Disrupted sociability and consequent social withdrawal are (early) symptoms of a wide variety of neuropsychiatric diseases, such as schizophrenia, autism spectrum disorders, depressive disorders and Alzheimer's disease. The paucity of objective measures to translationally assess social withdrawal characteristics has been an important limitation to study this behavioral phenotype, both in human ...

Evidence from a growing number of organisms suggests that individuals show consistent performance differences in cognitive tasks. According to empirical and theoretical studies, these cognitive differences might be at least partially related to personality. We tested this hypothesis in the guppy, Poecilia reticulata, by comparing individuals with different degree of sociability in the discrimin...

This paper discusses how semiotic engineering can support the formulation of problems and solutions involved in handling face-to-face (F2F) sociability models in computer-mediated communication (CMC). Based on a case study where a group of users migrated through different types of CMC systems, we show that the designer’s model of F2F sociability is extensively signified and encoded into technol...

The research has been conducted on behavioural test results obtained from 143 dogs of pedigreed stock reared in the National Guide Dog School (SNCG) of Scandicci (Firenze, Italy), consisting mostly of Labradors and Golden Retrievers, but also including German Shepherds. All dogs have been reared under quite uniform conditions and tested individually under similar conditions. The results followi...

We investigated sex and age group differences in attitudes to oral health among school-age children using an Oral Self-Care Appraisal (OSCA) to systematically determine changes in oral health knowledge, attitude, and behavior across developmental stages. The subjects (n = 1584) were stratified after random sampling so that each school grade analyzed contained 88 boys and 88 girls. Factor analys...

The present study investigated the sociability and academic achievement as predictors of creativity among university students. The sample consisted of 300 undergraduate students (155 girls and145 boys) taken from pure sciences and arts and social sciences departments of BS Hons. classes. The age range of the sample was 18 to 24 years. Abedi Creativity Test and the translated version of Californ...