The Hidden Structure Of Interaction

The idea of complexity states that most things tend to organize themselves into recurring patterns, even when these patterns are not immediately visible to an external observer. The general name for the scientific field concerned with the behaviour over time of a dynamic system is complexity theory. The dynamic systems - systems capable of changing over time - are the focus of this approach, and its concern is with the predictability of their behaviour. The systems of interest to the complexity theory, under certain conditions, perform in regular, predictable ways; under other conditions they exhibit behaviour in which regularity and predictability is lost. The concepts of stable and unstable behaviour are part of the traditional repertoire of physical science. What is novel is the concept of something in between - chaotic behaviour. For chaos here we refer to systems which display behaviour that, though it has certain regularities, defies prediction. How does the order emerge from the chaos? How can we predict the behaviour of a chaotic system?Over the last 30 years and more, trying to identify the hidden patterns behind chaotic behaviour became the focus of attention in a number of scientific disciplines. These range as widely as astronomy, chemistry, evolutionary biology, geology and psychology.

Offers a fresh and detailed take on the evolution of religious behavior from a biobehavioral perspective, promoting a new understanding that may help build bridges across the religious divide. There has been much recent interest in the study of religion from the perspective of Darwinian evolution. The Biology of Religious Behavior: The Evolutionary Origins of Faith and Religion offers a broad overview of the topic, written by internationally recognized experts. In addition to its primary focus on religious behavior, the book addresses other important aspects of religion, such as values, beliefs, and emotions as they affect behavior. The contributors approach the evolution of religion by examining the behavior of individuals in their everyday lives. After describing various religious behaviors, the contributors consider the behaviors with reference to their evolutionary history, development during the lifetime of the individual, proximate causes, and adaptive value. Happily, this foray into understanding religion from a biobehavioral perspective demonstrates that, at the biological and behavioral levels, what unites the different religions of the world is far greater than what divides them.

The general focus of this book is on multimodal communication, which captures the temporal patterns of behavior in various dialogue settings. After an overview of current theoretical models of verbal and nonverbal communication cues, it presents studies on a range of related topics: paraverbal behavior patterns in the classroom setting; a proposed optimal methodology for conversational analysis; a study of time and mood at work; an experiment on the dynamics of multimodal interaction from the observer’s perspective; formal cues of uncertainty in conversation; how machines can know we understand them; and detecting topic changes using neural network techniques. A joint work bringing together psychologists, communication scientists, information scientists and linguists, the book will be of interest to those working on a wide range of applications from industry to home, and from health to security, with the main goals of revealing, embedding and implementing a rich spectrum of information on human behavior.

Communication is the core activity for an educator, conveying and sharing information from one person to another, from one organization to another. This work includes contributions which encompass a series of topics in communication psychology.

This project was inspired in the sixties by primatologist D. Morris’s “The Naked Ape”, Niko Tinbergen, K. Lorenz, and K. von Frisch ethological research rewarded in 1973 by a shared Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology and E. O. Wilson’s 1975 opus “Sociobiology”. Other important inspirations were B. F. Skinner’s work on probabilistic real-time contingencies, N. Chomsky’s on syntactic structure and creativity, H. Montagner’s on interactions in social insects and children, S. Duncan’s on turn-taking in human dyadic interactions, and Richard Dawkins’ on behavioral hierarchy and detection algorithms. Structured animal mass-societies (>104 individuals) are only found in insects and modern humans and understanding their similarities and differences became a major aim through a search for hidden interaction patterns. Existing multivariate and artificial neural network methods and models lacked adequate description and detection of complex real-time patterns requiring new mathematical time structure (1-D) models, now the T-system, with detection algorithms and software (THEME™).

Acts of violence assume many forms: they may travel by the arc of a guided missile or in the language of an economic policy, and they may leave behind a smoldering village or a starved child. The all-pervasiveness of violence makes it seem like an unavoidable, and ultimately incomprehensible, aspect of the modern world. But, in this detailed and expansive book, Marc Pilisuk and Jen Rountree demonstrate otherwise. Widespread violence, they argue, is in fact an expression of the underlying social order, and whether it is carried out by military forces or by patterns of investment, the aim is to strengthen that order for the benefit of the powerful. The Hidden Structure of Violence marshals vast amounts of evidence to examine the costs of direct violence, including military preparedness and the social reverberations of war, alongside the costs of structural violence, expressed as poverty and chronic illness. It also documents the relatively small number of people and corporations responsible for facilitating the violent status quo, whether by setting the range of permissible discussion or benefiting directly as financiers and manufacturers. The result is a stunning indictment of our violent world and a powerful critique of the ways through which violence is reproduced on a daily basis, whether at the highest levels of the state or in the deepest recesses of the mind.