Successful human social interactions depend upon the transmission of verbal and non-verbal signals from one individual to another. Non-verbal social communication is realized through our ability to read and understand information present in other people's actions. It has been proposed that employing the same motor programs, we use to execute an action when observing the same action underlies th...

Affirmative action is a controversial and often poorly understood policy. It is also a policy that has been widely studied by social scientists. In this review, we outline how affirmative action operates in employment and education settings and consider the major points of controversy. In addition, we detail the contributions of psychologists and other social scientists in helping to demonstrat...

Significant attention has been devoted to developing intersectoral strategies to reduce health inequities; however, these strategies have largely neglected to consider how equity in health ought to be weighted and balanced with the pursuit of equity for other social goods (eg, education equity). Research in this domain is crucial, as the health sector’s pursuit of health equity may be at odds w...

Optimal control models of biological movements are used to account for those internal variables that constrain voluntary goal-directed actions. They, however, do not take into account external environmental constraints as those associated to social intention. We investigated here the effects of the social context on kinematic characteristics of sequential actions consisting in placing an object...

This article is a review of the PhD Thesis of Malin Eriksson, entitled 'Social capital, health and community action - implications for health promotion.' The article presents a theoretical overview of social capital and its relation to health, reviews empirical findings of the links between social capital and (self-rated) health, and discusses the usefulness of social capital in health promotio...

This paper investigates the interrelations between social control mechanisms, social networks and collective action. We introduce a game theoretical model that explains how and under what conditions social networks rationalize participation in collective action and how can collective action reshape network relations in single encounters. The key mobilizing forces in collective action are interp...