Anthropologists have become increasingly interested in embodiment-that is, the ways that socio-cultural factors influence the form, behavior and subjective experience of human bodies. At the same time, social cognitive neuroscience has begun to reveal the mechanisms of embodiment by investigating the neural underpinnings and consequences of social experience. Despite this overlap, the two field...

Language plays a crucial role in the formation and categorization of one’s ethnic identity. Recent work on linguistic accent emphasizes the role of accent in person perception and social categorization, demonstrating that accent serves as a meaningful ethnic category indicator. In this paper, we examine whether accent can be used to implement socio-cultural markers. We investigate whether the a...

The goal of this paper is to integrate culture as a computational term in embodied conversational agents by employing an empirical data-driven approach as well as a theoretical model-driven approach. We propose a parameter-based model that predicts nonverbal expressions appropriate for specific cultures. First, we introduce the Hofstede theory to describe socio-cultural characteristics of each ...

Recent studies of humanoid robotics (Brooks 1998) have claimed that natural communication with human beings requires that the artificial agent possesses two essential features: embodiment, sharing a structurally and functionally similar body with the interlocutor, and situatedness, being embedded in the same socio-cultural environment (Zlatev 1999). However, almost no specific methods have been...

Complete genital self-mutilation (GSM), mostly a non-suicidal behavior, is a rare occurrence among patients with psychotic and non-psychotic disorders. This case report is on a patient who, in the shadow of severe psychotic manifestations with overwhelming socio-cultural contents, completely self-mutilated his external genitals. Emergency surgical and psychiatric management improved his conditi...

correlated self-ratings of emotion with the nations’ socio-economic and cultural characteristics. In spite of the complexities and difficulties involved in differentiating culture from social structure, we will try to test the competing effects of social structure (i.e. socio-economic development) and culture (i.e. value’s syndrome) on emotional experience. The value of predicting cross-nationa...

For Archer, everyday life is shaped, in part, by the interplay of social and cultural systems [2]. A Social System is an array of positions, occupied by persons, and a distribution of status (or ranking) over that array. A Cultural System is conceived as a collection of belief-informing propositions. A Socio-Cultural System is Archer’s abstraction from everyday life and is analyzable as the int...

In this paper, we examine whether embodied conversational agents can be used to implement socio-cultural markers. We investigate whether the accent of a virtual character, as a marker for culture, can cause cultural frame-shifts in individuals. We report an experiment, performed among bicultural and monocultural individuals, in which we test the above hypothesis. Our results show that a virtual...

OBJECTIVES To generate the Persian version of the Perceived Socio-cultural Pressure Scale. METHODS The study, done in Kerman, Iran, from November 2010 to February 2011, comprised 1200 volunteers. After translation and back-translation, the questionnaire's internal consistency, criterion and construct validity were evaluated, individual and global scores of the Perceived Socio-cultural Pressur...