Recent studies of humanoid robotics (Brooks 1998) have claimed that natural communication with human beings requires that the artificial agent possesses two essential features: embodiment, sharing a structurally and functionally similar body with the interlocutor, and situatedness, being embedded in the same socio-cultural environment (Zlatev 1999). However, almost no specific methods have been...

Complete genital self-mutilation (GSM), mostly a non-suicidal behavior, is a rare occurrence among patients with psychotic and non-psychotic disorders. This case report is on a patient who, in the shadow of severe psychotic manifestations with overwhelming socio-cultural contents, completely self-mutilated his external genitals. Emergency surgical and psychiatric management improved his conditi...

Background: Behavioral, social, psychological and biological factors influence health and disease; and, to achieve professional competency, physicians should be knowledgeable about their society and its inhabitants' behavior. This knowledge will help physicians to become competent in communication, professional behavior, self-awareness, ethical reasoning, and understanding cultural and social d...

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...