA tools -- NodeXL was developed by a multidisciplinary team of experts that bring together information studies, computer science, sociology, human-computer interaction, and over 20 years of visual analytic theor

In God we trust? Neural measures reveal lower social conformity among non-religious individuals.

Science.gov (United States)

Thiruchselvam, Ravi; Gopi, Yashoda; Kilekwang, Leonard; Harper, Jessica; Gross, James J

2017-06-01

Even in predominantly religious societies, there are substantial individual differences in religious commitment. Why is this? One possibility is that differences in social conformity (i.e. the tendency to think and behave as others do) underlie inclination towards religiosity. However, the link between religiosity and conformity has not yet been directly examined. In this study, we tested the notion that non-religious individuals show dampened social conformity, using both self-reported and neural (EEG-based ERPs) measures of sensitivity to others' influence. Non-religious vs religious undergraduate subjects completed an experimental task that assessed levels of conformity in a domain unrelated to religion (i.e. in judgments of facial attractiveness). Findings showed that, although both groups yielded to conformity pressures at the self-report level, non-religious individuals did not yield to such pressures in their neural responses. These findings highlight a novel link between religiosity and social conformity, and hold implications for prominent theories about the psychological functions of religion. © The Author (2017). Published by Oxford University Press.

Response to hypothetical social scenarios in individuals with traumatic brain injury who present inappropriate social behavior: a preliminary report.

Science.gov (United States)

Gagnon, Jean; Henry, Anne; Decoste, François-Pierre; Ouellette, Michel; McDuff, Pierre; Daelman, Sacha

2013-03-01

Very little research thus far has examined the decision making that underlies inappropriate social behavior (ISB) post-TBI (traumatic brain injury). To verify the usefulness of a new instrument, the Social Responding Task, for investigating whether, in social decision making, individuals with TBI, who present inappropriate social behavior (ISB), have difficulty anticipating their own feelings of embarrassment and others' angry reactions following an ISB. Seven subjects with TBI presenting with inappropriate social behavior (TBI-ISB), 10 presenting with appropriate social behavior (TBI-ASB), and 15 healthy controls were given 12 hypothetical scenarios three times, each time ending with a different behavioral response. Subjects were asked to gauge the likelihood of their displaying the behavior in that situation (part A) and of it being followed by an angry reaction from the other or by feelings of embarrassment in themselves (part B). TBI-ISB subjects scored higher than TBI-ASB and healthy controls on a scale of likelihood of displaying an ISB. RESULTS regarding expectations of angry reactions from others and feelings of embarrassment after an ISB were similar among groups. Negative correlations between endorsement of an inappropriate behavior and anticipation of negative emotional consequences were significant for both TBI-ASB and control subjects, but not for TBI-ISB subjects. RESULTS suggest that the TBI-ISB participants were likely to endorse an ISB despite being able to anticipate a negative emotional response in themselves or others, suggesting that there were other explanations for their poor behavior. A self-reported likely response to hypothetical social scenarios can be a useful approach for studying the neurocognitive processes behind the poor choices of individuals with TBI-ISB, but the task needs further validation studies. A comprehensive discussion follows on the underlying mechanisms affecting social behaviors after a TBI.

Response to Hypothetical Social Scenarios in Individuals with Traumatic Brain Injury Who Present Inappropriate Social Behavior: A Preliminary Report

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Michel Ouellette

2013-01-01

Full Text Available Background: Very little research thus far has examined the decision making that underlies inappropriate social behavior (ISB post-TBI (traumatic brain injury. Objectives: To verify the usefulness of a new instrument, the Social Responding Task, for investigating whether, in social decision making, individuals with TBI, who present inappropriate social behavior (ISB, have difficulty anticipating their own feelings of embarrassment and others’ angry reactions following an ISB. Methods: Seven subjects with TBI presenting with inappropriate social behavior (TBI-ISB, 10 presenting with appropriate social behavior (TBI-ASB, and 15 healthy controls were given 12 hypothetical scenarios three times, each time ending with a different behavioral response. Subjects were asked to gauge the likelihood of their displaying the behavior in that situation (part A and of it being followed by an angry reaction from the other or by feelings of embarrassment in themselves (part B. Results: TBI-ISB subjects scored higher than TBI-ASB and healthy controls on a scale of likelihood of displaying an ISB. Results regarding expectations of angry reactions from others and feelings of embarrassment after an ISB were similar among groups. Negative correlations between endorsement of an inappropriate behavior and anticipation of negative emotional consequences were significant for both TBI-ASB and control subjects, but not for TBI-ISB subjects. Conclusions: Results suggest that the TBI-ISB participants were likely to endorse an ISB despite being able to anticipate a negative emotional response in themselves or others, suggesting that there were other explanations for their poor behavior. A self-reported likely response to hypothetical social scenarios can be a useful approach for studying the neurocognitive processes behind the poor choices of individuals with TBI-ISB, but the task needs further validation studies. A comprehensive discussion follows on the underlying

Measuring Perceived Competence and Social Acceptance in Individuals with Intellectual Disabilities

Science.gov (United States)

Vermeer, Adri; Lijnse, Margot; Lindhout, Marleen

2004-01-01

The results of a study examining the psychometric quality of a pictorial scale to measure perceived physical competence, perceived cognitive competence and perceived social acceptance by peers and caregivers in individuals with intellectual disabilities are reported. The scale was administered twice to 100 subjects. The stability of the scale…

Distrust As a Disease Avoidance Strategy: Individual Differences in Disgust Sensitivity Regulate Generalized Social Trust.

Science.gov (United States)

Aarøe, Lene; Osmundsen, Mathias; Petersen, Michael Bang

2016-01-01

Throughout human evolutionary history, cooperative contact with others has been fundamental for human survival. At the same time, social contact has been a source of threats. In this article, we focus on one particular viable threat, communicable disease, and investigate how motivations to avoid pathogens influence people's propensity to interact and cooperate with others, as measured by individual differences in generalized social trust. While extant studies on pathogen avoidance have argued that such motivations should prompt people to avoid interactions with outgroups specifically, we argue that these motivations should prompt people to avoid others more broadly. Empirically, we utilize two convenience samples and a large nationally representative sample of US citizens to demonstrate the existence of a robust and replicable effect of individual differences in pathogen disgust sensitivity on generalized social trust. We furthermore compare the effects of pathogen disgust sensitivity on generalized social trust and outgroup prejudice and explore whether generalized social trust to some extent constitutes a pathway between pathogen avoidance motivations and prejudice.

Zagreb during World War I: Historic newspapers as source for social history research

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Mirjana Jurić

2009-07-01

Full Text Available The aim of the paper is to reconstruct the social image of Zagreb during World War I by focusing on the influence of war circumstances on urban life, the living conditions and the position of children as the most vulnerable group of inhabitants, by using primarily newspapers as historical sources. In order to achieve as complete an image as possible, various publications were used (‘Narodne novine’, ‘Jutarnji list’, ‘Obzor’, ‘Novine’, ‘Hrvatska’, ‘Ilustrovani list’, ‘Katolički list’ and ‘Narodna zaštita’ which proved to be an inexhaustible source of information and contemporary observations on the above-mentioned issues. The paper tells about the general sense of insecurity in the city during wartime, the usual war motives (the wounded in the streets, life under war regulations, forced charity events and the consequences of the war situation (shortage of living supplies and poverty, begging and vagrancy, neglected children and war orphans. The paper has proven that historic newspapers are a first-class historical source. The essential scientific contribution of the paper is the reconstruction of part of Zagreb social history during World War I, highlighting that this part of Croatian history has still been poorly and incompletely researched.

Relations between social-perceptual ability in multi- and unisensory contexts, autonomic reactivity, and social functioning in individuals with Williams syndrome.

Science.gov (United States)

Järvinen, Anna; Ng, Rowena; Crivelli, Davide; Arnold, Andrew J; Woo-VonHoogenstyn, Nicholas; Bellugi, Ursula

2015-07-01

Compromised social-perceptual ability has been proposed to contribute to social dysfunction in neurodevelopmental disorders. While such impairments have been identified in Williams syndrome (WS), little is known about emotion processing in auditory and multisensory contexts. Employing a multidimensional approach, individuals with WS and typical development (TD) were tested for emotion identification across fearful, happy, and angry multisensory and unisensory face and voice stimuli. Autonomic responses were monitored in response to unimodal emotion. The WS group was administered an inventory of social functioning. Behaviorally, individuals with WS relative to TD demonstrated impaired processing of unimodal vocalizations and emotionally incongruent audiovisual compounds, reflecting a generalized deficit in social-auditory processing in WS. The TD group outperformed their counterparts with WS in identifying negative (fearful and angry) emotion, with similar between-group performance with happy stimuli. Mirroring this pattern, electrodermal activity (EDA) responses to the emotional content of the stimuli indicated that whereas those with WS showed the highest arousal to happy, and lowest arousal to fearful stimuli, the TD participants demonstrated the contrasting pattern. In WS, more normal social functioning was related to higher autonomic arousal to facial expressions. Implications for underlying neural architecture and emotional functions are discussed. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Social functioning and internalized stigma in individuals diagnosed with substance use disorder.

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Can, Ganime; Tanrıverdi, Derya

2015-12-01

The aim of this descriptive study was to determine social functioning and internalized stigma in individuals with substance use disorder. The study sample consisted of 105 patients diagnosed with substance use disorder according to the DSM-IV-TR diagnostic criteria. A Descriptive Information Form, Internalized Stigma of Mental Illness Scale (ISMI) and Social Functioning Scale (SFS) were used for data collection. Average total SFS score of the patients was 103.25±25.09 points, indicating an intermediate level of social functioning. Average total ISMI score of patients was 2.92±0.48 points, reflecting a high level of internalized stigma. A negative significant association was observed between the internalized stigma levels and social functioning of patients. These results suggest that rehabilitation of substance users should include counseling services in order to reduce internal perception of stigma and improve their social functioning. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

PROFILE SOCIAL CLASS OF INDIVIDUALS ASSISTED IN A SOCIAL ORGANIZATION IN THE CAMAÇARI-BA CITY

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Milene de Andrade Carvalho

2012-04-01

Full Text Available The city of Camaçari-Ba in the Bahia is considered the biggest territory of the region metropolitan area of Salvador-B. This population has presented considerable growth in the Human Development Index (HDI, with magnifying of the life expectancy and industrial cycle. The biggest social organization situated in the city and considered satate reference of social inclusion are develops entailed diverse actions to the participation of the city departments, except on actions to the healt secretariat. This study one is about a research of transverse whose objective was to identify the profile of 227 individuals assisted by social organization Prof. Raimundo Pinheiro, located in the mentioned city. The results had indicated the presence of a predominant age range next to 60 years, the relation between income and scholarity, the high frequency of chronic pain and relation enters the chronic use of drugs, activities of daily life and occupational activities. It is necessary that the activities of the social organization contemplate the logic of the intersectoral and include secretariat of health in its organizational politics.

Individual and social correlates of aggressive behavior in Lebanese undergraduates: The role of trait emotional intelligence.

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Sanchez-Ruiz, Maria-Jose; Baaklini, Amal

2018-01-01

This study investigates the relationship between Aggressive Behavior and individual factors, namely trait Emotional Intelligence, personality dimensions, emotion regulation and self-worth, as well as social factors, namely accepting/rejecting parenting styles and exposure to violence. The sample consisted of 252 university students in Lebanon (154 females), from 16 to 30 years old. Results from hierarchical regression analyses (controlling for age and gender and in the presence of social and individual predictors) showed that the Self-control and Emotionality factors of trait Emotional Intelligence were significant negative predictors of Aggressive Behavior while controlling for age and gender and in the presence of social and individual predictors). Exposure to violence and openness to experience also predicted Aggressive Behavior. Implications for future research and limitations of the present study are discussed.

Social Support in the Structure of Personality Resources in Individuals with Disabilities

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D.A. Leontiev

2015-10-01

Full Text Available The paper focuses on the issues of social support of individuals with disabilities and describes its role in the development and maintenance of subjective well-being of persons in situations of disability. A special external resource for overcoming unfavorable developmental conditions, social support is interlocked in a continuous relationship with psychological resources of personality. One of its distinctive features is that it implies the subject's activity aimed at overcoming difficult life situation on his/her own. When the person's bodily resources are insufficient (as it happens in situations of physical disabilities, the role of macro- and microsocial resources in supporting his/her well-being naturally increases. However, when both social and bodily resources are scarce, it is the individual's personality that stands in the gap. The research described in the paper explored the relationship between microsocial resources (support of family and friends, satisfaction with this support and psychological resources of resistance and self-regulation of personality. The sample consisted of 210 subjects (48 students with disabilities, 162 healthy subjects. The outcomes revealed certain differences between the subsamples with low and high rates of social support which suggest that the subjects' perceptions and evaluations of the support contribute to their psychological resources of coping and self-regulation, activating and/or reinforcing the existing potential of their personalities.

Social Development in Individuals with High Functioning Autism and Asperger Disorder

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Koegel, Robert L.

2007-01-01

Until recently, and even in many current research circles, social behavior in individuals with autism spectrum disorders (including those with high functioning autism or Asperger disorder) was considered to be unmodifiable. Mundy, Henderson, Inge, and Coman and McGee and Daly shed new light on this concept of intractability, suggesting that…

Factors contributing to the longitudinal development of social participation in individuals with cerebral palsy

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Tan, Siok Swan; van der Slot, Wilma M A; Ketelaar, Marjolijn; Becher, Jules G.; Dallmeijer, Annet J.; Smits, Dirk Wouter; Roebroeck, Marij E.

2016-01-01

Aims We aimed to determine factors associated with the longitudinal development of social participation in a Dutch population of individuals with Cerebral Palsy (CP) aged 1–24 years. Methods and procedures For this multicentre prospective longitudinal study, 424 individuals with CP aged 1–24 years

Activities of daily living (ADL) of single elderly individuals using social assistive programs in a rural community.

Science.gov (United States)

Yokokawa, Yoshiharu; Miyoshi, Kei; Kai, Ichiro

2017-01-01

Objectives　The proportion of elderly individuals living alone is increasing in Japan. Matsumoto city office provides social assistive programs such as home help, lunch delivery, life advice, and safety check telephone calls. The purpose of this study was to compare the level of ADL between the elderly using social assistive programs (the use group) and those who did not (the non-use group).Methods　We conducted a cross-sectional study at Shiga district of Matsumoto city in September 2014. A total of 128 elderly individuals participated in this study. Health volunteers asked these subjects to complete a questionnaire without assistance. Measurement items included lifestyle variables and social support networks. With respect to the frequency of use, we used questions that inquired about the use of the social assistive program. We included a set of instruments commonly used in the health assessment of elderly populations: functional capacity (Instrumental ADL, Intellectual Activity, Social Role), social support, nutrition (Mini Nutrition Assessment [MNA]) and depressive symptoms (Geriatric Depression Scale [GDS]).Results　The use group consisted of 24 elderly individuals participating in the social support program. The non-use group consisted of 89 elderly individuals living alone without programs. The mean age of those who completed the survey was 83.9±4.2 years for the use group and 82.3±4.3 years for the non-use group. Comparisons between the two groups did not show significant difference in terms of their intellectual activity, social role, emotional social support, and MNA or GDS scores. The use group was more likely to use the public transfer service and receive instrumental social support from children and relatives.Conclusions　By means of utilizing the public transfer service, and receiving family support, the elderly living alone who used social assistive programs could live independently. These findings suggest a need for improvement in the public

Individual Differences in the Resistance to Social Change and Acceptance of Inequality Predict System Legitimacy Differently Depending on the Social Structure

Science.gov (United States)

Reyna, Christine

2017-01-01

Abstract We propose that individual differences in the resistance to social change and the acceptance of inequality can have divergent effects on legitimacy depending on the context. This possibility was tested in a sample of 27 European countries (N = 144 367) and across four experiments (total N = 475). Individual differences in the resistance to social change were related to higher levels of perceived legitimacy no matter the level of inequality of the society. Conversely, individual differences in the acceptance of inequality were related to higher levels of perceived legitimacy in unequal societies, but either a relationship near zero or the opposite relationship was found in more equal societies. These studies highlight the importance of distinguishing between individual differences that make up political ideology, especially when making predictions in diverse settings. © 2017 The Authors. European Journal of Personality published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of European Association of Personality Psychology PMID:28706346

Individual Differences in the Resistance to Social Change and Acceptance of Inequality Predict System Legitimacy Differently Depending on the Social Structure.

Science.gov (United States)

Brandt, Mark J; Reyna, Christine

2017-01-01

We propose that individual differences in the resistance to social change and the acceptance of inequality can have divergent effects on legitimacy depending on the context. This possibility was tested in a sample of 27 European countries ( N  = 144 367) and across four experiments (total N  = 475). Individual differences in the resistance to social change were related to higher levels of perceived legitimacy no matter the level of inequality of the society. Conversely, individual differences in the acceptance of inequality were related to higher levels of perceived legitimacy in unequal societies, but either a relationship near zero or the opposite relationship was found in more equal societies. These studies highlight the importance of distinguishing between individual differences that make up political ideology, especially when making predictions in diverse settings. © 2017 The Authors. European Journal of Personality published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of European Association of Personality Psychology.

20 CFR 404.469 - Nonpayment of benefits where individual has not furnished or applied for a Social Security number.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-04-01

... not furnished or applied for a Social Security number. 404.469 Section 404.469 Employees' Benefits... or applied for a Social Security number. No monthly benefits will be paid to an entitled individual... or her Social Security number, or, if the individual has not been assigned a number, he or she makes...

Individual social capital and survival

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Ejlskov, Linda; Mortensen, Rikke N; Overgaard, Charlotte

2014-01-01

BACKGROUND: The concept of social capital has received increasing attention as a determinant of population survival, but its significance is uncertain. We examined the importance of social capital on survival in a population study while focusing on gender differences. METHODS: We used data from...... a Danish regional health survey with a five-year follow-up period, 2007-2012 (n = 9288, 53.5% men, 46.5% women). We investigated the association between social capital and all-cause mortality, performing separate analyses on a composite measure as well as four specific dimensions of social capital while...... controlling for covariates. Analyses were performed with Cox proportional hazard models by which hazard ratios and 95% confidence intervals were calculated. RESULTS: For women, higher levels of social capital were associated with lower all-cause mortality regardless of age, socioeconomic status, health...

[Coping skills and social support in German long-time survivors of rape in the end of World War II].

Science.gov (United States)

Eichhorn, Svenja; Klauer, Thomas; Grundke, Elena; Freyberger, Harald J; Brähler, Elmar; Kuwert, Philipp

2012-05-01

The aim of the study was to document perceived social support in a sample of German war-raped women in World War II. Furthermore the impact of this potential resource on today's posttraumatic symptoms should be pointed out. 27 women (M = 80.3 years, SD = 3.1 years) answered each a semi-structured interview and several questionnaires. Perceived social support shows clearly lower values than in the comparative samples. The measured degree of the variable in the present sample bears negative relationship to the actual posttraumatic symptoms of the women. In World War II sexually traumatized women could profit only few from the examined resource. The found negative relationship between perceived social support and posttraumatic symptoms shows additionally the potentially long-lasting impact of these form of coping on psychological health in trauma victims. © Georg Thieme Verlag KG Stuttgart · New York.

Individual Differences in Social Behavior and Cortical Vasopressin Receptor: Genetics, Epigenetics, and Evolution

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Steven M. Phelps

2017-10-01

Full Text Available Social behavior is among the most complex and variable of traits. Despite its diversity, we know little about how genetic and developmental factors interact to shape natural variation in social behavior. This review surveys recent work on individual differences in the expression of the vasopressin 1a receptor (V1aR, a major regulator of social behavior, in the neocortex of the socially monogamous prairie vole. V1aR exhibits profound variation in the retrosplenial cortex (RSC, a region critical to spatial and contextual memory. RSC-V1aR abundance is associated with patterns of male space-use and sexual fidelity in the field: males with high RSC-V1aR show high spatial and sexual fidelity to partners, while low RSC-V1aR males are significantly more likely to mate outside the pair-bond. Individual differences in RSC-V1aR are predicted by a set of linked single nucleotide polymorphisms within the avpr1a locus. These alternative alleles have been actively maintained by selection, suggesting that the brain differences represent a balanced polymorphism. Lastly, the alleles occur within regulatory sequences, and result in differential sensitivity to environmental perturbation. Together the data provide insight into how genetic, epigenetic and evolutionary forces interact to shape the social brain.

Developing social marketed individual preconception care consultations: Which consumer preferences should it meet?

Science.gov (United States)

van Voorst, Sabine F; Ten Kate, Chantal A; de Jong-Potjer, Lieke C; Steegers, Eric A P; Denktaş, Semiha

2017-10-01

Preconception care (PCC) is care that aims to improve the health of offspring by addressing risk factors in the pre-pregnancy period. Consultations are recognized as a method to promote perinatal health. However, prospective parents underutilize PCC services. Uptake can improve if delivery approaches satisfy consumer preferences. Aim of this study was to identify preferences of women (consumers) as a first step to social marketed individual PCC consultations. In depth, semi-structured interviews were performed to identify women's views regarding the four components of the social marketing model: product (individual PCC consultation), place (setting), promotion (how women are made aware of the product) and price (costs). Participants were recruited from general practices and a midwife's practice. Content analysis was performed by systematic coding with NVIVO software. The 39 participants reflected a multiethnic intermediately educated population. Product: Many participants had little knowledge of the need and the benefits of the product. Regarding the content of PCC, they wish to address fertility concerns and social aspects of parenthood. PCC was seen as an informing and coaching service with a predominant role for health-care professionals. the general practitioner and midwife setting was the most mentioned setting. Promotion: A professional led promotion approach was preferred. Price: Introduction of a fee for PCC consultations will make people reconsider their need for a consultation and could exclude vulnerable patients from utilization. This study provides consumer orientated data to design a social marketed delivery approach for individual PCC consultations. © 2017 The Authors Health Expectations Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

The roles of contextual and individual social determinants of oral health-related quality of life in Brazilian adults.

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Vettore, Mario Vianna; Aqeeli, Amal

2016-04-01

This study investigated the relationship between contextual and individual social determinants of oral health-related quality of life (OHRQoL) in Brazilian adults. Data of 4594 Brazilian adults aged 35-44 years from the 2010 Brazilian Oral Health Survey were analysed. OHRQoL was measured using the Oral Impacts on Daily Performance (OIDP). Contextual socio-economic characteristics at city level assessed in 1991 and 2000 included social deprivation measured by Human Development Index (HDI) and income inequality (Gini index). Individual socio-economic characteristics included family income, schooling and number of goods. Covariates were age, sex, ethnicity and clinical oral measures. Multilevel multivariable Poisson regression analysis was carried to investigate the association of contextual and individual social characteristics with OIDP extent and with each OIDP item. Eating and cleaning teeth were the most reported daily activities influenced by oral conditions. In the adjusted analysis, low HDI 1991 and individual social characteristics (lower family income and lower schooling) were associated with OIDP extent. Sex (females) and all clinical oral measures were also associated with OIDP. Adults living in the cities with low HDI 1991 were more likely to have impact on eating and sleeping, whereas living in cities with high Gini index 1991 increased the prevalence of impact on emotional status, work and social contact. Low income was associated with all OIDP items. Poor contextual social determinants and lower individual socio-economic position are associated with worse OHRQoL among Brazilian adults, even after adjusting for individual socio-demographic and clinical oral health variables.

Putting Social Media in Its Place: A Curatorial Theory for Media’s Noisy Social Worlds

OpenAIRE

Mary L. Gray

2015-01-01

The quest to make sense of media’s impact—what it does to us—dominates communication theories and popular discourse about media. But the impulse to collar, cultivate, domesticate, or measure the impact of media on individuals and society can have pernicious effects, too. This essay calls for a set of new analytical models to account for media as messy instantiations of social interaction transforming before our very eyes. We need to shift from a media effects paradigm that narrowly focuses on...

Stepping in to the social media world: reflections from both personal and institutional points of view (Invited)

Science.gov (United States)

Townsend, A. R.

2013-12-01

Like it or not, the world is increasingly run by social media. It has completely transformed the delivery of and access to news, and data show that half or more U.S. citizens now get their news from some form of social media. Interactive web tools determine political campaigns and help catalyze country-scale revolutions. They allow very personal access in ways both good and bad, as well as the rapid dissemination of both high quality information and complete falsehoods. But though they have plenty of downsides, their central and still-rising presence in society means that scientists who study any aspect of global environmental change (as well as those in most other areas of science) cannot afford to be social media luddites. In this panel, I will talk about my recent experiences in diving into this world, from both personal and institutional perspectives. For the former, I'll discuss some lessons learned in adding twitter and a blog to my professional life, and why I ultimately chose to have the blog reveal substantial information about me, not just the science I pursue. For the latter, I'll discuss launching the first blog in the history of the National Science Foundation and what that experience revealed about pushing social media advances on an institutional scale.

Aging and Variability of Individual Differences: A Longitudinal Analysis of Social, Psychological, and Physiological Indicators.

Science.gov (United States)

Maddox, George L.; Douglass, Elizabeth B.

This paper explores the relationship between age and individual differences. Two hypotheses were tested through the use of repeated measures of functioning in terms of social, psychological, and physiological parameters: (1) individual differences do not decrease with age, and (2) individuals tend to maintain the same rank in relation to age peers…

The effect of relationship quality on individual perceptions of social responsibility in the US.

Science.gov (United States)

Thornton, Joseph C

2015-01-01

Social responsibility (SR) has been of continuing interest in the U.S. and around the world. Organizations make a wide variety of SR decisions that represent differing viewpoints. While a number of definitions of SR exist, many of these definitions indicate that SR decisions may be viewed as existing of various facets, such as legal/regulatory, financial/economic, ethical, environmental, and voluntary. While drivers of SR have been proposed, there has been limited research at a micro-level on how individuals perceive SR activities by the organizations where they work. Based on a prior qualitative study (Thornton and Byrd, 2013) that found SR decisions are related to several traits and influenced by relationships, a model was proposed and tested in this research. The traits found relevant in the qualitative research were conscientiousness, especially in the sense of being responsible, and self-efficacy. Relationship quality was assessed based on positive and negative emotional attractors as proposed in intentional change theory. Perceptions of individuals in management and non-management showed that relationship quality mediated the effect of conscientiousness and general self-efficacy on the SR. Because there are multiple facets, the author made use of Carroll's (1991) pyramid of SR to identify activities that business owners and managers consider relevant. The findings indicate that conscientiousness is related to specific SR activities in the areas of legal/regulatory, ethical and discretionary dimensions while general self-efficacy is related to financial/economic and legal/regulatory dimensions. The presence of relationship quality enhanced the effects of both conscientiousness and general self-efficacy on the various SR dimensions. This suggests that individuals perceived SR activities along different traits and that enhancing these traits might improve perceptions of SR decisions.

The effect of relationship quality on individual perceptions of social responsibility in the US

Science.gov (United States)

Thornton, Joseph C.

2015-01-01

Social responsibility (SR) has been of continuing interest in the U.S. and around the world. Organizations make a wide variety of SR decisions that represent differing viewpoints. While a number of definitions of SR exist, many of these definitions indicate that SR decisions may be viewed as existing of various facets, such as legal/regulatory, financial/economic, ethical, environmental, and voluntary. While drivers of SR have been proposed, there has been limited research at a micro-level on how individuals perceive SR activities by the organizations where they work. Based on a prior qualitative study (Thornton and Byrd, 2013) that found SR decisions are related to several traits and influenced by relationships, a model was proposed and tested in this research. The traits found relevant in the qualitative research were conscientiousness, especially in the sense of being responsible, and self-efficacy. Relationship quality was assessed based on positive and negative emotional attractors as proposed in intentional change theory. Perceptions of individuals in management and non-management showed that relationship quality mediated the effect of conscientiousness and general self-efficacy on the SR. Because there are multiple facets, the author made use of Carroll’s (1991) pyramid of SR to identify activities that business owners and managers consider relevant. The findings indicate that conscientiousness is related to specific SR activities in the areas of legal/regulatory, ethical and discretionary dimensions while general self-efficacy is related to financial/economic and legal/regulatory dimensions. The presence of relationship quality enhanced the effects of both conscientiousness and general self-efficacy on the various SR dimensions. This suggests that individuals perceived SR activities along different traits and that enhancing these traits might improve perceptions of SR decisions. PMID:26113830

Understanding Students' Adaptation to Graduate School: An Integration of Social Support Theory and Social Learning Theory

Science.gov (United States)

Tsay, Crystal Han-Huei

2012-01-01

The contemporary business world demands adaptive individuals (Friedman & Wyman, 2005). Adaptation is essential for any life transition. It often involves developing coping mechanisms, strategies, and seeking of social support. Adaptation occurs in many settings from moving to a new culture, taking a new job, starting or finishing an…

Exploring the Role of Social Media and Individual Behaviors in Flood Evacuation Processes: An Agent-Based Modeling Approach

Science.gov (United States)

Du, Erhu; Cai, Ximing; Sun, Zhiyong; Minsker, Barbara

2017-11-01

Flood warnings from various information sources are important for individuals to make evacuation decisions during a flood event. In this study, we develop a general opinion dynamics model to simulate how individuals update their flood hazard awareness when exposed to multiple information sources, including global broadcast, social media, and observations of neighbors' actions. The opinion dynamics model is coupled with a traffic model to simulate the evacuation processes of a residential community with a given transportation network. Through various scenarios, we investigate how social media affect the opinion dynamics and evacuation processes. We find that stronger social media can make evacuation processes more sensitive to the change of global broadcast and neighbor observations, and thus, impose larger uncertainty on evacuation rates (i.e., a large range of evacuation rates corresponding to sources of information). For instance, evacuation rates are lower when social media become more influential and individuals have less trust in global broadcast. Stubborn individuals can significantly affect the opinion dynamics and reduce evacuation rates. In addition, evacuation rates respond to the percentage of stubborn agents in a nonlinear manner, i.e., above a threshold, the impact of stubborn agents will be intensified by stronger social media. These results highlight the role of social media in flood evacuation processes and the need to monitor social media so that misinformation can be corrected in a timely manner. The joint impacts of social media, quality of flood warnings, and transportation capacity on evacuation rates are also discussed.

Economic and Social Political Ideology and Homophobia: The Mediating Role of Binding and Individualizing Moral Foundations.

Science.gov (United States)

Barnett, Michael D; Öz, Haluk C M; Marsden, Arthur D

2018-05-01

Previous research has linked conservative political ideology with homophobia. Political ideology has also been linked to differences in moral decision-making, with research suggesting that conservatives and liberals may use different values in their moral decision-making processes. Moral foundations theory is a model of moral decision-making that proposes that individuals emphasize different domains in moral decision-making. Conservatives tend to emphasize binding foundations, while liberals tend to emphasize individualizing foundations. Utilizing large, ethnically diverse college samples, the purpose of these two cross-sectional studies (Study 1 N = 492; Study 2 N = 861) was to explore whether moral foundations mediate the relationship between political ideology and homophobia. These studies explored economic and social political ideology separately and utilized a two-factor model of moral foundations theory (individualizing and binding foundations). Results of both studies found that conservative economic and social political ideology was positively associated with homophobia. Study 1 found that both conservative economic and social political ideology had an indirect effect on homophobia through binding foundations. Study 2 found that both economic and social political ideology had an indirect effect on homophobia through both binding and individualizing foundations. Overall, the results were consistent with the notion that moral foundations may explain the relationship between political ideology and homophobia.

Poverty crisis in the Third World: the contradictions of World Bank policy.

Science.gov (United States)

Burkett, P

1991-01-01

Politicians, the mainstream media, and orthodox social science have all been telling us of a final victory of capitalism over socialism, suggesting that capitalism is the only viable option for solving the world's problems. Yet, the global capitalist system is itself entering the third decade of a profound structural crisis, the costs of which have been borne largely by the exploited and oppressed peoples of the underdeveloped periphery. While the World Bank's latest World Development Report recognizes the current poverty crisis in the third world, its "two-part strategy" for alleviating poverty is based on an inadequate analysis of how peripheral capitalist development marginalizes the basic needs of the third world poor. Hence, the World Bank's assertion that free-market policies are consistent with effective antipoverty programs does not confront the class structures and global capitalist interests bound up with the reproduction of mass poverty in the third world. The World Bank's subordination of the basic needs of the poor to free-market adjustments and reforms in fact suggests that the real purpose of its "two-part strategy" is to ensure continued extraction of surplus from third world countries by maintaining the basic structure of imperialist underdevelopment.

Social network predictors of latrine ownership.

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Shakya, Holly B; Christakis, Nicholas A; Fowler, James H

2015-01-01

Poor sanitation, including the lack of clean functioning toilets, is a major factor contributing to morbidity and mortality from infectious diseases in the developing world. We examine correlates of latrine ownership in rural India with a focus on social network predictors. Participants from 75 villages provided the names of their social contacts as well as their own relevant demographic and household characteristics. Using these measures, we test whether the latrine ownership of an individual's social contacts is a significant predictor of individual latrine ownership. We also investigate whether network centrality significantly predicts latrine ownership, and if so, whether it moderates the relationship between the latrine ownership of the individual and that of her social contacts. Our results show that, controlling for the standard predictors of latrine ownership such as caste, education, and income, individuals are more likely to own latrines if their social contacts own latrines. Interaction models suggest that this relationship is stronger among those of the same caste, the same education, and those with stronger social ties. We also find that more central individuals are more likely to own latrines, but the correlation in latrine ownership between social contacts is strongest among individuals on the periphery of the network. Although more data is needed to determine how much the clustering of latrine ownership may be caused by social influence, the results here suggest that interventions designed to promote latrine ownership should consider focusing on those at the periphery of the network. The reason is that they are 1) less likely to own latrines and 2) more likely to exhibit the same behavior as their social contacts, possibly as a result of the spread of latrine adoption from one person to another. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Psychological well-being among individuals aging with HIV: the value of social relationships.

Science.gov (United States)

Mavandadi, Shahrzad; Zanjani, Faika; Ten Have, Thomas R; Oslin, David W

2009-05-01

Utilizing a heterogenous sample of adults diagnosed with HIV infection, the current study sought to explore associations among age, various dimensions of social support, and psychological and functional well-being. Cross-sectional data capturing subjective and instrumental support, social interaction, behavioral health service utilization, and psychological well-being (ie, positive affect and depressive symptomatology), and physical functioning, were collected from 109 men and women living with HIV. To explore age group differences, participants were stratified by age (social interaction. However, older adults reported higher subjective support, which in turn was associated with lower depressive symptomatology, greater positive affect, and nonutilization of behavioral health services. More attention should be paid to the social environment of individuals diagnosed with HIV as the quality of social relationships may be particularly important for successful psychological adaptation to HIV.

PENGUJIAN COGNITIVE ABSORPTION TERHADAP KEPERCAYAAN-KEPERCAYAAN PENGGUNA UNTUK BERBAGI INFORMASI DI LINGKUNGAN VIRTUAL WORLDS

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Supardi Supardi

2014-04-01

Full Text Available Virtual Worlds (VWs are media-rich  cognitively  engaging technologies that geographically dispersed organizations  can use  as a cost effective workplace collaboration tool. Using  a sharing  information in virtual worlds environment, the aims of this study is to investigate cognitive absorption within individual beliefs about the technology of virtual worlds use. Cognitive absorption, theorized as being exhibited through the five dimensions of temporal dissociation, focused immersion, heightened enjoyment, control, and curiosity, is posited to be a proximal antecedent of two important beliefs about technology use: perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use. A model, based on Bandura's Social Cognitive Theory, was developed to test number of variables as the antecedents of cognitive absorption, which include social factor and individual like familiarity and personal innovativeness.A sample of 218 respondents participated in the research. In informing the results, the study utilized the partial least square model with the support for SmartPLS 2.0 software. Our findings suggest that beliefs about VWs usage can be influenced by cognitive absorption. Significant relationships were found between familiarity and cognitive absorption, and between personal innovativeness and cognitive absorption. Theoretical and practical implications are offered.

VIRTUAL SOCIAL LIFE AND RELATED MARKETING EFFORTS IN THE WORLD OF ONLINE GAMES

OpenAIRE

PANAYIRCI, Cevdet; YILDIRIM, Fazli

2010-01-01

As the Internet and the World Wide Web proliferate, a new form of communication and interaction has been made possible. People live increasingly hybrid lives where the physical and the digital, the real and the virtual interact. Massively multiplayer online role - playing games (MMORPGs), i.e. online role playing games, are a special medial and social phenomenon of our time and experienced a massive growth of players. Studies reveal that mmorpg players compose a heterogenic population and spe...

Social capital impact on individual health due to neighbours or the neighbourhood?

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Mohnen, S.M.; Groenewegen, P.P.; Völker, B.; Flap, H.; Subramanian, S.V.

2010-01-01

Background: We test two different perspectives on social capital and its association with health; a macro perspective focusing on resources on the neighbourhood level, and a micro perspective focusing on the individual level personal network. So far, most researchers inquired into these perspectives

Developmental Pathways for Social Understanding: Linking Social Cognition to Social Contexts

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Kimberly eBrink

2015-05-01

Full Text Available Contemporary research, often with looking-time tasks, reveals that infants possess foundational understandings of their social worlds. However, few studies have examined how these early social cognitions relate to the child’s social interactions and behavior in early development. Does an early understanding of the social world relate to how an infant interacts with his or her parents? Do early social interactions along with social-cognitive understandings in infancy predict later preschool social competencies? In the current paper, we propose a theory in which children’s later social behaviors and their understanding of the social world depend on the integration of early social understanding and experiences in infancy. We review several of our studies, as well as other research, that directly examine the pathways between these competencies to support a hypothesized network of relations between social-cognitive development and social-interactive behaviors in the development from infancy to childhood. In total, these findings reveal differences in infant social competences that both track the developmental trajectory of infants’ understanding of people over the first years of life and provide external validation for the large body of social-cognitive findings emerging from laboratory looking-time paradigms.

'Living between two worlds': who is living in whose worlds?

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McCoy, Brian

2009-08-01

Indigenous people have often been depicted as 'living between two worlds'. They have been described as living neither in their 'Indigenous' world nor in the 'Western' world but in some middle, liminal, or in-between 'world'. People in such situations are often described as 'caught' or 'suspended' and with obvious negative social, emotional and health consequences. What is this cultural space that is often described as 'being between two worlds'? Can Indigenous people develop their identity within the demands and values of contemporary Australian society? Most people who live within the context of modernity move across a mixture of different social, spiritual and cultural 'worlds'. By projecting particular and negative meanings onto Indigenous people and their journey of identity, non-Indigenous people diminish the value of Indigenous energies and initiatives in attempting to cope with life's diverse pressures and expectations. The perpetuation of such attitudes serves to undermine the efforts that Indigenous people make to engage modernity while at the same time attempting to maintain values that are of critical importance for their health and wellbeing. Consequently, non-Indigenous people can end up diminishing the importance of their own life transitions.

Study of the World War I Effects on the Social Structures of the Western Regions of Iran

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Shahin Ranaie

2017-09-01

Full Text Available During the World War I, the western district of Iran was the place of military and political conflicts of the Entente and Alliance states, owing to its strategic geographical location. On the one side, it was bordered by the Ottoman Empire, and on the other side it was located under the influence of Russia. In this research, we try to consider the impacts of the World War I on the social, economic and political spheres. Based on the results of the research, large numbers of people of this area were killed due to military combats, starvation, famine and disease during the war. Cities became the military base of the hostile powers and economic and social institutions such as municipal and farming were destroyed. The domination of the central government, and the authority of local governors and political stability were exhausted.

Distrust as a Disease-Avoidance Strategy:Individual Differences in Disgust Sensitivity Regulate Generalized Social Trust

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Lene Aarøe

2016-07-01

Full Text Available Throughout human evolutionary history, cooperative contact with others has been fundamental for human survival. At the same time, social contact has been a source of threats. In this article, we focus on one particular viable threat, communicable disease, and investigate how motivations to avoid pathogens influence people's propensity to interact and cooperate with others, as measured by individual differences in generalized social trust. While extant studies on pathogen avoidance have argued that such motivations should prompt people to avoid interactions with outgroups specifically, we argue that these motivations should prompt people to avoid others more broadly. Empirically, we utilise two convenience samples and a large nationally representative sample of US citizens to demonstrate the existence of a robust and replicable effect of individual differences in pathogen disgust sensitivity on generalized social trust. We furthermore compare the effects of pathogen disgust sensitivity on generalised social trust and outgroup prejudice and explore whether generalised social trust to some extent constitutes a pathway between pathogen avoidance motivations and prejudice.

Social support, volunteering and health around the world: cross-national evidence from 139 countries.

Science.gov (United States)

Kumar, Santosh; Calvo, Rocio; Avendano, Mauricio; Sivaramakrishnan, Kavita; Berkman, Lisa F

2012-03-01

High levels of social capital and social integration are associated with self-rated health in many developed countries. However, it is not known whether this association extends to non-western and less economically advanced countries. We examine associations between social support, volunteering, and self-rated health in 139 low-, middle- and high-income countries. Data come from the Gallup World Poll, an internationally comparable survey conducted yearly from 2005 to 2009 for those 15 and over. Volunteering was measured by self-reports of volunteering to an organization in the past month. Social support was based on self-reports of access to support from relatives and friends. We started by estimating random coefficient (multi-level) models and then used multivariate logistic regression to model health as a function of social support and volunteering, controlling for age, gender, education, marital status, and religiosity. We found statistically significant evidence of cross-national variation in the association between social capital variables and self-rated health. In the multivariate logistic model, self-rated health were significantly associated with having social support from friends and relatives and volunteering. Results from stratified analyses indicate that these associations are strikingly consistent across countries. Our results indicate that the link between social capital and health is not restricted to high-income countries but extends across many geographical regions regardless of their national-income level. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Individuals with autism spectrum disorders do not use social stereotypes in irony comprehension.

Science.gov (United States)

Zalla, Tiziana; Amsellem, Frederique; Chaste, Pauline; Ervas, Francesca; Leboyer, Marion; Champagne-Lavau, Maud

2014-01-01

Social and communication impairments are part of the essential diagnostic criteria used to define Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASDs). Difficulties in appreciating non-literal speech, such as irony in ASDs have been explained as due to impairments in social understanding and in recognizing the speaker's communicative intention. It has been shown that social-interactional factors, such as a listener's beliefs about the speaker's attitudinal propensities (e.g., a tendency to use sarcasm, to be mocking, less sincere and more prone to criticism), as conveyed by an occupational stereotype, do influence a listener's interpretation of potentially ironic remarks. We investigate the effect of occupational stereotype on irony detection in adults with High Functioning Autism or Asperger Syndrome (HFA/AS) and a comparison group of typically developed adults. We used a series of verbally presented stories containing ironic or literal utterances produced by a speaker having either a "sarcastic" or a "non-sarcastic" occupation. Although individuals with HFA/AS were able to recognize ironic intent and occupational stereotypes when the latter are made salient, stereotype information enhanced irony detection and modulated its social meaning (i.e., mockery and politeness) only in comparison participants. We concluded that when stereotype knowledge is not made salient, it does not automatically affect pragmatic communicative processes in individuals with HFA/AS.

The Investigation of Social Media Data Thresholds for Opinion Formation

OpenAIRE

Asher, D.; Caylor, J.; Mittrick, M.; Richardson, J.; Heilman, E.; Bowman, E.; Korniss, G.; Szymanski, B.

2017-01-01

The pervasive use of social media has grown to over two billion users to date, and is commonly utilized as a means to share information and shape world events. Evidence suggests that passive social media usage (i.e., viewing without taking action) has an impact on the user's perspective. This empirical influence over perspective could have significant impact on social events. Therefore, it is important to understand how social media contributes to the formation of an individual's perspective....

Friends with Faces: How Social Networks Can Enhance Face Recognition and Vice Versa

Science.gov (United States)

Mavridis, Nikolaos; Kazmi, Wajahat; Toulis, Panos

The "friendship" relation, a social relation among individuals, is one of the primary relations modeled in some of the world's largest online social networking sites, such as "FaceBook." On the other hand, the "co-occurrence" relation, as a relation among faces appearing in pictures, is one that is easily detectable using modern face detection techniques. These two relations, though appearing in different realms (social vs. visual sensory), have a strong correlation: faces that co-occur in photos often belong to individuals who are friends. Using real-world data gathered from "Facebook," which were gathered as part of the "FaceBots" project, the world's first physical face-recognizing and conversing robot that can utilize and publish information on "Facebook" was established. We present here methods as well as results for utilizing this correlation in both directions. Both algorithms for utilizing knowledge of the social context for faster and better face recognition are given, as well as algorithms for estimating the friendship network of a number of individuals given photos containing their faces. The results are quite encouraging. In the primary example, doubling of the recognition accuracy as well as a sixfold improvement in speed is demonstrated. Various improvements, interesting statistics, as well as an empirical investigation leading to predictions of scalability to much bigger data sets are discussed.

HIV infection duration, social support and the level of trauma symptoms in a sample of HIV-positive Polish individuals.

Science.gov (United States)

Rzeszutek, Marcin; Oniszczenko, Włodzimierz; Żebrowska, Magdalena; Firląg-Burkacka, Ewa

2015-01-01

The aim of this study was to investigate the relationship between the average HIV infection duration and the level of quantitatively rated post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms and social support dimensions in a sample of 562 Polish HIV+ adults. Possible moderating effects of social support on the relationship between the average HIV infection duration and the level of PTSD symptoms were also analysed. The results of this study suggest that the average HIV infection duration may intensify PTSD symptoms and deteriorate the perceived availability of social support in HIV+ individuals. However, a positive relationship between HIV infection duration and the level of trauma symptoms was observed only in the group of HIV+ individuals with low perceived available social support, but not in the group of HIV-infected individuals with high perceived available social support. This research provided some new insight into the psychological and social aspects of living with HIV. In particular, our results suggest that although HIV infection duration may intensify trauma symptoms and deteriorate social support, perceived available social support may act as a buffer against HIV-related trauma symptoms.

An analysis of the concept of competence in individuals and social systems.

Science.gov (United States)

Adler, P T

1982-01-01

This paper has attempted to present a unified conceptual model of positive mental health or competence from the perspective of individuals and from the perspective of social systems of varying degrees of complexity, such as families, organizations, and entire communities. It has provided a taxonomy of the elements of competence which allows the application of a common framework to the analysis of competence and to the planning and evaluation of competence building interventions at any level of social organization. Community Mental Health Centers can apply the model which has been presented in a number of different ways. At whatever level(s) the CMHCs' efforts are directed, the competence model presents a framework for analysis, intervention, and evaluation which enriches and expands upon more typical disorder-based formulations. By providing a framework which encompasses all levels of social organization, the model provides the conceptual tools for going beyond the individual and microsystem levels which have often constituted the boundaries of CMHC concern, and allows the CMHC to approach the organizational and community levels which must be encompassed by a competently comprehensive center. Application of the concept of competence to social organizations and to communities allows the CMHC to analyze and intervene at these levels. Finally, the concept of organizational competence separated into its various elements provides the CMHC with a tool for analyzing and evaluating its own environment and the competence of various aspects of its own functioning within that environment.

Is there a genetic contribution to cultural differences? Collectivism, individualism and genetic markers of social sensitivity.

Science.gov (United States)

Way, Baldwin M; Lieberman, Matthew D

2010-06-01

Genes and culture are often thought of as opposite ends of the nature-nurture spectrum, but here we examine possible interactions. Genetic association studies suggest that variation within the genes of central neurotransmitter systems, particularly the serotonin (5-HTTLPR, MAOA-uVNTR) and opioid (OPRM1 A118G), are associated with individual differences in social sensitivity, which reflects the degree of emotional responsivity to social events and experiences. Here, we review recent work that has demonstrated a robust cross-national correlation between the relative frequency of variants in these genes and the relative degree of individualism-collectivism in each population, suggesting that collectivism may have developed and persisted in populations with a high proportion of putative social sensitivity alleles because it was more compatible with such groups. Consistent with this notion, there was a correlation between the relative proportion of these alleles and lifetime prevalence of major depression across nations. The relationship between allele frequency and depression was partially mediated by individualism-collectivism, suggesting that reduced levels of depression in populations with a high proportion of social sensitivity alleles is due to greater collectivism. These results indicate that genetic variation may interact with ecological and social factors to influence psychocultural differences.

Social Web Identity Established upon Trust and Reputations

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Rajni Goel

2014-11-01

Full Text Available Online social networks have become a seamless and critical online communication platform for personal interactions. They are a powerful tool that businesses are using to expand among domestic markets. The increase in participation in online social networking can and has caused damage to individuals and organizations, and the issuance of trust has become a concern on the social web. The factors determining the reputation of persons (customers in the real world may relate to the factors of reputation on the social web, though relative to how trust is established in the physical world, establishing trust on the social web can be fairly difficult. Determining how to trust another individual’s online social profile becomes critical in initiating any interaction on the social web. Rather than focusing on content on the social network page, this research proposes and examines the application of user reputations to determine whether the trust should be issued on the social web. A top-level framework to establish trust in an identity on the Social Network Sites (SNS as a function of the users’ associations, usage patterns and reputation on the social web is presented.

Relationship between a Belief in a Just World and Social Justice Advocacy Attitudes of School Counselors

Science.gov (United States)

Parikh, Sejal B.; Post, Phyllis; Flowers, Claudia

2011-01-01

The purpose of this study was to examine how belief in a just world (BJW), political ideology, religious ideology, socioeconomic status of origin, and race relate to social justice advocacy attitudes among school counseling professionals. A sequential multiple regression indicated that political ideology and BJW were statistically significant…

The association between team-level social capital and individual-level work engagement: Differences between subtypes of social capital and the impact of intra-team agreement.

Science.gov (United States)

Meng, Annette; Clausen, Thomas; Borg, Vilhelm

2018-04-01

The study explored the association between team-level social capital and individual-level work engagement. Questionnaire data were collected from six companies in the dairy industry. Seven hundred seventy-two participants divided into 65 teams were included. In confirmatory factor analyses, we found a superior model fit to a four dimensional model of social capital: bonding social capital, bridging social capital and two types of linking social capital. The results showed a positive association between all subtypes of social capital at the team level and work engagement at the individual level. However, this association only remained significant for linking social capital in relation the workplace as a whole when we adjusted for psychosocial working conditions. The level of intra-team agreement in social capital score did not moderate the association between social capital and work engagement. In conclusion, the results provide further support for previous findings suggesting a positive association between social capital and work engagement. They add to the existing knowledge by suggesting that linking social capital in relation to the workplace is the most important explanatory variable for work engagement, thus emphasizing the need to distinguish between subtypes of social capital in research and practice. © 2018 The Authors. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology published by Scandinavian Psychological Associations and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Social learning and the development of individual and group behaviour in mammal societies

OpenAIRE

Thornton, Alex; Clutton-Brock, Tim

2011-01-01

As in human societies, social learning may play an important role in shaping individual and group characteristics in other mammals. Here, we review research on non-primate mammals, concentrating on work at our long-term meerkat study site, where longitudinal data and field experiments have generated important insights into the role of social learning under natural conditions. Meerkats live under high predation pressure and occupy a difficult foraging niche. Accordingly, pups make extensive us...

Digital information culture the individual and society in the digital age

CERN Document Server

Tredinnick, Luke

2008-01-01

Digital Information Culture is an introduction to the cultural, social and political impact of digital information and digital resources. The book is organised around themes, rather than theories and is arranged into three sections: culture, society and the individual. Each explores key elements of the social, cultural and political impact of digital information. The culture section outlines the origins of cyber culture in fifties pulp-fiction through to the modern day. It explores the issues of information overload, the threat of a digital dark age, and the criminal underbelly of digital culture. Section two, society, explores the economic and social impact of digital information, outlining key theories of the Information Age. Section three explores the impact of digital information and digital resources on the individual, exploring the changing nature of identity in a digital world. Written by a leading author in the field Focuses on digital information and its social, cultural and political impact is uniqu...

Social class rank, essentialism, and punitive judgment.

Science.gov (United States)

Kraus, Michael W; Keltner, Dacher

2013-08-01

Recent evidence suggests that perceptions of social class rank influence a variety of social cognitive tendencies, from patterns of causal attribution to moral judgment. In the present studies we tested the hypotheses that upper-class rank individuals would be more likely to endorse essentialist lay theories of social class categories (i.e., that social class is founded in genetically based, biological differences) than would lower-class rank individuals and that these beliefs would decrease support for restorative justice--which seeks to rehabilitate offenders, rather than punish unlawful action. Across studies, higher social class rank was associated with increased essentialism of social class categories (Studies 1, 2, and 4) and decreased support for restorative justice (Study 4). Moreover, manipulated essentialist beliefs decreased preferences for restorative justice (Study 3), and the association between social class rank and class-based essentialist theories was explained by the tendency to endorse beliefs in a just world (Study 2). Implications for how class-based essentialist beliefs potentially constrain social opportunity and mobility are discussed.

Interactions in multiagent systems fairness, social optimality and individual rationality

CERN Document Server

Hao, Jianye

2016-01-01

This book mainly aims at solving the problems in both cooperative and competitive multi-agent systems (MASs), exploring aspects such as how agents can effectively learn to achieve the shared optimal solution based on their local information and how they can learn to increase their individual utility by exploiting the weakness of their opponents. The book describes fundamental and advanced techniques of how multi-agent systems can be engineered towards the goal of ensuring fairness, social optimality, and individual rationality; a wide range of further relevant topics are also covered both theoretically and experimentally. The book will be beneficial to researchers in the fields of multi-agent systems, game theory and artificial intelligence in general, as well as practitioners developing practical multi-agent systems.

Social Structure and Individual Agency in Second Language Learning: Evidence from Three Life Histories

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Flowerdew, John; Miller, Lindsay

2008-01-01

This paper examines the issue of social structure and individual agency in language learning through the life histories of three young engineering graduates in Hong Kong. English is identified as an important form of cultural capital, which to a considerable extent determines the development of the three individuals, each of whom comes from a…

Social comparison and prosocial behavior: an applied study of social identity theory in community food drives.

Science.gov (United States)

Shipley, Andrew

2008-04-01

Social Identity Theory and the concept of social comparison have inspired research on individuals, addressing effects of personal and environmental factors in directing social attention. The theory's conceptual origins, however, suggest that social comparison may have behavioral implications as well. Such behaviors may include attempts by an individual to enhance the relative status of his ingroup on a salient dimension of comparison. Such behavior is referred to as "social competition." In two studies, the effects of social comparison and social competition were measured in the real-world environment of community food drives. Participants were aggregated by household; 600 households in upper middle-class neighborhoods in Eugene and Salem, Oregon, were contacted. In Study 1 of 300 households, it was hypothesized that inclusion of a social competition cue in requests for donation would significantly increase the likelihood of donation. This hypothesis was supported. Study 2 was done to clarify the possible role in a social comparison of perceived ingroup inferiority in the prior observed increase in donations. The inclusion of a social comparison cue in the donation request significantly increased donations in households of the second study. The findings suggest that researchers should expand study of the theory's behavioral implications, including the role of social comparison in prosocial behavior.

The Social Pathologies of Self-Realization: A Diagnosis of the Consequences of the Shift in Individualization

Science.gov (United States)

Hammershoj, Lars Geer

2009-01-01

The aim of this article is to inquire into today's social pathologies, i.e. the negative consequences of the developmental processes of society. In a dialogue with Axel Honneth, the article asserts that a shift has occurred in individualization, a shift that implies a fundamental change in social pathologies: Social pathologies no longer derive…

Why Are Some More Peer Than Others? Evidence from a Longitudinal Study of Social Networks and Individual Academic Performance.

Science.gov (United States)

Lomi, Alessandro; Snijders, Tom A B; Steglich, Christian E G; Torlo, Vanina Jasmine

2011-11-01

Studies of peer effects in educational settings confront two main problems. The first is the presence of endogenous sorting which confounds the effects of social influence and social selection on individual attainment. The second is how to account for the local network dependencies through which peer effects influence individual behavior. We empirically address these problems using longitudinal data on academic performance, friendship, and advice seeking relations among students in a full-time graduate academic program. We specify stochastic agent-based models that permit estimation of the interdependent contribution of social selection and social influence to individual performance. We report evidence of peer effects. Students tend to assimilate the average performance of their friends and of their advisors. At the same time, students attaining similar levels of academic performance are more likely to develop friendship and advice ties. Together, these results imply that processes of social influence and social selection are sub-components of a more general a co-evolutionary process linking network structure and individual behavior. We discuss possible points of contact between our findings and current research in the economics and sociology of education.

You may now kiss the bride: Interpretation of social situations by individuals with right or left hemisphere injury.

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Baldo, Juliana V; Kacinik, Natalie A; Moncrief, Amber; Beghin, Francesca; Dronkers, Nina F

2016-01-08

While left hemisphere damage (LHD) has been clearly shown to cause a range of language impairments, patients with right hemisphere damage (RHD) also exhibit communication deficits, such as difficulties processing prosody, discourse, and social contexts. In the current study, individuals with RHD and LHD were directly compared on their ability to interpret what a character in a cartoon might be saying or thinking, in order to better understand the relative role of the right and left hemisphere in social communication. The cartoon stimuli were manipulated so as to elicit more or less formulaic responses (e.g., a scene of a couple being married by a priest vs. a scene of two people talking, respectively). Participants' responses were scored by blind raters on how appropriately they captured the gist of the social situation, as well as how formulaic and typical their responses were. Results showed that RHD individuals' responses were rated as significantly less appropriate than controls and were also significantly less typical than controls and individuals with LHD. Individuals with RHD produced a numerically lower proportion of formulaic expressions than controls, but this difference was only a trend. Counter to prediction, the pattern of performance across participant groups was not affected by how constrained/formulaic the social situation was. The current findings expand our understanding of the roles that the right and left hemispheres play in social processing and communication and have implications for the potential treatment of social communication deficits in individuals with RHD. Published by Elsevier Ltd.

The Social World of Peer Rejected Children as Revealed by a Wireless Audio-Visual Transmission System.

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Asher, Steven R.; Gabriel, Sonda W.

This paper describes an observational methodology designed to permit increased understanding of the day-to-day social world of school children. The methodology was developed in the course of investigations of the extent to which children classified as rejected on sociometric measures actually experience overt rejection at school. Discussions of…

Social-emotional instability in individuals with Rett syndrome: parents' experiences with second stage behaviour.

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Munde, V; Vlaskamp, C; Ter Haar, A

2016-01-01

While the medical profession often terms behaviours in individuals with Rett syndrome (RTT) in the second stage as 'autistic-like', parents disagree with this description. The present study focuses on a comparison of parents' experiences with the social-emotional behaviour of the child with RTT in the second and subsequent stages. In collaboration with the Dutch Rett Syndrome Organization, 51 parents of children with RTT in the Netherlands took part in the present study. Parents completed an online questionnaire to clarify their experiences of the social-emotional behaviour of their children during and after the second stage of RTT. Both quantitative and qualitative analysis techniques have been used. The results of the paired-samples t-test show that parents see significantly less social-emotional behaviour in the children during the second stage of RTT than in the subsequent stages. Parents reported that their children did not seek as much interaction. From the parents' descriptions, it would seem that the children are willing but unable to interact with their environment. Like previous research, our study leads to doubts about the appropriateness of the label 'autistic-like' for the behaviour of individuals in the second stage of RTT. While behaviours of individuals with autism and individuals with RTT may resemble each other, quality and intentions may differ. Still, future studies are needed for further clarification. © 2015 MENCAP and International Association of the Scientific Study of Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Individual differences in the peripheral immune system promote resilience versus susceptibility to social stress.

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Hodes, Georgia E; Pfau, Madeline L; Leboeuf, Marylene; Golden, Sam A; Christoffel, Daniel J; Bregman, Dana; Rebusi, Nicole; Heshmati, Mitra; Aleyasin, Hossein; Warren, Brandon L; Lebonté, Benoit; Horn, Sarah; Lapidus, Kyle A; Stelzhammer, Viktoria; Wong, Erik H F; Bahn, Sabine; Krishnan, Vaishnav; Bolaños-Guzman, Carlos A; Murrough, James W; Merad, Miriam; Russo, Scott J

2014-11-11

Depression and anxiety disorders are associated with increased release of peripheral cytokines; however, their functional relevance remains unknown. Using a social stress model in mice, we find preexisting individual differences in the sensitivity of the peripheral immune system that predict and promote vulnerability to social stress. Cytokine profiles were obtained 20 min after the first social stress exposure. Of the cytokines regulated by stress, IL-6 was most highly up-regulated only in mice that ultimately developed a susceptible behavioral phenotype following a subsequent chronic stress, and levels remained elevated for at least 1 mo. We confirmed a similar elevation of serum IL-6 in two separate cohorts of patients with treatment-resistant major depressive disorder. Before any physical contact in mice, we observed individual differences in IL-6 levels from ex vivo stimulated leukocytes that predict susceptibility versus resilience to a subsequent stressor. To shift the sensitivity of the peripheral immune system to a pro- or antidepressant state, bone marrow (BM) chimeras were generated by transplanting hematopoietic progenitor cells from stress-susceptible mice releasing high IL-6 or from IL-6 knockout (IL-6(-/-)) mice. Stress-susceptible BM chimeras exhibited increased social avoidance behavior after exposure to either subthreshold repeated social defeat stress (RSDS) or a purely emotional stressor termed witness defeat. IL-6(-/-) BM chimeric and IL-6(-/-) mice, as well as those treated with a systemic IL-6 monoclonal antibody, were resilient to social stress. These data establish that preexisting differences in stress-responsive IL-6 release from BM-derived leukocytes functionally contribute to social stress-induced behavioral abnormalities.

How does social functioning in the early stages of psychosis relate to depression and social anxiety?