Knowledge sharing within an organization allows it to develop a competitive advantage over its rivals. However, sustaining and motivating members of knowledge sharing groups to contribute knowledge is a challenge for many organizations. To address this problem, organizations have implemented new knowledge sharing tools such as Wikis to facilitate knowledge contribution, although these have had ...

We study the statistical properties of community dynamics in large social networks, where the evolving communities are obtained from subsequent snapshots of the modular structure. Such cohesive groups of people can grow by recruiting new members, or contract by loosing members; two (or more) groups may merge into a single community, while a large enough social group can split into several small...

Using a longitudinal, systematic random sample of 490 postings, this study analyzed the type of social support provided, the strategies used to solicit social support, and the themes on the top 5 Yahoo! eating disorder discussion boards. Optimal match theory was used as the theoretical framework for the study. Results suggest that messages providing informational support were more prevalent tha...

On the sandlot and on the battlefield, people divide into groups and fight, for bragging rights and for resources. Disputes are often between groups explicitly defined as different in terms of characteristics, values, and principles. A long social psychology tradition emphasizes such group differences as the source of conflict and bias.1 Yet, new experimental research indicates that a key expla...

Soldiers in foreign missions need to be able to interact with local people while taking their cultural and social norms into account. Serious games offer an opportunity to acquire the knowledge and skills to act appropriately, provided that the virtual characters behave according to the norms to be learned. This paper presents research on how to model the characteristics of social groups into t...

Conflict is one of the most (if not the most) studied and discussed subjects in the area of family communication. In fact, some authors suggest that conflict has been emphasized to an extent that it has eclipsed positive aspects of marital and family interaction (Bradbury, Rogge, & Lawrence, 2001; Roberts & Greenberg, in press). Why do scholars show so much interest in communication and family ...

Sleep is considered to be a recovery process of prior wakefulness. Not only duration of the waking period affects sleep architecture and sleep EEG, the quality of wakefulness is also highly important. Studies in rats have shown that social defeat stress, in which experimental animals are attacked and defeated by a dominant conspecific, is followed by an acute increase in NREM sleep EEG slow wav...

The credential phenomena in the labor market have been given competing theoretical interpretations in the sociological literature, notably structural-functionalism and the conflict theories. Education as an institutionalized form of socialization allocates people with differential talents into appropriate positions, motivating achievement in meritocratic selection. Yet the functions of educatio...

Interpersonal conflict related to sociocultural group membership was examined with a multicultural university sample. The Social Group Conflict Scale (SGCS), collective self-esteem (CSE), and Bradburn affect scale were administered to 248 university students. The current study attempted to replicate and extend the findings on social group-based conflict recently proposed by Dunbar, Sue, and Liu...