The increasing refinement of fMRI has given neuroscientists insights into how the living cortex participates in a host of human scenarios. This approach has had a dramatic impact on the study of social interactions. Suddenly fields as diverse as robotics, primate behaviour, neuroanatomy, neurophysiology and child psychology have a dynamic relationship to socially crippling conditions such as au...

Intergenerational Analysis of Social Interaction We explore the relationship between the social interaction of parents and their offspring from a theoretical and an empirical perspective. Our theoretical framework establishes possible explanations for the intergenerational transfer of social interaction whereby the social interaction of the parent may influence that of their offspring and vice ...

There are many reasons why people living in the same neighbourhood or working in the same firm behave similarly. Field studies have problems disentangling endogenous effects from contextual and correlated effects. We present an experiment that offers clean evidence on social interaction effects. We show that workers’ effort decisions are influenced by their coworkers’ efforts. Most existing beh...

We thought that, virtual reality cannot merely be reduced to a hardware system, another way to achieve the optimal experience, is to produce a sense of immersion associated to an emotional and social experience inside the virtual environment. We believe that Virtual Characters that express a social and emotional behavior in their interaction could produce a sense of immersion in the user that i...

Social interactions are a fundamental and adaptive component of the biology of numerous species. Social recognition is critical for the structure and stability of the networks and relationships that define societies. For animals, such as mice, recognition of conspecifics may be important for maintaining social hierarchy and for mate choice. A variety of neuropsychiatric disorders are characteri...

In recent years interactive narratives emerged as a new form of digital entertainment, allowing users to interact and change stories according to their own desires. In this paper, we explore the use of social networks as a way of interaction in interactive narratives. We present the interaction interface of an interactive storytelling system that allows users to interact and change stories thro...

A key aspect of service robotics for everyday use is the motion of systems in close proximity to humans. It is here essential that the robot exhibits a behaviour that signals safe motion and awareness of the other actors in its environment. To facilitate this there is a need to endow the system with facilities for detection and tracking of objects in the vicinity of the platform, and to design ...

Moreover, I claim that:  the framework should include a metamodel and the means to implement whatever sociotechnical systems are modeled and embed these systems in an environment that supports its operation.  the metamodel and the supporting environment may be understood as (electronic or artificial) institutions.  the sociotecnical systems may be understood as normative multiagent systems ...

There have been calls from several sources recently for a renewal of class analysis that would encompass social and cultural, as well as economic elements. This paper explores a tradition in stratification that is founded on this idea: relational or social distance approaches to mapping hierarchy and inequality which theorize stratification as a social space. The idea of 'social space' is not t...