Language plays a crucial role in the formation and categorization of one’s ethnic identity. Recent work on linguistic accent emphasizes the role of accent in person perception and social categorization, demonstrating that accent serves as a meaningful ethnic category indicator. In this paper, we examine whether accent can be used to implement socio-cultural markers. We investigate whether the a...

Recent studies of humanoid robotics (Brooks 1998) have claimed that natural communication with human beings requires that the artificial agent possesses two essential features: embodiment, sharing a structurally and functionally similar body with the interlocutor, and situatedness, being embedded in the same socio-cultural environment (Zlatev 1999). However, almost no specific methods have been...

In the global phenomenon of widening participation policy in higher education, lower retention rates for students from less advantaged socio-economic circumstances have potential to undermine the social inclusion agenda of HE. This might be an issue in Europe but is not necessarily the case elsewhere. In this paper we consider statistical data on Australian university students from underreprese...

Complete genital self-mutilation (GSM), mostly a non-suicidal behavior, is a rare occurrence among patients with psychotic and non-psychotic disorders. This case report is on a patient who, in the shadow of severe psychotic manifestations with overwhelming socio-cultural contents, completely self-mutilated his external genitals. Emergency surgical and psychiatric management improved his conditi...

For Archer, everyday life is shaped, in part, by the interplay of social and cultural systems [2]. A Social System is an array of positions, occupied by persons, and a distribution of status (or ranking) over that array. A Cultural System is conceived as a collection of belief-informing propositions. A Socio-Cultural System is Archer’s abstraction from everyday life and is analyzable as the int...

Research is an interesting activity and an interesting word. Research can be defined inseveral ways and each definition allows for a different take on what is good research andwhat is essential for research. One definition of research is that it is ‘the systematic studyof a phenomenon (or several phenomena) that results in new understanding, newmeaning, or new knowledge’. When I...

In this paper, we examine whether embodied conversational agents can be used to implement socio-cultural markers. We investigate whether the accent of a virtual character, as a marker for culture, can cause cultural frame-shifts in individuals. We report an experiment, performed among bicultural and monocultural individuals, in which we test the above hypothesis. Our results show that a virtual...

Group decision-making problem is a common and crucial human activity. By the characteristic of group decision making process, the model of multi-attribute group decision making (MAGDM) process based on evidence theory is proposed. The interacting process for MAGDM is analyzed, and the consensus analysis and the improving approach in group experts’ decision making based on similarity is given. B...

OBJECTIVES To generate the Persian version of the Perceived Socio-cultural Pressure Scale. METHODS The study, done in Kerman, Iran, from November 2010 to February 2011, comprised 1200 volunteers. After translation and back-translation, the questionnaire's internal consistency, criterion and construct validity were evaluated, individual and global scores of the Perceived Socio-cultural Pressur...