The critical theory of society of the Frankfurt School continues to excite interest and controversy. The critical theorists have deeply influenced contemporary social theory, philosophy, communications theory and research, cultural theory, and other disciplines for six decades. The dream of a interdisciplinary social theory continues to animate the sociological imagination. In recent decades th...

Decisions to help those in need are essential for human development and survival. Previous studies have demonstrated the "identified effect", in which one identifiable individual typically invokes stronger feelings of compassion and receives greater aid than statistical victim. However, this preference might be influenced by cultural differences. In the current study, Chinese respondents' ratin...

User-interface design is influenced by cultural differences. Cultures around the world have different patterns of social behavior and interaction that have led anthropologists and scientists of communication to develop culture models whose dimensions describe these differences. This paper describes an effort to collect expert opinion about these cultural dimensions and how they influence user-i...

0

Part of human cortex is specialized for cultural domains such as reading and arithmetic, whose invention is too recent to have influenced the evolution of our species. Representations of letter strings and of numbers occupy reproducible locations within large-scale macromaps, respectively in the left occipito-temporal and bilateral intraparietal cortex. Furthermore, recent fMRI studies reveal a...

Conditional inference patterns are influenced by the availability of counterexamples. We show that aside of the semantic counterexamples that are stored in long-term memory, there is an additional pool of counterexamples that stem from conversational implicatures. Experiment 1 showed that for young adults the retrieval of pragmatic counterexamples requires working memory resources. Experiment 2...

Alexander Rödlach is an associate professor of anthropology and psychiatry at Creighton University in Omaha, USA. He studies cultural explanations of HIV and AIDS in Zimbabwe and conducts interdisciplinary research exploring how access to integrated medical services for HIV/AIDS and TB in Zimbabwe is influenced by cultural perceptions of both diseases. Further, he collaborates with others study...

E-learning is gaining momentum in corporate settings as an alternative and supplementary solution to learning and performance problems. Users of e-learning applications and courses differ across regional, linguistic, and country boundaries and user requirements are strongly influenced by their local cultural perspective. Thus e-learning design needs to be sensitive to cultural parameters. Yet, ...