Online health communities (OHCs) have become a major source of social support for people with health problems. Members of OHCs interact online with those who face similar problems and are involved in different types of social supports, such as information support, emotional support and companionship. Using a case study of an OHC among breast cancer survivors, we first use machine learning techn...

A smile is the most frequent facial expression, but not all smiles are equal. A social-functional account holds that smiles of reward, affiliation, and dominance serve basic social functions, including rewarding behavior, bonding socially, and negotiating hierarchy. Here, we characterize the facial-expression patterns associated with these three types of smiles. Specifically, we modeled the fac...

one of the main agreements among classical and contemporary sociologists is putting emphasis on the role and place of utilizing forms of capital in reconsidering identity limits and expansion of collective belongings. this article is based on conceptual framework (jenekins and bourdieu) and tries to study empirically the theory of the relationship between the amount of economic capital as well ...

E-Commerce’s virtuality poses questions concerning trust between buyer and seller. Web 2.0 formats have provided new complications for these questions. Companies are creating more social networking sites, experimenting with ways to use such networks for marketing purposes. This paper explores the issue of trust in social networking site transactions vs. those at more established e-commerce site...

In this paper we compare the social network structure of people talking about Crohn’s disease, Cystic Fibrosis, and Type 1 diabetes on Facebook and Twitter. We find that the Crohn’s community’s contributors are most emotional on Facebook and Twitter and most negative on Twitter, while the T1D community’s communication network structure is most cohesive. INTRODUCTION Social media has become a ma...

In this article we describe the Illinois statewide elder abuse social service program, which is unusual in its comprehensive approach to the assessment and documentation of reported cases of abuse and its extensive data monitoring system. Descriptive information on the number and types of cases of elder abuse reported to the system are presented, along with information on the amount of social w...

This short comment on Epstein's (2008) paper and on the response by Thompson and Derr (2008) argues that the symmetry between explanation and prediction cannot satisfactorily be discussed without making clear what prediction means—depending on which connotations the authors have with 'prediction' their arguments can or cannot be accepted. 1.1 Both Epstein (2008) and the authors of response (Tho...

BACKGROUND Current knowledge about associations between psychosocial factors and non-psychotic symptoms provide little information about their relationship to specific types of neurotic symptoms such as symptoms of fatigue, worry, phobic anxiety and obsessional symptoms. METHOD The British National Survey of Psychiatric Morbidity was based on a cross-sectional random sample of 10,108 househol...