Usual transformations of the current lexis and its stock, semantics as well treatments particular words reflect some shifts in social consciousness. They are provoked by changes political, cultural, psychological spheres life. The author this article aim at analysis factors which facilitate such lexical units semantic axiological characteristics modern discourse. Among tasks is considered a dif...

Alcohol consumption is frequent among university students in Lebanon as elsewhere in the world. A cross-sectional study was conducted in Lebanon's public and private universities between October 2009 and September 2010 using a standardized questionnaire to assess personal beliefs about alcohol consumption, peers' behaviours and opinions and history of and current drinking practices. Of 1235 stu...

The growing presence of digital distributed systems in social life is exemplified by many particular instances, including opinion forums, social networks, dating sites and photo sharing portals. The increased usage in the last decade of these systems brings various risks and behaviors, inherent from the social interaction therein. An epistemic aspect is singled out as a common feature shared be...

The connection between contradictory public opinions, heterogeneous beliefs, and the emergence of majority- or minority-induced extremism is studied, extending our former two-state dynamic opinion model. Agents are attached to a social-cultural class. At each step they are distributed randomly in different groups within their respective classes to evolve locally by majority rule. In case of a t...

Prior work shows that children view group membership and psychological traits in essentialist terms, perceiving them to be both biologically determined and stable across time. To what extent might individuals view mental states such as beliefs similarly? Given that beliefs are often based on experience and can change across time, one hypothesis is that beliefs on the whole do not elicit essenti...

Previous work shows that children view group membership and psychological traits in essentialist terms, perceiving them to be both biologically determined and stable across time. To what extent might individuals view mental states such as beliefs similarly? Given that beliefs are often based on experience and can change across time, one hypothesis is that beliefs on the whole do not elicit esse...

Opinions and beliefs are essential ingredients in the diffusion of innovation. We present a framework to model and simulate diffusion processes of opinions and beliefs in interpersonal communication networks. We introduce an algorithm to create stylized networks with attributes of real world interpersonal communication networks. We also introduce a simple, but expandable model for simulating th...