This paper describes evidence that led to the concept of biological embedding and research approaches designed to elucidates its mechanisms. Biological embedding occurs when experience gets under the skin and alters human biological and developmental processes; when systematic differences in experience in different social environments in society lead to systematically different biological and d...

BACKGROUND A range of evidence suggests that the dominant culture associated with the economic systems of 'modern' societies has become a major source of pressure on global resources and may precipitate a third revolution in human history, with major implications for health and well-being. OBJECTIVE This paper aims to consider whether there are historical analogies with contemporary circumsta...

Subjective well-being (SWB), people's emotional and cognitive evaluations of their lives, includes what lay people call happiness, peace, fulfillment, and life satisfaction. Personality dispositions such as extraversion, neuroticism, and self-esteem can markedly influence levels of SWB. Although personality can explain a significant amount of the variability in SWB, life circumstances also infl...

The school-to-work transition presents a substantial regulatory challenge for youth in modern societies. Based on the action-phase model of developmental regulation, we investigated the effects of goal engagement on transition outcomes in a high-density longitudinal study of noncollege-bound German adolescents (N5 362). Career-related goal engagement was important for attaining a desired career...

The WHO's International Studies of Schizophrenia conclude that schizophrenia may have a more benign course in "developing" societies than in the West. The authors focus on this finding's most common corollary: cultural schemata are shaped by the transition from agrarian to industrial society. Developing societies are viewed as traditional, gemeinschaft cultures lacking the stigmatizing beliefs ...

In previous work [1] we presented a framework for the specification of open computational societies i.e. societies where the behaviour of the members and their interactions cannot be predicted in advance. We viewed computational systems from an external perspective, with a focus on the institutional and the social aspects of these systems. The social constraints and roles of the open societies ...

The aim of this discussion paper is to raise awareness the conceptual and practical limits mainstream practices in social measurement suggest possible directions for indicator construction, view effectively supporting policies sustainability well-being promotion. We start with a review epistemological issues raised by phenomena, investigate notion complexity, discuss critical link between it me...

Community-based approaches have been the mainstay of interventions to address the problem of child malnutrition in developing societies. Many programs have been in operation in several countries for decades and originated largely as social welfare, food security and poverty eradication programs. Increasingly conceptual frameworks to guide this activity have been developed as our understanding o...