Social smiling is universally regarded as being an infant's first facial expression of pleasure. Underlying co-constructivist emotion theories are the assumptions that the emergence of social smiling is bound to experiences of face-to-face interactions with caregivers and the impact of two developmental mechanisms--maternal and infant imitation. We analyzed mother-infant interactions from two d...

Address behavior is governed by politeness phenomenon which is culturally bound. This paper attempts to draw a cross-cultural comparison between Chinese and English address forms and, going beneath the surface, explore the cultural differences in value systems and their underlying philosophical sources. The study will help people develop a fuller understanding of the meanings of the address ter...

We use qualitative data to analyze the key elements of the price adjustment processes used at a large industrial manufacturer and several of its major customers. We focus on a specific episode, a price cut, which most vividly exemplifies the themes that emerge from our data. In the specific episode, market forces clearly dictate that the firm should cut prices, and everyone in the firm agrees w...

We characterize the joint dynamics of expected returns, stochastic volatility, and prices. In particular, with a given dividend process, one of the processes of the expected return, the stock volatility, or the price-dividend ratio fully determines the other two. For example, the stock volatility determines the expected return and the price-dividend ratio. By parameterizing one, or more, of exp...

Using the Nielsen Consumer Panel, we document the presence of significant price heterogeneity in the United States. Poor households pay lower prices for the same products, mostly because they shop more at discount stores. However, we also find that price heterogeneity has a very small impact on the measurement of consumption inequality. Adjusting nominal household expenditures by imposing that ...

Various researchers (i.e., Singelis, Triandis, Bhawuk, & Gelfand,1995; Triandis & Gelfand, 1998) have suggested that the cultural variables of horizontal and vertical individualism and collectivism correspond to Fiske’s (1991, 1992) relational models of collectivism, authority ranking, equality matching, and market pricing. In this study, we tested this claim in a cross-cultural comparison betw...

Background: Psoriasis is a common and genetically determined skin disease, which is frequent throughout the world. Objective: To perform a descriptive clinical study of 200 cases of psoriasis in Ahwaz. Patients and Methods: This study was performed from November 1997 to April 1999 on 200 psoriatic patients attended a private skin clinic in Ahwaz. Data were collected from patients and entered in...

Some new oscillation criteria are presented by transforming this equation to the first-order delayed and advanced differential equations. Employing suitable comparison theorems we establish new results on oscillation of the studied equation. Assumptions in our theorems are less restrictive, these criteria improve those in the recent paper [Appl. Math. Comput., 202 (2008), 102-112] and related c...