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Cardiovascular disease is the number one cause of death for women in the United States. Acute myocardial infarction (AMI) carries a more negative prognosis for women than men. Women with AMI have both increased mortality and disability. All researchers who have documented a difference in delay times between men and women note that women delay longer in seeking treatment. In the case of an evolving AMI, women who delay in seeking medical attention will often place themselves outside the limits of reperfusion therapies such as angioplasty and thrombolysis, thereby increasing their risk of an out-of-hospital sudden cardiac death. Several investigators have reported that reasons for delay to treatment may include the presence or absence of “somatic awareness”, that is, how a woman perceives body activity and physiological functioning. The inability of women to disregard social roles and place primacy of caring over their own health issues may limit them from seeking formal care. Social roles and obligations in a women’s life are often influenced by everyday, ordinary happenings which may have a negative impact on decision making. These everyday, ordinary happenings have been defined as “daily hassles”. The Leventhal self-regulatory model of illness behavior, which has been used to study treatment seeking behavior in response to symptoms, provides a coherent framework for interpreting the problem of delayed treatment of myocardial infarction. The Leventhal model proposes that the patients’ belief about their health is structured in a hierarchical fashion and that these structures are based on previous illness experiences and information presented in the social environment. Utilizing a descriptive design, this study examined the relationship between somatic awareness and daily hassles and how these variables influenced a women’s treatment seeking behavior in AMI. The Modified Somatic Perception Questionnaire (MSPQ) was used to measure somatic awareness; and daily hassles were measured through the Daily Hassles and Uplift Scale (DHUS). The questionnaires were administered at least 24 hours post admission to women with AMI. Though there were no significant relationships found between somatic awareness, daily hassles and time to treatment for AMI, the study revealed other pertinent findings. A significant relationship was found between daily hassles and age; revealing that younger participants revealed a higher daily hassle score. Also, a significant relationship was found between total MSPQ and prior cardiac events; indicating infrequent occurrence of intense symptoms experienced by women with a positive cardiac history. Though it is unknown what impact this new knowledge will have on treatment of women with AMI, these findings hold promise for clarifying these areas of research. Keywords: somatic awareness, daily hassles, treatment seeking behavior, women with acute myocardial infarction (AMI).

This study compares social behavior of infants of resident mothers and infants of immigrant mothers in social groups of the mountain gorilla, Gorilla gorilla beringei. Infants of immigrant mothers spent more time in proximity to their mothers during group resting. They spent more time in solo play and less time in social play during group feeding. Their opportunity for social interaction with peers may be restricted mostly to group rest periods and their social play levels during this time are higher than infants with resident mothers. However, during both group resting and feeding they spent less time near other infants and they initiated fewer dyadic play bouts.

The ability of organisms to sense – and properly respond to – their environment is crucial to their survival. Higher organisms communicate with conspecifics to ensure the survival of the species. Nematodes, such as the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans, are ubiquitous across all biomes, and rely on chemical communication to convey information with one another. The small molecules they utilize in this communication are called ascarosides. These modular pheromones are employed by all taxa, ranging from Caenorhabditis to Ascaris. The ascaroside, ascr#8, is release by hermaphroditic C. elegans to attract potential mates. Previous work has shown that a class of male specific neurons are required for sensation of this pheromone. Here, we show that these neurons initiate a neural circuit modulated by the FMRFamide-like neuropeptide, flp-3. This neuropeptide is sensed by a set of G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs), NPR-10 and FRPR-16. Together, these components determine the behavioral valence of males to ascr#8. Within the male-specific sensory neurons, the CEM, we show that another group of GPCRs sense the ascr#8. Two of these receptors, DMSR-12 and SRW-97, are expressed in the cilia, suggesting their involvement in direct sensation of the cue. As a targeted approach to identifying and confirming receptors for ascr#8, we have developed a bioactive photoaffinity probe. We have also confirmed that the ability of ascr#8 to attract males is conserved across the genus. Together, these studies coalesce to deepen our understanding of sex-specific chemosensation and neuronal processing. These results can be used to better understand the defects that are seen in neurodegenerative diseases – many of which exhibit sex-specific defects in neuronal processing.

This chapter begins by describing the appearance of motor abilities, social and play behavior, sexual maturity, and sensory function in laboratory rats. It then discusses cognitive function, the development of simple stimulus associations made in conditioned taste aversion, and complex associations necessitated in spatial memory. The development of brain structures and their possible role in these behaviors are also discussed.

In the simulation of human crowd behavior including evacuation planning, transportation management, and safety engineering in architecture design, the development of pedestrian model for higher behavior fidelity is an important task. To construct plausible facsimiles of real crowd movements, simulations should exhibit human behaviors for navigation, pedestrian decision-making, and social behaviors such as grouping and crowding. The research field is quite mature in some sense, with a large number of approaches that have been proposed to path finding, collision avoidance, and visually pleasing steering behaviors of virtual humans. However, there is still a clear disparity between the variety of approaches and the quality of crowd behaviors in simulations. Many social science field studies inform us that crowds are typically composed of multiple social groups (James, 1953; Coleman and James, 1961; Aveni, 1977). These observations indicate that one component of the complexity of crowd dynamics emerges from the presence of various patterns of social interactions within small groups that make up the crowd. Hence, realism in a crowd simulation may be enhanced when virtual characters are organized in multiple social groups, and exhibit human-like coordination behaviors. Motivated by the need for modeling groups in a crowd, we present a multi-agent model for large crowd simulations that incorporates socially plausible group behaviors. A computational model for multi-agent coordination and interaction informed by well- established Common Ground theory (Clark, 1996; Clark and Brennan, 1991) is proposed. In our approach, the task of navigation in a group is viewed as performing a joint activity which requires maintaining a state of common ground among group members regarding walking strategies and route choices. That is, group members communicate with, and adapt their behaviors to each other in order to maintain group cohesiveness while walking. In the course of interaction, an agent may present gestures or other behavioral cues according to its communicative purpose. It also considers the spatiotemporal conditions of the agent-group's environment in which the agent interacts when selecting a kind of motions. With the incorporation of our agent model, we provide a unified framework for crowd simulation and animation which accommodates high-level socially-aware behavioral realism of animated characters. The communicative purpose and motion selection of agents are consistently carried through from simulation to animation, and a resulted sequence of animated character behaviors forms not merely a chain of reactive or random gestures but a socially meaningful interactions. We conducted several experiments in order to investigate the impact of our social group interaction model in crowd simulation and animation. By showing that group communicative behaviors have a substantial influence on the overall distribution of a crowd, we demonstrate the importance of incorporating a model of social group interaction into multi-agent simulations of large crowd behaviors. With a series of perceptual user studies, we show that our model produces more believable behaviors of animated characters from the viewpoint of human observers. / Ph. D.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.