background: despite significant reduction in global disease prevalence, leprosy still has a high rate of disability while its determinants are unfair and many of them are amendable. the objective of this study was to measure inequality of disability in leprosy in iran. methods: this was a cross‑sectional study (2006‑2007) on all living people affected by leprosy registered in w. azerbaijan prov...

Background: Despite the large number of studies conducted on breastfeeding, no studies have yet examined the direct and indirect effects of socio-personal factors and mental health on breastfeeding. Aim: This study aimed to analyze of the effects of mental health and socio-personal factors on breastfeeding in infants aged less than six months. Method: This analytical cross-sectional study was c...

Despite the fact that most competence-relevant settings are socially relevant settings, the interpersonal effects of achievement goals have been understudied. This is all the more surprising in the case of performance goals, for which self-competence is assessed using an other-referenced standard. In the present research, performance-goals are conceived as a social tool for regulating interpers...

How can the dynamic relationship between society, technology and nature be understood in order to derive operational concepts for sustainable development? How can long-term structural change in socio-ecological systems be deliberatedly shaped? These are central questions for industrial transformation research. They also form the background to this paper which discusses some conceptual issues th...

Welfare-oriented analyses of economic outcome measures such as income and wealth in general rest on the assumption of pooling and equal sharing of resources by all members of a given household. Examining the distribution of income and wealth within the household context is almost always hampered by the lack of individual level data. Based on unique individual level wealth data from the German S...

Believability is a key issue for virtual agents. Most of the authors agree that emotional behavior and personality have a high impact on agents’ believability. The social capacities of the agents also have an effect on users’ judgment of believability. In this paper we analyze the role of plausible and/or socially appropriate emotional displays on believability. We also investigate how people j...

10 11 Abstract Collaborative learners are often meant to be guided by collaboration scripts to 12 identify, discuss, and resolve differences of opinion and knowledge. How learners engage in 13 and resolve conflict, however, may be highly dependent on learners’ cultural background. In 14 this article, we examine the extent to which a peer-critique collaboration script induces socio15 cognitive c...

This paper examines the facilitator, group member, and system roles as a complete socio-technical system. Each of these three components of the sociotechnical system is discussed in terms of the roles that they play within the context of the group meeting. This research draws from previous work on "group roles" to define how these "roles" interact to accomplish effective group per formance. The...