..................................................................................................................................................................... 2 INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................................................................... 3 TECHNOLOGY IN SOCIAL-ECOLOGICAL SYSTEMS .....................

Studies have shown that videoconferences are an effective medium for facilitating communication between parties who are separated by distance. Furthermore, studies reveal that videoconferences are effective when used for distance learning, particularly when learners are engaged in complex collaborative learning tasks. However, as in face-to-face communication, learners benefit most when they re...

We chronicle the use of acknowledgements in twentieth century scholarship by analyzing and classifying more than 4,500 specimens covering a 100-year period. Our results show that the intensity of acknowledgment varies by discipline, reflecting differences in prevailing socio-cognitive structures and work practices. We demonstrate that the acknowledgment has gradually established itself as a con...

A common form of embodied social engagement involves acting as an ensemble, with all participants aware of each other and mutually engaged. In this naturalistic comparative study, we term this kind of triadic socio-cognitive activity ‘fluid collaboration’. Fluid collaboration occurs when participants establish the pace of ensemble activity mutually, with their moves flexibly adjusted and respon...

How much retirement income is needed in order to maintain one’s living standard at old age? As it is difficult to find a firm basis for an empirical treatment of this question, we employ a novel approach to assessing an adequate replacement rate vis-à-vis income in the pre-retirement period. We subject indications regarding satisfaction with current income as collected in the German Socio-Econo...

Despite the fact that most competence-relevant settings are socially relevant settings, the interpersonal effects of achievement goals have been understudied. This is all the more surprising in the case of performance goals, for which self-competence is assessed using an other-referenced standard. In the present research, performance-goals are conceived as a social tool for regulating interpers...

How can the dynamic relationship between society, technology and nature be understood in order to derive operational concepts for sustainable development? How can long-term structural change in socio-ecological systems be deliberatedly shaped? These are central questions for industrial transformation research. They also form the background to this paper which discusses some conceptual issues th...

Welfare-oriented analyses of economic outcome measures such as income and wealth in general rest on the assumption of pooling and equal sharing of resources by all members of a given household. Examining the distribution of income and wealth within the household context is almost always hampered by the lack of individual level data. Based on unique individual level wealth data from the German S...

Believability is a key issue for virtual agents. Most of the authors agree that emotional behavior and personality have a high impact on agents’ believability. The social capacities of the agents also have an effect on users’ judgment of believability. In this paper we analyze the role of plausible and/or socially appropriate emotional displays on believability. We also investigate how people j...