Objectives In Japan today it is believed that there are a million young adults who refuse to work and who avoid social contact. This phenomenon, known as “hikikomori” (social withdrawal), has become a serious socio-psychological problem throughout the country. However, there has been little psychopathological consideration of this phenomenon, and no detailed discussion of diagnosis. In this art...

BACKGROUND Cultural diversity among patients presents specific challenges to physicians. Therefore, cultural diversity training is needed in medical education. In cases where strategic curriculum documents form the basis of medical training it is expected that the topic of cultural diversity is included in these documents, especially if these have been recently updated. The aim of this study wa...

ion in Situation Calculus Action Theories Bita Banihashemi York University Toronto, Canada [email protected] Giuseppe De Giacomo Sapienza Università di Roma Roma, Italy [email protected] Yves Lespérance York University Toronto, Canada [email protected]

This article presents a situation calculus formalism featuring events as primary and the usual actions as a special case. Events that are not actions are called internal events and actions are called external events. The effects of both kinds of events are given by effect axioms of the usual kind. The actions are assumed to be performed by an agent as is usual in situation calculus. An internal...

Imposing a markovian condition on the situation calculus enables the embedding of situation calculus theories into the DEVS (discrete event system speciication) modelling and simulation framework. DEVS has an algebraic formalism relying on classical systems theory, and has been used to good eeect in practical domains. The demonstrated correspondence between the situation calculus and DEVS is ba...

Many psychologists and philosophers have suggested that religious ideas emerge because they are motivationally attractive. This paper attempts to support a version of the motivational thesis by relying on religious creeds as a source of historical evidence. This simple source of evidence indicates that the cultural evolution of religious ideas is partly a function of the motivational attractive...

Research in cultural evolution has focused on the spread of intuitive or minimally counterintuitive beliefs. However, some very counterintuitive beliefs can also spread successfully, at least in some communities-scientific theories being the most prominent example. We suggest that argumentation could be an important factor in the spread of some very counterintuitive beliefs. A first experiment ...