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Objective To investigate what social, psychological, personality, and behavioral factors affect overtime heart rate changes of college students. Participants: The daily heart rates of over 600 undergraduates at the University of Notre Dame were unobtrusively recorded via Fitbit devices from August 16, 2015, to May 13, 2017. Method: Latent Growth-Curve modeling strategy is utilized to examine how daily mean heart rate and its standard deviation change over time, and what foregoing factors predict observed changes. Results: The mean heart rate increased and its standard deviation stayed the same over the 637 days. Heart rate levels go up with that of social contacts, an indicator of peer influence. Both daily heart rate levels and changes are also affected by multiple external factors. Conclusion: Human heart rate is not only a physiological phenomenon but also a social-psychological one, as it is systematically affected by peer networks, social contexts, and human activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociological theories suggest that urban life affects human sociability in negative ways. People in urban areas are expected to have fewer and weaker ties than those in rural areas. Rural areas should have proportionally more local ties, whereas urban areas have stronger nonlocal ties. We test these hypotheses using comprehensive large-scale data from a mobile phone company in Spain. We examine urban and rural differences in terms of the average number of ties and the composition and strength of local vs. nonlocal ties of subscribers in 6,124 postal codes. Consistent with urbanism theories, networks in more urban areas are smaller but the effect is weak. What is more pronounced are urban–rural differences in the composition and strength of local and nonlocal ties. There is a tradeoff between strength and number of ties. In urban places where local ties are weaker, there are more such ties, whereas in rural places where local ties are stronger, there are fewer local ties. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of the results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of "form," and the associated problem of the relationship between "forms" and "contents" is a central theme in Simmel's overall work. This paper shows that recent work in cultural sociology has taken a "Simmelian turn" in conceptualizing how cultural goods can serve as the primary engines of sociation in (post)modern societies. In this, they serve as the most common type of minimal formal content featured in domains characterized by Simmelian sociability. At the same time, there has been a renewed concern with rethinking the dynamics of cultural spread diffusion and their link to cultural identity along Simmelian lines. Here, formal features of cultural goods and consumption styles, such as their quantitative spread, are transmuted into contentful forms, capable of performing semiotic work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay I show how the Devil has and continues to be one of the most pervasive symbols of the workings of capitalism and its historical penetration into communal and everyday life. First, I briefly sketch the historical transformations in popular and literary images of the Devil throughout post-medieval Western history, connecting these to specific historical transformations of capitalism as a historical social system. Second, I draw on Michael Taussig's work on the role of metonymic symbols in the social representation of capitalist practices and on Fredric Jameson's notion of cognitive mapping to show how we can conceive of the repeatedly observed appeal of the figure of the Devil in those terms. Finally, I examine recent representations of the Devil in Hollywood film to show that the Devil continues to be an intuitive symbolic resource to “map” the global, consumer-based capitalist system in late modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most critical engagement with the film Fight Club tends to emphasize its relevance for the study of contemporary representations of gender and masculinity. These readings tend to primarily highlight the "reactionary" aspects of the film, which are seen as a response to structural sources of feminization experienced by men as they are embedded in the consumerist machine of the service-oriented economy. In this paper I argue that these takes on Fight Club, while enlightening and indeed capturing a key aspect, miss what I think is its most essential contribution: its attempt to craft a transcendental "counter-myth" capable with dealing with the cultural and societal contradictions of post-industrial capitalism in the context of the transition to a service oriented economy. I draw on the work of Daniel Bell in order to offer a neo-Weberian reading of Fight Club which makes sense of various aspects of the film which are rendered meaningless by the gender-focused reading. I argue that Fight Club can be seen as an attempt to deal with the evacuation and exhaustion of the original form of value-rationality from the realm of production in service work - grounded in the older ethic of ascetic Protestantism - as well as the failure of ideological interpellation in the consumer society - grounded in a domesticated version of the experience-based counter-Bourgeois ethic associated with aesthetic modernism - to provide an adequate substitute for it. I conclude that Fight Club can therefore be interpreted as an inchoate attempt to produce some version of a class consciousness and cognitive mapping in the late-capitalist situation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: To determine whether first-year college students cluster in networks based on subjective perceptions of loneliness. Participants: 492 first-year Notre Dame students completed surveys across two semesters and provided communication data used to reconstruct their social networks. Methods: Subjective perceptions of loneliness are measured using the Social and Emotional Loneliness Scale for Adults (SELSA). Correlations between an individual's loneliness and the average loneliness of their alters are compared to associations in random networks created using a rewiring algorithm to determine statistical significance. Results: During their first semester, students are more likely than chance to form ties with other students with similar levels of family and romantic loneliness. In their second semester, students cluster on romantic loneliness but not on family or social loneliness. Conclusions: Students are more likely than chance to form ties with people with similar self-perceived levels of loneliness, but only for certain types of loneliness and during certain periods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how levels of social capital in a new urbanist community change over time. We collected demographic and social capital data in a new urbanist community in 2001 and then again in 2010. The findings indicate that this community experienced an overall decline in social capital over this nine-year period. Additionally, we found that while residents new to the community were less concerned with social capital than long-term residents in the community, the latter group had also declined significantly in their levels of social capital. Overall, the results suggest that planners of new urbanist and other intentional communities should consider the impact of changing demographics when designing new subdivisions. Most importantly, residents and community leaders need to consider alternative means by which social capital can be retained as new residents are integrated into established communities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]