aim and background: meta-cognitive therapy is based on the principle that meta-cognitive is very important for understanding the way of cognition function and the way of producing our conscious experience about ourselves and the world around us. in this research it has been tried to study the effectiveness of this kind of treatment in improving depression patients. methods and materials: this c...

When do people take political action? What roles do values, elite rhetoric, and social norms play in motivating action? These questions are of obvious importance for those interested in political behavior; however, little work – other than research on participation – explores the impact of these various factors. This study offers a framework that generates hypotheses about the role of values, r...

iology is instrumental in establishing and perpetuating societal norms of gender and sexuality, owing to its afforded authoritative role in formulating beliefs about what is “natural”. However, philosophers, historians, and sociologists of science have shown how conceptions of gender and sexuality pervade the supposedly objective knowledge produced by the natural sciences. 1 For example, in des...

Background Advocacy coalitions play an increasingly prominent role within the global health landscape, linking actors and institutions to attract political attention and resources. This paper examines how coalitions negotiate among themselves and exercise hidden forms of power to produce policy on the basis of their beliefs and strategic interests.   Methods This paper examines the beliefs and ...

BACKGROUND Childbirth by cesarean section has increased at an alarming rate over the past few years in Iran. The present study was designed to explore pregnant women's beliefs about the mode of delivery in order to provide some suggestions for future interventions to increase vaginal delivery. METHODS This was a qualitative study framed by the Theory of Planned Behavior conducted in Tehran, I...

The necessity to model the mental ingredients of norm compliance is a controversial issue within the study of norms. So far, the simulation-based study of norm emergence has shown a prevailing tendency to model norm conformity as a thoughtless behavior, emerging from social learning and imitation rather than from specific, norm-related mental representations. In this article, the opposite stanc...

The study of norms (Ns) is recent but growing concern in the AI field (cf. [MOS92]; [SHO92]) as well within other formal approaches to social action, such as Game Theory (where theories of Ns began to appear long before, cf.[LEW69]; [ULL77]). The normative is an essential dimension of social life. An explicit model of such dimension is crucial for any theory of social action. Notions such as "s...