The doctor-patient relationship (DPR) is one of the most important subjects in medical sociology and health policy. Due to mutual understanding, undistorted DPRs not only result in satisfaction of both doctors and patients, but also help to reduce financial burdens for patients and the health care system. The purpose of this research was to identify a DPR based on the qualitative paradigm model...

There have been substantial changes in the relationship between the PLA and the emerging private entrepreneurs since China’s reform and opening-up. As a consequence, these relations have shifted from the old model of political divide to a new model of social reconciliation, which could be described by four major indicators: recruiting policy, civil-military mutual support movement, the private ...

Why do people distrust others in social exchange? To what degree, if at all, is distrust subject to genetic influences, and thus possibly heritable, and to what degree is it nurtured by families and immediate peers who encourage young people to be vigilant and suspicious of others? Answering these questions could provide fundamental clues about the sources of individual differences in the dispo...

Background: Adjuvant therapy after breast cancer surgery decreases recurrence and increases survival, yet not all women receive and complete it. Previous research has suggested that distrust in medical institutions plays a role in who initiates adjuvant treatment, but has not assessed treatment completion, nor the potential mediating role of physician distrust.Methods: Women listed in Pennsylva...

Trust networks among users of a recommender system (RS) prove beneficial to the quality and amount of the recommendations. Since trust is often a gradual phenomenon, fuzzy relations are the pre-eminent tools for modeling such networks. However, as current trust-enhanced RSs do not work with the notion of distrust, they cannot differentiate unknown users from malicious users, nor represent incon...

This article reports on a study of the use and form of greetings and closings in the emails of two New Zealand workplaces: an educational organization and a manufacturing plant. Using discourse analytic techniques, 515 emails were analyzed and a number of differences were identified. In the educational organization, where restructuring has resulted in low staff morale and a mistrust of manageme...

We present an abstract framework that allows agents to form coalitions with agents that they believe to be trustworthy. In contrast to many other models, we take the notion of distrust to be our key social concept. We use a graph theoretic model to capture the distrust relations within a society, and use this model to formulate several notions of mutually trusting coalitions. We then investigat...