For Archer, everyday life is shaped, in part, by the interplay of social and cultural systems [2]. A Social System is an array of positions, occupied by persons, and a distribution of status (or ranking) over that array. A Cultural System is conceived as a collection of belief-informing propositions. A Socio-Cultural System is Archer’s abstraction from everyday life and is analyzable as the int...

In this paper, we examine whether embodied conversational agents can be used to implement socio-cultural markers. We investigate whether the accent of a virtual character, as a marker for culture, can cause cultural frame-shifts in individuals. We report an experiment, performed among bicultural and monocultural individuals, in which we test the above hypothesis. Our results show that a virtual...

OBJECTIVES To generate the Persian version of the Perceived Socio-cultural Pressure Scale. METHODS The study, done in Kerman, Iran, from November 2010 to February 2011, comprised 1200 volunteers. After translation and back-translation, the questionnaire's internal consistency, criterion and construct validity were evaluated, individual and global scores of the Perceived Socio-cultural Pressur...

The study of socio-economic inequalities from a cross-national perspective has been hampered by the lack of adequate common indices of socioeconomic status that can be used in a self-report survey instrument. This paper examines the construction and the properties of global social indexes in general, and of the Family Affluence Scale (henceforth FAS) in particular. The paper proposes a new stra...

as a living specimen of the eclectic but sensitive approach being promoted in the anthology. Eight sections entail: "the way we are, disease and mental illness, doctors and psychiatrists, nurses and patients, healing, last things, research, and ethics and purpose": not all medical categories in their own right and each with sub-sections. There is an advantage to the non-chronological arrangemen...

An epidemiological survey of subjects aged over 50 in a sub urban area of India was carried out. 406 subjects aged over 50were examined by making house visits. 13 were diagnosed as suffering from organic psychoses, 3 from schioephrenia, 98 from depression and 28 from other functional disorder. Depression was the commonest diagnosis made. 24.1% of the subjects aged over 50 in the community were ...

The main aim of the Gezondheid en Levens Omstandigheden Bevolking Eindhoven en omstreken (GLOBE) study (the letters of whose name represent the first letters of the Dutch acronym for Health and Living Conditions of the Population of Eindhoven and surroundings) is to quantitatively assess mechanisms and factors explaining socio-economic inequalities in health in the Netherlands. Baseline data fo...