BACKGROUND Smoking prevalence across high-income countries such as the United Kingdom has significantly decreased over the past few decades; this decrease, however, has not occurred uniformly across social strata. The highest concentrations of smokers are currently found in lower-income groups. Lack of access to material resources and differing social norms have been cited as possible causes of...

BACKGROUND Research in different fields of medicine suggests that communication is important in physician-patient encounters and influences satisfaction with these encounters. It is argued that this also applies to the non-curative tasks that physicians perform, such as sickness certification and medical disability assessments. However, there is no conceptualised theoretical framework that can ...

Understanding human behaviour in an automatic but non-intrusive manner is an important area for various applications. This requires the collaboration of information technology with human sciences to transfer existing knowledge of human behaviour into self-acting tools. These tools will reduce human error that is introduced by current obtrusive methods such as questionnaires. To achieve unobtrus...

Reports of substantial clonal mixing measured in social aphid colonies seem, on the face of it, to rule out population structure as an explanation of this enigmatic insect's social behaviour. To clarify how selection operates in aphids, and to disentangle direct and indirect fitness components, we present a model of the life cycle of a typical colony-dwelling aphid. The model incorporates ecolo...

We study effects of social processes’ representation in Internet auctions using laboratory experiments. The inability of participating parties to learn about each others’ bidding behaviour and to extend their comprehension beyond what is presented in auction sites today decreases the social influence compared to traditional face-to-face auctions. This reality is about to change since new intera...

UNLABELLED For the last three decades or so, we all have been living with the pandemic of HIV and AIDS. Human behaviour is complex; widespread behaviour changes are challenging to achieve. Understanding the dynamics of HIV transmission can not be separated from an understanding of the broader context of poverty, inequality and social exclusion which create conditions where unsafe behaviour flou...

Interactions among individuals in social groups lead to the emergence of collective behaviour at large scales by means of multiplicative non-linear effects. Group foraging, nest building and task allocation are just some well-known examples present in social insects. However the precise mechanisms at the individual level that trigger and amplify social phenomena are not fully understood. Here w...

Dispersal determines gene flow among groups in a population and so plays a major role in many ecological and evolutionary processes, from biological invasions to species extinctions. Because patterns of gene flow shape kin structure, dispersal is also important to the evolution of social behaviours that influence reproduction and survival within groups. Conversely, dispersal patterns depend on ...

Interactions among individuals in social groups lead to the emergence of collective behaviour at large scales by means of multiplicative non-linear effects. Group foraging, nest building and task allocation are just some well-known examples present in social insects. However the precise mechanisms at the individual level that trigger and amplify social phenomena are not fully understood. Here w...