This study's interest relies on adolescents' social representations of unprotected sex, more precisely on the relationship between the attitude towards the preservative and the reason attribution for its non use. 1386 secondary school students took part in the study, in the Brazilian cities of Florianópolis, Itajaí and Balneário Camboriú. In order to verify reasons attributed by the students, w...

We study an interesting phenomenon of social influence locality in a large microblogging network, which suggests that users’ behaviors are mainly influenced by close friends in their ego networks. We provide a formal definition for the notion of social influence locality and develop two instantiation functions based on pairwise influence and structural diversity. The defined influence locality ...

The Problem: This work explores socially situated learning by exploiting the types of interaction that arise between a nurturing caretaker and an immature learner. Here, the learner is an anthropomorphic robotic platform. Its primary sensory inputs include vision, audition, and joint rotation of its degrees of freedom. Its outputs include vocalizations, head and eye orientation, and facial expr...

Social cognition is a complex process that requires the integration of a wide variety of behaviors, including salience, reward-seeking, motivation, knowledge of self and others, and flexibly adjusting behavior in social groups. Not surprisingly, social cognition represents a sensitive domain commonly disrupted in the pathology of a variety of psychiatric disorders including Autism Spectrum Diso...

Maternal separation (MS) is an animal model mimicking the effects of early life stress on the development of emotional and social behaviors. Recent studies revealed that MS stress increased social anxiety levels in female mice and reduced peri-pubertal aggression in male mice. Estrogen receptor (ER) β plays a pivotal role in the regulation of stress responses and anxiety-related and social beha...

The innovations of science often point to ideas and behaviors that must spread and take root in communities to have impact. Ideas, practices, and behaviors need to go from accepted truths on the part of a few scientists to commonplace beliefs and norms in the minds of the many. Moving from scientific discoveries to public good requires social influence. We introduce a structured influence proce...