Is the onset of fertility decline caused by structural socioeconomic changes or by the transmission of new ideas? The decline of marital fertility in Iran provides a quasi-experimental setting for addressing this question. Massive economic growth started in 1955; measurable ideational changes took place in 1967. We argue that the decline is described more precisely by demand theory than by idea...

This study investigated the significance of different well-established psychometric indicators of creativity for real-life creative outcomes. Specifically, we tested the effects of creative potential, intelligence, and openness to experiences on everyday creative activities and actual creative achievement. Using a heterogeneous sample of 297 adults, we performed latent multiple regression analy...

How is radical change in global health policy possible? Material factors such as economics or human resources are important, but ideational factors such as ideas and discourse play an important role as well. In this paper, I apply a theoretical framework to show how discourse made it possible for public and private actors to fundamentally change their way of working together--to shift from inte...

A laboratory study was carried out to establish the relative importance of verbal and gestural behavior, as well as their interaction, for perceived social influence in more or less competitive small groups. Forty women (psychology students) participated in leaderless small group discussions of different sizes (four-member and eight-member): at the end, each member rated the perceived influence...

Neurocomputational modeling and empirical evidence suggest that losses in neuronal signaling fidelity cause senescent changes in behavior. We applied structural equation modeling to five-occasion 13-year longitudinal data from the Berlin Aging Study (n=447; age range at t1=70-102 years) to test whether trial-to-trial reaction time variability in perceptual speed (identical pictures) antecedes a...

This article assesses and extends Campbell’s (1960) classic theory that creativity and discovery depend on blind variation and selective retention (BVSR), with special attention given to blind variations (BVs). The treatment begins by defining creativity and discovery, variant blindness versus sightedness, variant utility and selection, and ideational variants versus creative products. These de...

This work presents a hierarchical framework that generates continuous gesture animation performance for virtual characters. As opposed to approaches that focus more on realizing individual gesture, the focus of this work is on the relation between gestures as part of an overall gesture performance. Following Calbris’ work [3], our approach is to structure the performance around ideational units...

Despite the increasing uptake of term sustainable business model (SBM), concept has mainly focused on strategies. However, integrating SBM into a longer-term and macroscopic framework would make it more sustainable. This article explored as national strategy that operates beyond corporate level. In this respect, study examined ways in which cultural political perceptions nation can influence co...