BACKGROUND Individuals with Angelman syndrome appear strongly motivated by social contact, but there have been few studies that have examined the relationship between sociability and familiarity. In this study we compared social behaviour in Angelman syndrome when in contact with mothers and strangers. METHODS We systematically manipulated adult familiarity, eye contact and speech to examine ...

Implicit attitude research has expanded rapidly over the last decade and is seen as very promising as it counters biases present in much attitude research such as social desirability. However, most research in the area of intellectual disabilities has focused on explicit attitudes alone. This study examined implicit attitudes to this population and also examined their association with emotional...

BACKGROUND The aim of this study was to examine whether formal and informal social activities are associated with a lower risk of depression. Besides, we investigated which type of social activities may protect against late-life depression by gender using data from a population-based study of older Korean adults. METHODS Data for analysis were drawn from the 2010 Korean Longitudinal Study of ...

Contact networks are often used in epidemiological studies to describe the patterns of interactions within a population. Often, such networks merely indicate which individuals interact, without giving any indication of the strength or intensity of interactions. Here, we use weighted networks, in which every connection has an associated weight, to explore the influence of heterogeneous contact s...

In this paper, we focus on distributed file search over a delay tolerant network (DTN) formed by mobile devices that exhibit the characteristics of social networks. Current file search methods in MANETs/DTNs are either content-based or contact-based. The former builds routing tables for node contents but is not resilient to high node mobility, while the latter exploits node contact patterns in ...

At present Online Social Networks (OSN) usually not provide much support to the user for message filtering. To rectify this issue, a work is proposed which allows OSN users to have a direct control on the messages posted on their walls. Here the users can control the messages posted on their own private space to avoid unwanted messages displayed and they can also block their friend from friends...

Social resources can buffer against psychological distress following potentially traumatic events. Psychological distress can also lead to social resource deterioration. This longitudinal study evaluated whether baseline psychological distress symptoms and changes in these symptoms were associated with changes in social resources 5 months later among 96 adult male (52.6%) and female treatment-s...

The use of social and contact networks to answer basic and applied questions about infectious disease transmission in wildlife and livestock is receiving increased attention. Through social network analysis, we understand that wild animal and livestock populations, including farmed fish and poultry, often have a heterogeneous contact structure owing to social structure or trade networks. Networ...

The prejudice-reducing effects of intergroup contact have been well documented. However few studies have investigated the importance of the broader context within which contact occurs. The current study examined the predictors of social distance from Muslims in a large sample of Australian secondary school children (N = 980). Intergroup contact was an important predictor of reduced social dista...

In this paper, an interpersonal communication method based on tactile beats when devices are established physical contact will be proposed. Tactile beats are a well-known phenomenon that describes frequency modulation occurs when vibrating objects with similar but not same operating frequencies are physically connected. Vibrating signals at each configuration (no contact and contact with same/d...