The word 'Health' has enjoyed an enormous popularity with writers during the past quarter century. It was only during the second world war, the term 'social medicine' came into wider use. The concept of social medicine has given a new orientation of medicine to the changing needs of man and society. The vast majority of the population of the world still have no access to decent health care.

The World Wide Web has deeply changed our world and, over years, it has shaped our society. Social networks like Facebook strongly speed up the spreading of information among users, and allow people to communicate simultaneously with several individuals. As result, when studying sociological phenomena and socio-psychological behaviors, we have to consider the influence that the WWW has on peopl...

Despite the fact that most competence-relevant settings are socially relevant settings, the interpersonal effects of achievement goals have been understudied. This is all the more surprising in the case of performance goals, for which self-competence is assessed using an other-referenced standard. In the present research, performance-goals are conceived as a social tool for regulating interpers...

How can the dynamic relationship between society, technology and nature be understood in order to derive operational concepts for sustainable development? How can long-term structural change in socio-ecological systems be deliberatedly shaped? These are central questions for industrial transformation research. They also form the background to this paper which discusses some conceptual issues th...

Welfare-oriented analyses of economic outcome measures such as income and wealth in general rest on the assumption of pooling and equal sharing of resources by all members of a given household. Examining the distribution of income and wealth within the household context is almost always hampered by the lack of individual level data. Based on unique individual level wealth data from the German S...

Believability is a key issue for virtual agents. Most of the authors agree that emotional behavior and personality have a high impact on agents’ believability. The social capacities of the agents also have an effect on users’ judgment of believability. In this paper we analyze the role of plausible and/or socially appropriate emotional displays on believability. We also investigate how people j...

10 11 Abstract Collaborative learners are often meant to be guided by collaboration scripts to 12 identify, discuss, and resolve differences of opinion and knowledge. How learners engage in 13 and resolve conflict, however, may be highly dependent on learners’ cultural background. In 14 this article, we examine the extent to which a peer-critique collaboration script induces socio15 cognitive c...