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Drinking and drinking problems are complex phenomena. Understanding the etiology of alcohol use disorder requires consideration of biological, psychological, and social processes. It is our view that the last of these dimensions is just beginning to receive adequate scrutiny. In this selective review, we discuss the concept of a biopsychosocial analysis of the effects of alcohol. After briefly addressing biological and psychological research on alcohol's emotional effects, we bid to make a case for the vital role that social processes play in understanding why people drink. The bulk of the paper describes research illustrating the contributions that a social psychological perspective can make to advance understanding of the rewarding effects of alcohol. Overall, studies incorporating social contexts have revealed reliable evidence that alcohol enhances emotional experience in many social environments and have identified socio-contextual variables that moderate responses to alcohol. Further, these studies have broadened the scope of constructs thought to be socially rewarding, including social bonding, relationship functioning, and humor enjoyment. Our analysis concludes by identifying research areas we believe would profit from additional research. • A biopsychosocial lens is needed to comprehensively understand alcohol's effects. • The social aspects of alcohol response are relatively underexamined. • Integrating social contexts into studies of alcohol offers promising new directions. • Social alcohol administration studies can identify new socio-contextual moderators. • Examining social processes broadens the scope of alcohol's reinforcing properties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Membership in voluntary associations is often assumed to have a homogenizing or diversifying impact on the social composition of members' personal relations. In this study, we examine these assertions empirically in a sample (n = 818) comprising active members of voluntary associations in a typical midsized Swedish community. We investigate whether people whom active members of voluntary associations have met through their voluntary activities are more or less likely to share their social characteristics than people whom they have met elsewhere. Our results show that acquaintances whom our respondents have acquired within voluntary associations are less likely to share several of their significant social characteristics than other members of their personal networks, but more likely to reside in their vicinity than others. Consequently, our results give fairly robust support to the "integrating hypothesis" according to which voluntary associations contribute to the social diversification of their members' personal networks. We do, however, emphasize the principally important aspects of our results, according to which relations acquired through involvement in voluntary associations may have simultaneously homogenizing and diversifying effects on individuals' personal networks. Furthermore, the effect may also depend on the specific dimension(s) of the networks under consideration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a rapport of continuity and distancing between the twofilm depiction of the figure of St. Francis of Assisi in Liliana Cavani's cinema. Her 1989 film, Francesco, takes the story of St. Francis from where her 1966 film ended it, namely the death of St. Francis. Thus, the character of St. Francis relives through the words of his companions. The screen figure of the 13th century Francis allows modern reconstructions of multilayered interpretations. His inner crisis, the search of his place in the world, and his conflict with paternal authority can also be read in a social context. Cavani's Francis is a postrevolutionary young man who does not break completely the relationship with his natural parents. Modern interpretation can even touch contemporary themes, such as the phenomenon of riflusso which may be paralleled in the film. If for his father, Pietro Bernardone, labor was the preferred way of social elevation, for the son, the future St. Francis, work became an emblem of individual freedom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The formation of romantic relationships and the engagement in sexual behaviours are considered normative and salient developmental tasks for adolescents and young adults. These developmental tasks are increasingly viewed from an ecological perspective, thus not only as individual processes, but also as strongly embedded in different social contexts, including the proximal social domains of parents, peers, and partners. This special issue brings together seven recent empirical studies on adolescents' and young adults' romantic relationships and sexuality in the context of relationships and interactions with parents, peers, and partners. In this editorial introduction, we describe two important recent changes in the theoretical perspectives on emerging romantic relationships and sexual activity: from risky behaviours to normative tasks, and from individual to contextualized processes. We then discuss recent advances in empirical research on romantic relationships and sexuality of adolescents and young adults. After that, we review the seven studies in this special issue, and discuss the contributions of these studies to the existing literature. Finally, we discuss directions for future research regarding how the interrelational perspective can be further incorporated into empirical research, and how the gap between the research fields on romantic relationships and sexuality may be bridged. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Recent advances in information technology have turned out World Wide Web to be the main platform for interactions where participants-users and corresponding events-are triggered. Although the participants vary in accordance with scenarios, a considerable size of data will be generated. This phenomenon indeed causes the complexity in information retrieval, management, and resuse, and meanwhile, turns down the value of this data. In this research, we attempt to achieve efficient management of user-generated data and its derivative contexts (i.e., social ad hoc data) for human supports. The correlations among data, contexts, and their hybridization are specifically concentrated. An intelligent state machine is proposed to outline the relations of data and contexts, and applied to further identify their usage scenarios. The performance and feasibility can be revealed by the experiments that were conducted on the data collected from open social networks (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, etc.) in the past few years with size around 500 users and 8,000,000 shared contents from them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The social recommendation has utilized ego network in a static manner, assuming that the way of social influence impacts users' preferences is simplex and constant over time. Such assumptions hinder the effectiveness of social recommendation since the online social contexts are complicated and friends' tastes may change across items consumption. To address this research gap, we propose a novel social recommendation model that focuses on the effect of different social contexts and the dynamics of social influence. Specifically, we first leverage a community detection algorithm to divide online users into various communities, named community-based social contexts. Based on the community structure, we introduce a hierarchical attention mechanism to evaluate the influence of multiple community-based social contexts. Secondly, we choose the directly connected neighbors, namely the ego-network based social contexts. In such social contexts, the model can capture the user's preferences that are influenced by their friends' dynamic behaviors. Then, the model could have a comprehensive representation of users' current preferences by merging the impact of two types of social contexts. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that our proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art social recommendation models. The implementation of our model and the datasets are available at https://github.com/socialsnail/TSC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces the new idea of describing people using first names. We show that describing people in terms of similarity to a vector of possible first names is a powerful representation of facial appearance that can be used for a number of important applications, such as naming never-seen faces and building facial attribute classifiers. We build models for 100 common first names used in the US and for each pair, construct a pairwise first-name classifier. These classifiers are built using training images downloaded from the internet, with no additional user interaction. This gives our approach important advantages in building practical systems that do not require additional human intervention for data labeling. The classification scores from each pairwise name classifier can be used as a set of facial attributes to describe facial appearance. We show several surprising results. Our name attributes predict the correct first names of test faces at rates far greater than chance. The name attributes are applied to gender recognition and to age classification, outperforming state-of-the-art methods with all training images automatically gathered from the internet. We also demonstrate the powerful use of our name attributes for associating faces in images with names from caption, and the important application of unconstrained face verification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Typically developing (TD) infants could capitalize on social eye gaze and social contexts to aid word learning. Although children with autism disorder (AD) are known to exhibit atypicality in word learning via social eye gaze, their ability to utilize social contexts for word learning is not well understood. We investigated whether verbal AD children exhibit word learning ability via social contextual cues by late childhood. We found that AD children, unlike TD controls, failed to infer the speaker's referential intention through information gathered from the social context. This suggests that TD children can learn words in diverse social pragmatic contexts in as early as toddlerhood whereas AD children are still unable to do so by late childhood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the primary terms for purity in Biblical Hebrew, Ugaritic, Sumerian, Akkadian and Hittite. Building on insights from cognitive linguistics and embodiment theory, this study develops the premise that semantic structure--even of seemingly abstract concepts- is grounded in real-world bodily experience. An examination of purity terms reveals that all of them can be related to a concrete sense pertaining to radiance (brilliance, brightness, shininess). The article then traces the semantic development of purity terms in distinct experiential contexts and shows how semantic analysis can elucidate the inner logic of fundamental religious concepts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights: [•] We find considerable changes in personal relationships within seven years. [•] Nonetheless, the number of confidants and practical helpers only slightly changes. [•] A major reason for relationship discontinuation is a lack of meeting opportunities. [•] A path-dependent use of social contexts affects where new relationships emerge. [•] Carefully interpret changes in networks that are delineated by one question. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies in classifying affect from vocal cues have produced exceptional within-corpus results, especially for arousal (activation or stress); yet cross-corpora affect recognition has only recently garnered attention. An essential requirement of many behavioral studies is affect scoring that generalizes across different social contexts and data conditions. We present a robust, unsupervised (rule-based) method for providing a scale-continuous, bounded arousal rating operating on the vocal signal. The method incorporates just three knowledge-inspired features chosen based on empirical and theoretical evidence. It constructs a speaker's baseline model for each feature separately, and then computes single-feature arousal scores. Lastly, it advantageously fuses the single-feature arousal scores into a final rating without knowledge of the true affect. The baseline data is preferably labeled as neutral, but some initial evidence is provided to suggest that no labeled data is required in certain cases. The proposed method is compared to a state-of-the-art supervised technique which employs a high-dimensional feature set. The proposed framework achieveshighly-competitive performance with additional benefits. The measure is interpretable, scale-continuous as opposed to discrete, and can operate without any affective labeling. An accompanying Matlab tool is made available with the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Highlights: [•] We have studied how SA should be supported in organizations responding to time-pressure crisis situations. [•] We have observed teams during four emergency response cases. [•] We show a model which illustrates the importance of narratives in SA creation. [•] We show how SA is created and shared in so-called social context model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this special issue of AIDS and Behavior, we focus on the social contexts of sexual transmission of HIV/STI in one South China city. Our multiple projects grew from partnerships across the social and biomedical sciences, and with public health experts in Liuzhou City, to address critical gaps in knowledge about how social factors drive heterosexual transmission. The eleven articles that comprise this special issue feature multidisciplinary and mixed method approaches, collecting data in Liuzhou from different populations, environments, and social venues where individuals often find sexual partners. They document heterosexual behaviors and their meanings. They investigate the experiences and behaviors of women and men in social venues, exploring the networks of people within these venues, how they relate to one another, share information, and influence each other. The articles also examine the experiences of people living with HIV, again collecting data from multiple levels and sources, and revealing the ongoing power of stigma to shape these lives. Taken together, the articles demonstrate the critical role of social contexts in shaping behaviors and meanings, which are linked to heterosexual transmission of HIV/STI, and which must be taken into account for the development of appropriate and effective public health interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A social networking service (SNS) allows users to share information with family, friends, and communities. Since there are many kinds of information uploaded and shared through an SNS, the amount of information on such sites keeps increasing exponentially. In particular, Facebook has adopted some interesting features related to entertainment (e.g., movies, music, and TV shows). However, they do not consider contextual information of users for recommendations (e.g., time, location, and social context). Therefore, in this paper, we propose a novel approach for movie recommendations based on the integration of a variety of contextual information (i.e., when the users watched the movies, where the users watched the movies, and who watched the movie with them). Thus, we developed a Facebook application (called MyMovieHistory) for recording the movie history of users and recommending relevant movies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the present paper is described the learning process of pupils of a popular workshop of painting. Discursive, behavioral and social aspects of learning are integrated. The need to analyze the concrete contexts of learning beyond the simple description of the activities inside the workshop is defended. The paper suggests the social origin of the discursive resources of the pupils and in this way “the artistic thought” is relabeled as “artistic speech”. The social contexts of activity out and inside the workshop are located in the apex of what is called an inverted triangle of the artistic education.

Florida statutes allow for the application of enhanced sentences to defendants designated as “Career Offenders.” The application of these laws is discretionary and as such, prosecutors seek the designation for a fraction of the defendants who qualify. Utilizing Hierarchical Generalized Linear Modeling, this paper examines whether individual attributes, such as race and ethnicity, impact an individual's likelihood of receiving the Career Offender designation for 13,704 males sentenced to prison between 2002 and 2004. The second-level analysis incorporates county characteristics into the equation and tests whether these predictors have either a direct or a cross-level effect on the relationship. The broad theoretical framework that guides the present research is grounded in the social threat and social control perspective, which argues that minorities on both the individual and aggregate levels may be perceived as threatening in ways that can mobilize or enhance social controls. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The great acceptation of the Social Web has converted social networks, blogs and wikis in almost perfect advertising mediums. However, many of the current social publicity strategies do not exploit all the potential of these mediums, since they obviate users' online life: the social contexts in which they are involved. Our proposal to reverse this situation is a model to infer users' social contexts by the application of several Natural Language Processing (NLP) and data mining techniques over users' interaction data on Facebook. We take advantage of both Facebook and Groupon APIs to provide a deployment scenario in which knowing users' social life allows ads to target the most potential customers, which is beneficial for both companies and possible customers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

With the adoption of the Constitution, the government of the United States took on a new role. Unlike other governments of the time, the United States was primarily founded on ideas, and, as a result, there were many challenges at the beginning of the newly-created republic. One of the biggest challenges was establishing credibility and legitimacy. In addition, republics require the support of the people; thus, to support the new political system, people needed to believe in the principles and ideals of the nascent government. As one form of communication, art has the capacity to reflect social contexts, depict specific events, and provide a visual link that makes words memorable, lasting, and compelling. Following this idea, we seek to examine the role the visual arts played in the early decades of the newly formed republic. What were the artists who worked during these years seeking to convey to their audiences? We argue that through art, a foundation for a national identity and a secular American civil religion was laid. We find that the art of the early republic with its clear symbolic meanings provided the necessary visual images to help turn abstract political concepts into something more concrete. We examine selected pieces of art from the early republic, including depictions of the Founders in portraiture and sculpture, with a particular emphasis on George Washington, as well as historical paintings available to the public. These works reveal how “visual rhetoric” helped to illustrate the republican ideals and values the Founders articulated for the new government. Art contributed to creating the necessary shared identity, civil religion, and national narrative that allowed the United States to keep its republic in its formative years. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Abstract: The response efforts in emergency operation need to be fast and efficient. Actors from different fields have to cooperate in dynamic and complex environments and still in an efficient manner. In order to perform, the shared situation awareness of the response organization needs to be as good as possible. The purpose of our research was to identify the factors that affect the formation of shared situation awareness in search and rescue operations. The research is based on the theories of information, communication, and trust. The data collection was performed during a search and rescue exercise held in Finland in 2009 and included both observation and questionnaires. As a result we have defined the critical information needs for cooperation, a method for describing the communication, and the components of system trust. Emergency organizations can use the results in the development of their response activities. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

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Previous research suggests that there is a relationship between social contexts (e.g., economic growth, engagement in wars) and motives within populations. In particular, high achievement motive is associated with subsequent economic growth, which in turn increases power motive. Increased national achievement and power motives have been argued to precede social changes that lead to decreased affiliation motives, and engagement in wars. The present study aimed to examine differences in achievement, power, and affiliation motives between 266 college students in China (a nation with sustained high economic growth) and 255 college students in the USA (a nation with previously strong but now slowing economic growth, and engaged in war). Analysis of personal strivings suggested that Chinese college students showed significantly higher levels of achievement motive than the American college students, but American college students showed significantly higher levels of affiliation motive than Chinese college students. Overall, males exhibited higher achievement motivation than females. No significant interaction effects were found for gender by location for any of the three motives. The findings are discussed in relation to previous research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aimed to understand the nature of nurturing and restraining relationships in a school community. The inquiry entailed a single instrumental case study of a selected school community in a semi-urban context in South Africa. Participants were learners (n=720), teachers (n=33) and administrative and terrain staff members (N=8) as well as two parents. Data on participants' perceptions of relationships in the school community were collected using work sessions/nominal group techniques, visual representations, and focus group interviews. Thematic analysis of the data revealed connectedness, respect, care and transparent communication as aspects that nurture relationships. Limited connectedness between people, the abuse of power, shifting of responsibility and disrespect for one another were revealed as aspects that restrain relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, postsocialist rural contexts have afforded commons scholars particularly fertile ground for examination of institutional change and evolution under new modes of governance. In Mongolia, as elsewhere, such transformations have been characterized by the erosion of state control and de facto or de jure devolution of land and resource rights. Particularly since 2000, policy and practice in Mongolia have reflected state and donor concerns with the formation of herders’ groups and the implementation of group tenure solutions in pursuit of environmental sustainability. Drawing on data sets from the Gobi region, this article examines the nature, impact and limitations of recent state-, donor-, and community-led tenure reforms and social innovations with respect to land rights and practice, including with regard to mining-related land alienation. The article provides a critical analysis of recent, complex institutional innovations in Mongolia and their role in shaping contemporary commons management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Designation as a 'Habitual Offender' is an enhanced form of punishment which unlike, 'Three Strikes' or '10-20-Life,' is entirely discretionary. We use Hierarchical Generalized Linear Modeling to assess the direct effects of race and Latino ethnicity on the designation of Habitual Offenders as well as the effect of both static and dynamic indicators of racial and ethnic threat on those outcomes. Our data include 26,740 adults sentenced to prison in Florida between 2002 and 2004 who were statutorily eligible to be sentenced as Habitual. The odds of receiving this designation are significantly increased for black and Latino defendants as compared to whites, though race and ethnicity effects vary substantially by crime type, being strongest for drug offenses and negligible for violent crimes. Static measures of group level threat (% black and % Latino) have no cross-level effect on sentencing by race or Latino ethnicity. However, increasing black population over time increases the odds of being sentenced as Habitual for both black and Latino defendants. Increasing Latino population increases the odds of Habitual Offender sentencing for Latinos, but decreases it for blacks. The prospect of engaging dynamic as opposed to static measures of threat in future criminal justice and other social control research is discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Newly arrived from Cuba, Angelica, Dora, Marina, and Damaris attempted to negotiate new surroundings and immigrant identities, building a sense of home for themselves and their families. Data from qualitative interviews, classroom observations, and focus group conversations revealed hopes that by acquiring English language skills, they would improve their quality of life in their new country. Struggles included personal factors situated in their pasts in Cuba and their new surrounds in the Miami Cuban exile enclave, contexts that were further complicated by uncertain expectations of new lives in Miami and the overwhelming task of learning a new language at a local adult education center. The women negotiated pressure from spouses, assisted children in Cuba, pondered uncertainties of crossing cultural and linguistic borders, and anticipated eventual acceptance within the greater English‐speaking society. The women’s individual luchas (struggles) and English language learning efforts were tempered by their dreams for their children and themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Girls' early pubertal timing has been linked in many studies to behavioral problems such as delinquency and substance use. The theoretical explanations for these links have often involved the girls' peer relationships, but contexts have also been considered important in some explanations. By integrating two theoretical models, the peer- socialization and the contextual- amplification hypotheses, we propose a contextual framework for explaining the link between early pubertal timing and external problem behavior in girls. We hypothesize that early developing girls engage in unhealthy, dangerous, and risky behavior under contextual conditions that promote access to older friends and opposite-sex relationships. Under other conditions it is less likely. We tested this integrated hypothesis in two studies conducted in Sweden. The first was a cross-sectional study with information about school and free-time friends in a community sample (N = 284). Early pubertal timing was linked to having older, more normbreaking friends outside of school, but not in school, thus suggesting that the school context interferes early-developing girls' selection of older peers. The second study involved both a longitudinal (N = 434) and a cross-sectional sample of girls (N = 634), where we examined a leisure setting that is known to attract delinquent youth. Results showed that early pubertal timing was most strongly linked to delinquency for girls who spent time in this context and were heavily involved with boys and peers. In sum, results from both studies supported our predictions that certain contexts would amplify the peer-socialization effect. Overall, we conclude that the integrated peer-socialization/contextual-amplification model satisfactorily explains the link between pubertal timing and external problem behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper inquires into structural explanations for triadic closure in networks of confidants with whom one discusses important personal matters. Building upon the assumption that meeting opportunities affect network characteristics, we primarily argue that the social contexts in which network members meet, substantially affect triadic closure. The main empirical findings are (a) that about sixty percent of the triads in core discussion networks are closed triads, which also means that a substantial part of one''s strong relations is unconnected, and (b) that meeting network members in the same social contexts is an important condition for, but certainly does not guarantee triadic closure. Importantly, the specific characteristics of social contexts explain why sharing certain contexts positively affects triadic closure, while sharing other contexts does not. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Due to global industrialization, the light cycle is shifting to longer daytime. Mounting evidence indicates that social developmental disorders may correlate with longer periods of daytime in childhood. However, the exact mechanisms of this link remain unclear. To examine the impact of longer day-time on psychosocial development, we developed a novel non-human primate model, using the common marmoset (Callithrix jacchus) reared under constant daylight from birth. Marmosets were reared individually by human nursing under constant light (LL) during varying periods in juvenile development, and their behaviors were compared with those of normal day–night cycle (LD) marmosets by multivariate analysis based on principal component analysis (PCA). LL marmosets elicited egg-like calls (e-call) less in juvenile period, and displayed side-to-side shakes of the upper body with rapid head rotation through adulthood frequently. Based on the PCA, these behaviors were interpreted as ‘alert’ or ‘hyperactive’ states. Additionally, behavioral development of marmosets reared under constant dark (DD) was markedly different from both LD and LL marmosets, suggesting the fundamental importance of daylight-dependent neuronal and endocrine processes and entrainment by a constant 24-hour light/dark cycle on psychosocial behavior development. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]