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The article is focused on the importance of sociocultural competence of the students assigned to the specialty 061 «Journalism» during the Ukrainian language learning process in the higher educational establishments of the I-II accreditation level. The object of the article is to defi ne the tools and methods of sociocultural competence formation during the Ukrainian language lessons within the article on the basis of such methods as analysis, description and pedagogical observation. The essence of sociocultural competence of the future junior specialists in journalism is described thereby leading to the self-awareness as a cultural values representative; formation of general culture and universal human values; responsibility for the Motherland’s future; mastering of ethics and ethical norms; building of the dialogue principles concerning representatives of different views, nations, cultures and religions; broad range of speech skills and abilities formation; ability to control innovational processes and activities. Attention is focused on the tools and methods of teaching that develop student’s Ukrainian linguistic identity. Therefore, conducted analysis leads to the conclusion that Ukrainian language education of the students assigned to the specialty 061 «Journalism» promotes spiritual and intellectual development of the specialist as a linguistic identity. In order to provide sociocultural model of Ukrainian language learning, the lesson should be conducted on the basis of national and cultural texts (of different styles, genres, and speech types) which arises cognitive students’ interest and creates intellectual bases for their future activity. Such approach provides conditions for the students to focus their attention on universal human values, promotes growth of interest towards Ukrainian culture and language. To successfully build social competence of the students-editors, it is important to carry out integrated lessons, use traditional and innovative educational forms and methods, and choose interesting didactic material. Complex provision of methods and forms infl uences effi ciency of learning, actualization of thinking, and increased interest to language learning which accordingly will infl uence on sociocultural competence development. It will result in private, social, and educations spheres of communication. Simultaneously, further research of the tools and methods of students-editors’ sociocultural and speech development is considered to be potential.

The article analyzes the peculiarities of the culture and speech personality development of the fi rst grade students at the Ukrainian lessons. It is noted that language learning is extremely important for development of each individual, as it provides the basis for further education, upbringing and development of students, and increases their cultural level. The process of learning language should be directed at the development of culture and speech personality and implemented through the competent approach. The specifi city of teaching fi rst grade students is that knowledges about the language and speech skills are only start their forming, therefore, in the process of teaching writing and reading it is necessary to draw upon the language sense of children. Among many strategic tasks directed at the forming culture and speech personality, the sociocultural development and systematic improvement of student’s speech take central stage. The necessity and the specifi city of realization of the linguoethnographic aspect of sociocultural competence are highlighted. The aspects purpose is forming the fi rst-graders’ national consciousness, spiritual wealth and culture. It is determined that the formation of junior school students’ sociocultural competence is signifi cantly contributed by the linguoethnographic principle. It means supporting on the communicational function of the language in the process of learning basics of communication; the formation of a positive attitude to the studied language and people – native speaker of this language and to its culture. Therefore, the sociocultural content line provides the preparation of students for the acquisition of several competences: regional studies, ethnography, linguistics and sociolinguistic. To master free communication in the Ukrainian for fi rst-graders it is expedient to use the following basic methods and means of forming a culture and speech personality: a) imitation; b) learning by heart and recitation; c) role speech situation; d) didactic games; e) verbal games; f) self-made dictionary; g) thematic lapbook. The directions and sequence of work with fi rst-graders on speech development in the period of studying grammar are generalized:1) selection of the communicative minimum; 2) interpretation of the lexical meaning of words; 3) using of regional studies material in speech; 4) using of ethnographic material in speech, 5) working with folklore texts.

The article is devoted to the important problem of modern linguodidactics in the fi eld of primary education - the development of socio-cultural competence of students. It is emphasized that it is one of the components of communicative competence. Formation of this key competence of the individual has been recognized as the main goal of teaching Ukrainian at elementary school. It is shown that the requirement for the enrichment of the socio-cultural experience of the junior pupil involves the use in studying different language subjects of the didactic material of Ukrainian and regional history. It is recognized that the best form of presentation of this material is textual. The text demonstrates the specifi cs of the functioning of the learned language phenomena and units; he is the bearer of a wide variety of extra linguistic information; by its content can awaken the reader a variety of thoughts and feelings, adjust to refl ections, encourage discussion; The text contains powerful educational opportunities. Therefore, not only will it help to interest children in educational material, but will also stimulate their cognitive interest and growth in terms of national-cultural. The article focuses on the writers of the native land as a reliable didactic basis for the formation of sociocultural competence. The works of Lviv poets Igor Kalynets, Irina Kalynets, Maria Ludkevich, Bohdan Stelmakh, Maria Khorosnitskaya, Maria Chumarnaya are analyzed in the context of their Ukrainian studies and local lore signifi cance. The material of specifi c poems demonstrates possible ways of assimilating language concepts and socio-cultural information, as well as developing language and communication skills and abilities

Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) is a portable neuroimaging technique that may serve as a methodological tool for studying how sociocultural contexts can shape the human brain and impact cognition and behavior. The use of fNIRS in community-based research may (a) advance theoretical knowledge in psychology and neuroscience, particularly regarding underrepresented ethnic-racial communities; (b) increase diversity in samples; and (c) provide neurobiological evidence of sociocultural factors supporting human development. The review aims to introduce the use of fNIRS, including its practicalities and limitations, to new adopters inquiring how sociocultural inputs affect the brain. The review begins with an introduction to cultural neuroscience, and a review on the use of fNIRS follows. Next, benefits and guidelines to the design of fNIRS research in naturalistic environments (in the community or in the field) using a cultural lens are discussed. Strengths-based and community-based approaches in cultural neuroscience are recommended throughout. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Field social psychology is a conceptual and methodological approach to describe, examine, and explain psychological phenomena at multiple levels of analysis with emphasis on the sociocultural environments in which people are embedded, the unfolding of psychological processes over time, and the use of ecologically valid multiple methods in conjunction. In this essay, we first define a contemporary form of field social psychology from its roots in the history of psychological study. Second, we argue for the necessity of the reemergence of this approach given the limitations of the dominant current social psychological paradigm exposed by the replication crisis. Third, we outline an integrative and actionable model of field social psychological research. We describe two contemporary examples of field social psychological research concerning climate change protests in Norway and restorative justice in the U.S.A. to illustrate this framework. We end with implications of field social psychology for developing psychological science. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Dynamic Assessment (DA), an innovative assessment approach, has begun to attract attention as a conceptualization of assessment that emphasizes the social interactive role of learning. Although DA receives attention in the field of language testing/assessment, its feasibility in engaging larger cohorts of individuals is concerned. This shortcoming of DA leads to the application of Group Dynamic Assessment (G-DA). This study examined the extent to which mediation provided through G-DA frameworks – concurrent and cumulative – supported a group of language learners’ literacy development. It investigates five intermediate L2 Chinese learners’ rhetorical awareness via their performance on Chinese reading and writing tasks. One Chinese rhetorical structures, the ‘Qi-cheng-zhuan-he’ approach, was selected because it is considered the most difficult learning point for Chinese learners. Findings were reported: 1) the mediation provided to the participants through both concurrent and cumulative G-DA approaches promoted their understanding of the ‘Qi-cheng-zhuan-he’ approach, 2) the more times a participant engaged as the primary interactant, the better learning outcome he/she would present, 3) individual participant had different developmental level and thus showed various extent of responsiveness to the teacher’s mediation; yet, their active participation, either verbal or nonverbal behaviors, would foster their learning performance. Pedagogical applications are discussed.

In this theoretical review paper, we provide a developmental–sociocultural framework for the role of social media (SM) in contributing to adolescent girls’ body image concerns, and in turn, depressive symptoms and disordered eating. We propose that the features of SM (e.g., idealized images of peers, quantifiable feedback) intersect with adolescent developmental factors (e.g., salience of peer relationships) and sociocultural gender socialization processes (e.g., societal over-emphasis on girls’ and women’s physical appearance) to create the “perfect storm” for exacerbating girls’ body image concerns. We argue that, ultimately, body image concerns may be a key mechanism underlying associations between adolescent girls’ SM use and mental health. In the context of proposing this framework, we provide empirical evidence for how SM may increase adolescent girls’ body image concerns through heightening their focus on: (1) other people’s physical appearance (e.g., through exposure to idealized images of peers, celebrities, and SM influencers; quantifiable indicators of approval); and (2) their own appearance (e.g., through appearance-related SM consciousness; exposure to one’s own image; encouraging over-valuing of appearance; and peer approval of photos/videos). Our framework highlights new avenues for future research on adolescent girls’ SM use and mental health, which recognize the central role of body image.

Most cross-linguistic studies of speech acts have dealt mainly with two languages, a native language and a second or foreign language (Carrell and Konneker 1981; Castello 1981; Blum-Kulka 1982; Daikuhura 1986; Eisenstein1986; Wieland 1989; Chen Rong 1993, 2001; Sifianou 2001; Lee 2004, 2005). Neither have they dealt with an African language as the first language. The present study investigates a multilingual situation where the native speakers of Ciluba, French, and English are compared to the trilingual speakers of the three languages in terms of the realization of the speech acts of apologizing and complaining. It considers the social beliefs of the subjects of the four language groups for the realization of the two speech acts. The study is part of a larger study that was designed to discover the norms of the three languages under investigation and to see how people speaking a second and a foreign language, with different levels of fluency in each, can participate in the activity of the speech communities of the two languages without violating their socio-cultural norms, and what impact, if any, their knowledge of these languages has on each of the languages they speak.2 Data for the larger study was collected by means of a written questionnaire, role plays, and direct observation. The data and results presented and discussed in this paper come from the written questionnaire administered to the monolingual English and French speakers and trilingual speakers native in Ciluba; and from the same version of the questionnaire administered orally to the monolingual Ciluba speakers.3 It was found that for the realization of the speech acts of apologizing and complaining, Luba sociocultural beliefs were different from those of English and French, which are similar. In contrast to French and English, in Ciluba social distance and relative power between the participants play an important role in deciding whether the speech acts can be performed or not. The results also revealed that, despite the difference which exists between Ciluba and the other two languages, i.e., French and English, some subjects from the group of Ciluba monolingual subjects showed some similarities with the groups of French and English monolingual subjects in their responses to some items in the questionnaire. This deviation of some of the native speakers of Ciluba from their social beliefs was hypothesized to be a result of their contact with an urban environment and its mixed culture.

In this article we combine a concern with speech play and language ideologies to investigate contemporary Navajo terminology development. This article presents some recent cases of lexical elaboration in context, and argues that neologisms in Navajo are often fleeting, shifting, or humorous practices that reflect and recreate individual agency, intimate grammars, and local language ideologies. They also reflect an unexpected continuity in what is considered to be a context of rapid language shift. Such practices are one form of resistance to English and should be seen as a sociocultural, rather than purely referential, phenomenon.

The investigation of speech acts has been of interest, especially in cross-cultural pragmatics, to many L1/L2 researchers for many years (Blum-Kulka, House and Kasper 1989). Favor-asking, as an important speech act, is centered upon having the other party of conversation do a specific act (Goldschmidt 1999). Although some research has been done on favor-asking in different contexts, studies on this speech act are still scarce, if any, in Persian settings. The main thrust of the current study was to investigate favor-asking among a sample of 20 native speakers of Persian (10 women and 10 men). The participants were selected from graduate students, since the employed oral DCT scenarios were designed to elicit favors asked from three different academic statuses: Higher, equal, and lower (professors, peers, and students, respectively). A total of 240 responses were then analyzed to identify the recurring patterns under the three open-coded categories of pre-favor, favor, and post-favor. The examination of the responses illustrated some variation triggered by gender and academic status differences, namely, the length of favors, frequency of some (sub)themes, and formality degree. Additionally, some relevant syntactic issues were explored (e.g. plural/singular pronouns/verbs), which contributed to the formality/informality of the favors, depending upon the contexts in which they were incorporated. Finally, some insights into Persian sociocultural interactions, favor-asking in particular, were provided.

This article aims to examine the relation between conversational silence and face and to identify communicative behaviour related to silence in Spanish and German. To this end, I will first briefly explain the concepts of conversation, culture and silence, as well as the concept of face. Second, I will analyse verbal and non-verbal activities of silence in transactional and colloquial conversations in Spanish and German conversation. Perceptions and conceptions of conversational silence rely on the situational context and, especially, on the face of each speech community. Therefore, depending on the social context and the characteristics of face in each culture, silence is considered as forming part of conversation.

This paper examines the situated ways in which Moroccan immigrant children in Spain create imagined, alternative life worlds and explore possible forms of identification through an investigation of these children’s hybrid linguistic practices in the midst of play. Drawing on Bakhtin’s (1981, 1986) notions of heteroglossia and hybridity, the analysis focuses on the meanings of codeswitching practices that a group of Moroccan immigrant girls deploy in pretend-play sequences involving dolls to construct female identities; identities that they treat as desirable in the context of Spanish idealizations of femininity, but that are considered transgressional by adults in Moroccan diaspora communities in Spain. Neighborhood peer group play affords Moroccan immigrant girls’ transformations and engagement in subversive tactics, in that these activities take place outside the scrutiny of parents and other adults. The rich verbal and sociocultural environment of Moroccan immigrant children’s peer groups provide us with an excellent window to investigate peer language socialization processes in relation to how immigrant children negotiate, transform, and subvert in the midst of play the different, and often incongruous, socio-cultural and linguistic expectations and constraints that they encounter on a daily basis. Use of Moroccan Arabic and Spanish in this pretend play, in particular, results in a heteroglossic polyphony of voices imbued with moral tensions (Bahktin 1981, 1986). This analysis highlights the importance of these hybrid linguistic practices in immigrant girls’ explorations of alternative processes of gendered identification in multilingual, culturally-syncretic environments. Through surreptitious pretend-play, Moroccan immigrant girls explore imagined transgressional possible identities and moral worlds. In this sense, this research also underscores the implications of children’s language use and language choice in pretend-play for larger processes of cultural continuity and transformation in transnational, diasporic communities undergoing rapid change.

Even though the acknowledgement genre is a common practice in Arabic scholarly texts, this area is largely neglected in academic research. The present study examines the generic structure and the linguistic patterns of gratitude expressions used in acknowledegments accompanying the Arabic Ph.D. dissertation genre. To this end, I have analyzed the various rhetorical component options that writers use to convey gratitude and the role played by the socio-cultural factors in shaping this genre in a corpus of 100 Arabic acknowledgements accompanying Ph.D. dissertations in soft sciences written by doctoral Arabic native speakers. A discursive genre analysis reveals that Arab writers tend to use certain socio-cultural specific components that can be seen as contextualization cues bringing about the religious beliefs, and the academic and social conventions of the Arab writers. Further, they tend to utilize certain preferred address forms, and social honorifics together with various gratitude expression options having different degree of intensification to respond to different types of audience and reflect their complex relationships with the academic and social community members.

Taking as a starting point a broad conception of metapragmatics (Lucy 1993), this study describes a wide range of reflexive elements in closing arguments of criminal trials, and on the basis of their habitual use by trial lawyers, it enquires about the general underlying function as part of the sociocultural practice (Bourdieu 1990). The corpus of was collected at twenty-two criminal trials observed and recorded by the researcher. Five kinds of metapragmatic indexes – from the maximally explicit to the implicit – are identified and analyzed in their interactional, situational and societal context: (1) performatives, which count as official acts by the trial lawyer, (2) formulations and other evaluations of speech, (3) descriptions of aspects of the sociocultural practice and allusions to the principles governing the event, (4) strategic descriptions of contextual conditions, which are exploited with group identity and relational effects, and (5) style. The analysis reveals that these metapragmatic features contextualize the communication as expressing a specific social capital, and at the same time, they contribute to define what does not count as legitimate practice. Apart from the specific effects of individual types of indexes, in closing arguments metapragmatic indexes basically function signaling that the social actor and the practice they are engaged in rightfully belong to the social field of the law.

Barbadian ways of speaking draw their stylistic richness from intertwined and differentially valued resources of Creole (Bajan) and Barbadian English. Barbadians (and linguists) interpret this formal diversity through two ideological paradigms. One (labeled in Bajan, “adjusting to suit”) corresponds to linguist’s “register”. By attending to laminations of individual repertoires and to skills of their selective contextual deployment, the paradigm indexes the richness of speakers’ resources. The other paradigm interprets the stylistic diversity of speakers’ repertoires in essentializing, “sociolectal” terms that iconically link social categories and polarized language varieties. By exaggerating the distinctiveness of language varieties and by turning them into unambiguous indices of fixed social personae, the paradigm colludes with the hierarchies of linguistic and social prestige. These paradigms and hierarchies can be approached in terms of historical processes that defined their social and linguistic targets. Such a framework, however, neglects institutional sites pivotal in the continued production of cultural orders of language - the literature, media, and theater. Within these sites, characterized by hightened metadiscursive awareness, ideological tensions surrounding language and its couplings with social, racial, and national identities are scripted and launched into public domain. Macrohistorical explanations also neglect the processes that turn specific linguistic forms into emblems of Barbadian language varieties while erasing others. By considering strategies and practices of (re)allocation of linguistic styles to characters in literature, journalism, and theater, I explore sociocultural and semiotic underpinnings of drawing Creole and Barbadian English forms into production of linguistically marked social identities and socially marked language varieties.

The identity test imposed by the Gileadites on the Ephraimite fugitives at the passages of Jordan suggests that the recognition of ways and means of speaking as indices of social categories has a venerable history. After the passage of several millenia, much the same associational understanding of the relationship between language and identity employed to such violent ends by the Gileadites guides the contemporary - and one would hope more benign line of sociolinguistic inquiry that centers on the investigation of ethnicity or region or gender or age or occupation as “sociolinguistic variables” (see, e.g., Coulmas 1997). The addition of a third term, performance, to the nexus of language and identity, however, occasions a reorientation of analytical perspective. If we take performance in the sense of linguistic practice - situated, interactional, communicatively motivated - our investigative focus shifts from correlational sociolinguistics to the pragmatically oriented exploration of “when and how identities are interactively invoked by sociocultural actors” through the discursive deployment of linguistic resources (Kroskrity 1993: 222). In this perspective, identity is an emergent construction, the situated outcome of a rhetorical and interpretive process in which interactants make situationally motivated selections from socially constituted repertoires of identificational and affiliational resources and craft these semiotic resources into identity claims for presentation to others. This is clearly a productive line of inquiry, and one to which all of the contributors to this issue would subscribe. While acknowledging and exploiting the analytical power of this practice-centered perspective, however, the authors of the papers collected here have taken an additional step into less well charted investigative territory, guided by a more marked conception of verbal performance. Here, performance is understood as a special mode of situated communicative practice, resting on the assumption of accountability to an audience for a display of communicative skill and efficacy. In this sense of performance, the act of expression is put on display, objectified, marked out to a degree from its discursive surroundings and opened up to interpretive scrutiny and evaluation by an audience. Performance foregrounds form-functionmeaning interrelationships through verbal display (Bauman 1977; Hymes 1975). The six casestudies that follow suggest some of the ways that an orientation to this mode of performance

The study of language contact has been traditionally carried out from a structural perspective (synchronic or diachronic), from a sociolinguistic perspective and/or from a rather psychological perspective, centered on the linguistic and communicative competence of the multilingual individual. However, a great number of linguistic and sociolinguistic topics that appear in language contact situations may be productively tackled from a pragmatic viewpoint. This pragmatic perspective takes into account linguistic use in communication contexts and raises, at a different level, questions that deal with the structures and the evolution of the codes in contact. The main aim of this presentation is the analysis of some of the specific problems that arise in given language contact situations from a pragmatic perspective, considering the adaptation processes of the speakers, their particular interactive strategies and the social meaning generated. Understanding pragmatics in its original sense, i.e. as the study of the relationship between linguistic signs and speakers (users of certain resources), these phenomena should be understood as the result of speakers’ adaptation to changing sociocultural circumstances. This adaptation creates a new distribution of the verbal resources (or linguistic economy) of the community and, consequently, modifies its varieties as far as form and function are concerned.

This study investigates creative product descriptions (CPDs) in an intercultural context, especially with respect to cultural references (CRs) and lexical cohesion. More specifically, it examines (i) how CRs are utilized in CPDs written in English for intercultural communication, (ii) how lexical cohesion can be described in a culturally meaningful and context-sensitive way, and (iii) what role cultural reference terms play in shaping the lexical cohesion of such CPDs. By proposing a multi-layer framing model of cohesion, this paper shows how lexical cohesion results from interactions of four frames activated in the production and reception of a text: sociocultural, generic, interpersonal and conceptual. The study concludes with some practical implications for the writing of CPDs in English for intercultural communication.

Niche construction theory concerns how organisms can change selection pressures by altering the feature–factor relationship between themselves and their environment. These alterations are standardly understood to be brought about through two kinds of organism–environment interaction: perturbative and relocational niche construction. We argue that a reconceptualization is needed on the grounds that if a niche is understood as the feature–factor relationship, then there are three fundamental ways in which organisms can engage in niche construction: constitutive, relational, and external niche construction. We further motivate our reconceptualization by showing some examples of organismic activities that fall outside of the current categorization of niche construction, but nonetheless should be included. We end by discussing two objections to niche construction and show how our reconceptualization helps to undercut these objections. ispartof: British Journal for the Philosophy of Science vol:73 issue:2 pages:351-372 status: published

Pre-service teachers are often involved in the continuous construction and reconstruction of their identities that are shaped by various internal and external factors. This study explores sociocultural factors that influence pre-service teachers' beliefs about teaching and learning namely 1) previous schooling experience, 2) teacher education, and 3) curriculum specifications. Participants of the study were three pre-service teachers studying at a local university in Malaysia. Data were collected through face-to-face interviews conducted after their teaching practicum at local government schools. Findings from this study indicate that the three sociocultural factors have a varying degree of influence towards the pre-service teachers’ pedagogical beliefs and practice. Previous schooling experience and teacher education programme have the most influence on all the pre-service teachers' beliefs and practice while curriculum specifications have the least impact. It is also evident from this study that the formation of teachers' beliefs is complex as sociocultural factors such as ethnicity, gender, school and home are always interactional. The findings provide implications for ESL teacher educators in considering pre-service teachers' beliefs in teacher education programmes as these may significantly impact their pedagogical practices.

Self-concept affects the overall process of pregnancy, childbirth, and parenting among adolescent mothers. The current systematic review explores intervention studies on the enhancement of self-concept among adolescent mothers, following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses guidelines. English and Korean literature published within the past 10 years was searched and five articles met the inclusion criteria. To improve self-concept among adolescent mothers, especially self-esteem, it was deemed necessary to strengthen a balanced capacity of physiological, psychological, sociocultural, and developmental aspects, based on a comprehensive assessment. To provide effective intervention, it was essential to reflect the cultural characteristics of adolescent mothers' native countries. Lectures were confirmed as a representative method of enhancing self-concept and participatory learning methods, such as group discussions, group activities, practical skills training, and supervision, were considered effective for enhancing self-esteem by strengthening not only knowledge but also the motivation of adolescent mothers. [ Journal of Psychosocial Nursing and Mental Health Services, 60 (3), 31–39.]

Relevance The creation of a system of work with schoolchildren focused on choosing a profession taking into account possible success in a specific professional field is relevant. Aim The article is aimed at analysis of the situation of adolescents’ susceptibility to such guidance basing on different components. Materials and Methods The methodology of creating and implementing a special course is focused on the formation of basic elements of readiness for professional activities. Results The authors of the study developed long-term projects that are considered to improve socio-economic development and increase the quality of work in various industries and at the personal level–socio-cultural development and socialization of adolescents. Conclusion The career guidance for adolescents should include information about the means of communication. The development of the definition of technological means to provide information on the choice of profession is a significant part of the career guidance program.

The purpose of the research is to describe the sociocultural factors that emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic. Twitter is used as an instrument for data collection. The study is qualitative and uses the netnographic method. To analyze the flow of messages posted on Twitter, the model proposed by Perez-Cepeda and Arias-Bolzmann (2020) , which describes sociocultural factors, is taken as a basis. The semantics that people use are a type of functional knowledge that reveals sociocultural factors. Sentiments were analyzed through lexicon-based methods, which are the most suitable. The categorization and classification of the data are performed based on the information that users post on Twitter. The tweets related to COVID-19 describe the sociocultural issues and the level of sentiment around the pandemic. The discussion centers on the COVID-19 pandemic, information consumption, lexicon, sociocultural factors and sentiment analysis. The study was limited to the social media Twitter; another limitation was not to consider the social group of the users who interact with @pandemic_Covid-19, official account of the World Health Organization (WHO). This research contributes to the social sciences, focusing on sociocultural interaction through the use of the social network Twitter. It describes the link between sociocultural factors and the level of sentiment on issues related to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Cultural macroevolution concerns a long-term evolutionary process involving transmission of non-genetic or cultural traits between populations as well as birth and death of populations. To understand the spatial dynamics of cultural macroevolution, we present a one-locus model of cultural diffusion in which a cultural trait is transmitted on a network of populations. Borrowing the method of ancestral backward process from population genetics, our model explores the lineage of a trait variant sampled in the present generation to quantify when and where the variant was invented. Mathematical analysis of the model enables us to predict the distribution of cultural age in each population of the network, estimate the frequencies of trait variants originating from given populations, and discuss the time it takes for a trait variant to diffuse between a given pair of populations. We also perform numerical analysis on random scale-free network of populations to investigate the effect of network topology and innovation rate on the age and origin of variants in each population. The result suggests that trait variants are more likely to derive from a population with higher innovation rate. Our numerical analysis also shows that trait variants invented in populations with higher network-centrality values are likely to be maintained at a higher frequency and transmitted to other populations in a shorter time period.

The objective of this article is to analyze the social, political and cultural changes that the city of Berlin has undergone during recent history. The analysis has focused on the city’s multiple facets as a historical phenomenon, analyzing the social-historic situation through several literary works that have been fundamental in order to understand the cultural evolution of Berlin since the beginning of the 20 th century through the fall of the Berlin Wall.

In recent decades, social movements have experienced transformations since the beginning of the Internet and the development of social network sites for digital activism and movement organizations. This article initially considers a theoretical review of the relevant aspects that are considered for the evolution of social movements through the use of the Internet and social network sites, considering their scope and limitations. This study analyses, through a qualitative methodology of thirteen in-depth interviews with experts, activists and a journalist, how the social movements for peace in Mexico were formed and how their causes were displayed through the social network sites, beyond the technological determinism about the potential of these digital tools, considering the complexity of sociocultural factors that made possible the formation of these social movements in the context of the war on drugs. This article also analyses the change in the status quo of Mexican politics for peace, emphasizing the role of civil society and the work of peace groups in Mexico to generate transformations in Mexican politics peace.

This article covers recent research activities in educational psychology that have an interdisciplinary emphasis and that accommodate twenty-first-century skills in addition to the traditional foundations of literacy, numeracy, science, reasoning (problem-solving), and academic subject matter. We emphasize digital technologies because they are capable of tracking learning data in rich detail and reliably delivering interventions that are tailored to individual learners in particular sociocultural contexts. This is a departure from inflexible pedagogical approaches that previously have been routinely adopted in most classrooms and other contexts of instruction with no precise record of learning and instructional activities. A good design of educational technology embraces the principles of learning science, identifies the basic types of learning that are needed, implements relevant technological affordances, and accommodates feedback from different stakeholders. This article covers research in literacy, collaborative problem-solving, motivation, emotion, and science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) areas. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Psychology, Volume 73 is January 2022. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

In this research, we wish to address the tension tucked away in scholarly work: the simultaneous need to break in and break out of academic communities and their ways of thinking. More precisely, we are interested in social re-search (i.e., searching again) processes and how scholars authenticate their research within an established cultural convention. For that purpose, we focus on the use of the term ‘lens’, which is omnipresent in research texts but rarely defined. Upon completing an integrative literature review and considering the embeddedness of a lens in culture, language, research communities and our ontological assumptions, we define a ‘research lens’ as a sociocultural representation and tool that helps to negotiate our scientific interpretation of the world. Our contribution to industrial marketing stems from surfacing and discussing four uses of a lens evident in the industrial marketing literature, introducing a metaphorical lens as a way to reform knowledge, and finally exemplifying how our lens tends to either mirror, reflect, symbolize or mirage the contours of our world without our full awareness of it.

This study examines agrobiodiversity production and consumption among indigenous people and smallholders engaged with cascading migration, coca, and water resource changes. Addressing the questions if and how agrobiodiversity is viable amid intensifying extra-local influences, it combines the theorization of a pathway that has emerged via infrastructure entanglements and the extended case study of local utilization practices. The theoretical orientation integrates key elements of political ecology and social-ecological systems. We undertook surveys, interviews, and ethnographic participant observation in 10 communities and villages of Cochabamba, Bolivia, between 1990 and 2013. Results show how agrobiodiversity was utilized at moderate-high levels in the land and water systems, foods, and other uses of indigenous peasants and smallholder farmers in the 1990–2013 period even as certain minor crops were significantly reduced. Moreover, the results reveal how agrobiodiversity and agrobiodiverse foods have functioned in production and consumption amid the infrastructure entanglements of migration, roads, and irrigation. Embeddedness as both quotidian resource capacities and contingent sociocultural symbols was hinged to agrarian change in these accelerated entanglements. Mobilities of both meaning and people in recent infrastructure entanglement is characteristic of the unfolding utilization of agrobiodiversity and agrobiodiverse foods. Social power in the complex contours of accelerated entanglement have furnished meanings ranging from the resistance politics of indigenous people and smallholders to the purposeful agendas of more powerful groups. The conclusion highlights how dynamic agrobiodiversity utilization has emerged via the pathway of indigenous people and smallholders who are engaged in cascading, extra-local entanglements.

A case study approach was used to investigate the adaptation experiences of Turkish international students (TIS), which may vary according to the host culture, in two different cultures: Hungary (n = 14) and the United States (US) (n = 12). The findings of the data analysis yielded four broad overlapping categories: (1) experiences in academic setting, (2) interaction with others in the host country, (3) political reflections in the host country, and (4) everyday matters in the host country. According to findings, depending on the factors in the institutional, social and physical environment, and societal contexts, both the psychological and sociocultural adaptation experiences of the participants in Hungary and the US differed. The study revealed that studying in Hungary, which offers english mediuim instruction programs, poses some serious difficulties for TIS compared to their co-nationals studying in an English-speaking country, such as in-school separation from local students. However, due to a shared historical background between Hungarians and Turks, TIS in Hungary have experienced many cultural similarities in their relations and daily lives unlike TIS in the US. Additionally, the positive attitudes of some Hungarian politicians toward Turkey and Turkish ethnicity have contributed to TIS' perceived low cultural distance and positively affected their cross-cultural adaptation process. Whereas, TIS in the US experienced stress that hindered adaptation due to certain political developments in the US and their political relations with Turkey.

The philosophy of dermatology involves helping patients who present to dermatologists to realize their full potential by treating them holistically and educating them about the different aspects of their disease(s), while helping the doctors involved to grow professionally and as human beings. In the setting of a burdened health sector of a third-world country like Pakistan, the road to realizing this philosophy is rife with hurdles in the form of low resources, poor health infrastructure, lack of a research culture, a low literacy rate, and sociocultural taboos. The resolution of these issues needs concerted efforts by all the stakeholders, and it can be possible only through selfless leadership, dedicated teamwork, and incessant efforts by the doctors, health authorities, and national as well as international health institutions.

Family engagement in early learning and education is considered a key predictor of children's development. However, little is known about the link between family engagement in early learning opportunities in sociocultural diverse contexts, particularly in low- and-middle-income countries. This study examined the associations of family engagement in home learning activities (e.g., reading books, naming things) and in early childhood care and education centers (ECCE; e.g., attending meetings or workshops, helping inside the classroom) with young children's emergent literacy and numeracy, social-emotional functioning, motor development, and executive functions, as measured through direct assessment. Data came from a nationally-representative sample of public ECCE centers in Colombia serving 3–5-year-old children (N = 3069). Multilevel model analyses showed that home-based family engagement was associated with higher emergent numeracy, emergent literacy, social-emotional functioning, and motor development, whereas center-based family engagement was associated only with higher emergent numeracy and literacy development. These results suggest that interventions and policies designed to improve family engagement in early learning opportunities both at the ECCE centers and at the home could have positive and independent effects on early childhood development.

Although the United States has offered refuge to millions of immigrants, healthcare providers still lack sufficient understanding of social and ethnic issues in this population. Sociocultural barriers inhibit service accessibility and compromise the quality and appropriateness of care for resettled refugees. To address this issue, faculty from a school of nursing pioneered a spiritually and culturally centered simulation experience to enhance prelicensure students' cultural competence and sensitivity in caring for refugees.