We present a theory of cultural evolution based upon a renormalization group scheme. We consider rational but cognitively limited agents who optimize their decision making process by iteratively updating and refining the mental representation of their natural and social environment. These representations are built around the most important degrees of freedom of their world. Cultural coherence a...

........ ................................................................................................................ vi Chapter One Introduction ................................................................................................ 1 Problem Statement ............................................................................................... 2 Definition of Concepts ............

In order to expand our knowledge of how health inequalities are generated, a broader range of possible mechanisms has to be studied. Two mechanisms of potential importance here are childhood conditions and sense of coherence. Drawing on theoretical arguments and empirical findings in these two research fields, a conceptual model of the relationships between childhood conditions, sense of cohere...

In spite of a substantive claim for the adoption of agentbased models for social simulation, a shared framework to model key reasoning capabilities of social agents has not been developed yet. To fill this gap, we propose a new model, whereby agents belonging to a social network reason and interact argumentatively, and use trust and coherence setting in order to decide whether and how to revise...

In this paper, we conducted a systematic comparative analysis of language in different contexts of bursty topics, including web search, news media, blogging, and social bookmarking. We analyze (1) the content similarity and predictability between contexts, (2) the coverage of search content by each context, and (3) the intrinsic coherence of information in each context. Our experiments show tha...

In a seminal contribution, Hansson (1976) demonstrates that the collection of decisive coalitions associated with an Arrovian social welfare function forms an ultrafilter. He goes on to show that if transitivity is weakened to quasi-transitivity as the coherence property imposed on a social relation, the set of decisive coalitions is a filter. We examine the notion of decisiveness with acyclica...

OBJECTIVE Major depressive disorder (MDD) is one of the most common psychiatric disorders which affects married couples frequently.The present study aims to explain the role of family processes, social support and demographic factors in marital satisfaction of women with Major Depressive Disorder (MDD). METHOD In this cross-sectional study, 188 women with MDD were randomly selected among the ...

This paper considers some of the policy issues associated with social, emotional and behavioural difficulties (SEBD) in young people. After briefly defining SEBD the paper goes on to consider some of the ways in which SEBD impinges on different areas of social policy. Emphasis is placed on the need for coherence between different policy areas. Particular attention is given to the area of educat...