Symbolic Perception Transformation and Interpretation: The Role and Its Impact on Social Narratives and Social Behaviours

Social Stories (also known as social narratives) help individuals participate in and understand social situations. This scoping review identifies and synthesizes social narrative research targeting behavior change in individuals with ASD. Using the following questions as a guide: (a) What is the scope of social narrative interventions used for individuals with ASD, (b) What behavior change outcome measures are evaluated, and (c) What research designs are used; five databases were searched from 2007-to-2018. Fifty-six articles met the criteria. Primary outcomes were sorted into two macro-categories: Reduce Disruptive Behaviors and Increase Desired Behaviors. Most, but not all, studies were found to be effective for various behaviors such as aggressive actions, verbal protests, identifying emotions, executive functioning, following directions, and responding in social situations. Social narratives can be used to promote skills/behaviors in individuals with ASD to enable participation, an important goal in occupational therapy practice. They are an accessible and feasible intervention that can be implemented in various settings for behaviors including activities of daily living, social skills, independence, and self-regulation. Most research reviewed used a single subject design, which is a limitation of the research as it makes results difficult to generalize. However, through replication, functional relationships can be determined. Additional research utilizing randomized control trials is recommended.

Social narratives, or story-based interventions, are defined as stories that describe social situations, appropriate social behaviors to display, and when to display the specified behaviors. Social narratives are a commonly implemented and empirically evaluated procedure used to improve social behavior and decrease the probability of aberrant behavior for individuals diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder. Although social narratives are a commonly implemented and evaluated procedure, recommendations about their use and effectiveness is conflicting. This paper reviews six interventions that fit the definition of social narratives (i.e., Social Stories™/social stories, social scripts, cartooning, comic strip conversations, power cards, and social autopsies). Fifteen articles were analyzed across multiple methodological dimensions to determine the level of evidence (i.e., convincing, partial, or not convincing). Results of the analysis indicated that the majority of social narrative studies did not demonstrate convincing evidence. Recommendations for clinicians and future research are discussed based on the results of the literature review.

Children on the autism spectrum often experience difficulty generalizing social skills across environments and contexts, which can make developing friendships challenging in early childhood. This means that, in addition to initial social skills instruction, children with autism may need specialized supports to promote the generalization of newly learned skills to natural inclusive play routines such as unstructured social centers and playdates. In this paper, we describe strategies teachers can employ to promote the generalization of newly learned social skills. Specifically, we describe how social narratives, visual supports, and environmental arrangement, prompting, and praise can be used during social centers and playdates to facilitate setting generalization. When teachers systematically support generalized social skills and behaviors, children will have more opportunities to develop meaningful friendships.

Population ageing is accelerating worldwide, making public attitudes towards older adults an increasingly important concern for public health. Using nationwide survey data from Chinese adults across multiple provinces, this study applies a multilevel analytical framework in which individual health behaviours are examined within provincial social climates, allowing both personal perceptions and contextual conditions to be considered simultaneously. The analysis focuses on two parallel pathways, namely the association between positive social cognition of ageing and health behaviour, and the association between age-related stereotypes and behavioural engagement, while also assessing how provincial discourse on ageing conditions these relationships. Results show that more favourable perceptions of ageing are strongly associated with higher levels of preventive care, physical activity, and social participation, with standardised coefficients ranging from approximately 0.46 to 0.55. About one quarter of this association is linked to an indirect pathway, whereby stronger social cognition corresponds to lower endorsement of negative stereotypes, which in turn is associated with healthier behaviour. Age-related stereotypes display a consistent negative association with health behaviour, with coefficients between -0.36 and -0.41, and this pattern is particularly pronounced in rural areas. Contextual conditions further shape these associations. In provinces characterised by more supportive public discourse on ageing, the link between cognition and behaviour is stronger, whereas in environments where stereotypes are more salient, their negative association with behaviour is amplified. Urban residents show a stronger alignment between positive views of ageing and behavioural engagement than rural residents, indicating an institutional gradient in healthy ageing. Taken together, the findings suggest that health behaviour in later life reflects not only individual orientations but also the social narratives and institutional environments surrounding ageing, implying that policies aimed at promoting healthy ageing may benefit from combining individual-level education with broader efforts to improve public discourse on ageing and to reduce persistent urban-rural inequalities in health systems.

Lee Benson was one of the first American political historians to suggest a “systematic” revision of traditional political history with its emphasis on narrow economic class analysis, narrative arguments, and over‐reliance on qualitative research methodologies. This essay presents Benson's contributions to the “new political history”—an attempt to apply social‐science methods, concepts, and theories to American political history—as a social, cultural, and political narrative of Cold War‐era American history. Benson belonged to a generation of ex‐Communist American historians and political scientists whose scholarship and intellectual projects flowed—in part—out of Marxist social and political debates, agendas, and paradigmatic frameworks, even as they rejected and revised them. The main focus of the essay is the genesis of Benson's pioneering study of nineteenth‐century New York state political culture, The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy, with its emphasis on intra‐class versus inter‐class conflict, sensitivity to ethnocultural determinants of political and social behavior, and reliance on explicit social‐science theory and methodology. In what follows, I argue that The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy has its roots in Benson's Popular Front Marxist beliefs, and his decade‐long engagement and subsequent disenchantment with American left‐wing politics. Benson's growing alienation from Progressive historical paradigms and traditional Marxist analysis, and his attempts to formulate a neo‐Marxism attentive to unique American class and political realities, are linked to his involvement with 1940s radical factional politics and his disturbing encounter with internal Communist party racial and ideological tensions in the late 1940s at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 315 Valley, killing four hundred people. In response, California tight­ ened controls over all dam building by private companies. East­ wood’s structures were all intact, but after he died of a heart attack in 1924, no powerful voice remained to defend his legacy. Jackson surveys the others who carried on, but arch dams faded away by the end of the 1930s, not least because big-budget New Deal builders favored the monumental aesthetics of gravity dams. There was more than one possible “second nature.” In the decade that Jackson devoted to this work he appears to have examined every relevant archive and all of Eastwood’s dams. This solid, instructive, innovative, and well-constructed book de­ serves a wide readership. David E. Nye Dr. Nye, professor of American history at Odense University, received the 1993 Dexter Prize for Electrifying America. His most recent books are Consuming Power: A Social History ofAmerican Energies (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997) and Narratives and Spaces: Technology and the Construction ofAmerican Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). The Emergence ofPottery: Technology and Innovation in Ancient Societies. Edited by William K. Barnett and John W. Hoopes. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996. Pp. xviii+285; illustra­ tions, maps, figures, tables, notes, index. $55.00 (cloth); $29.95 (paper). After decades of neglect, material culture and technology have risen recently to the forefront of sociocultural inquiry and interpre­ tation theory. Scholars have begun to explore in greater depth and in a wider interdisciplinary context the interdependence between material culture and society, matter and mind, and between technol­ ogy and human evolutionary processes. This volume of essays on the earliest appearance and development of pottery throughout the world provides a thought-provoking addition to the growing litera­ ture on the relationships between society and technology in varied historical and sociocultural contexts. Archaeologists today can reconstruct much more of the past than they could just a few years ago. Sophisticated new techniques of chemical, physical, and biological analysis in combination with re­ cent developments in archaeological methods and sociocultural in­ terpretation theory make available new kinds of data and new in­ sights into the nature of prehistoric societies. Pottery today is analyzed not only with reference to vessel shape and size or surface decoration to establish chronologies, typologies, and uncontextual­ ized sériations grounded primarily in visual analysis. With the aid of such methods as thermoluminescence dating and neutron-activa­ 316 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE tion analysis for trace-element analyses of clays, archaeologists may locate the vessels’ geographical sources and map their distribution to determine trade links and other forms of exchange and social interaction. Residues adhering to vessels or shards, too, are now ana­ lyzed along with shape and decoration to recover information on not only subsistence and quality of nutrition in early populations but also vessel function—i.e., whether it was used for storage, cook­ ing, ritual, or social display. Given the availability of these new data, the authors of these essays can ask and answer new questions about ceramic technology and the relationship of pottery to society and to sociocultural change over time. Seeking to address the “social factors” behind earliest pottery production and use, the editors state that their primary aim is “to deconstruct commonly held assumptions about prehistoric ce­ ramics” (p. 1). Collectively, the essays in this volume make a power­ ful statement on the importance of the individual case in historic time and space and the likely futility of seeking universal laws in human and social behavior. The book clearly drives home, for exam­ ple, the fact that the emergence of pottery can no longer be associ­ ated solely with the appearance of agriculture. Nor is it necessarily part ofa package that includes settled village life or social complexity or any other trait previously linked with the so-called Neolithic life­ style. Instead, pottery was developed and first used by seasonally mo­ bile populations of the late Upper Palaeolithic era, among hunters and gatherers of wild foods, and most likely among those reliant upon fish and shellfish food resources. The earliest pottery so far excavated in both Old and New World contexts...

Social media platforms, particularly Twitter, have emerged as influential arenas for financial discourse, shaping and reflecting market sentiment in real time. This study explores the thematic structure of financial discussions on Twitter, employing Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) to identify key topics and their temporal dynamics. A dataset of 11,932 finance-related tweets was analyzed, revealing five distinct topics encompassing corporate earnings, macroeconomic policies, geopolitical trade issues, and market trends. By correlating tweet volumes and topic prevalence with significant financial events, the study demonstrates the utility of social media as a barometer for market activity. Unlike traditional sentiment analysis, which predominantly classifies tweets into sentiment categories such as bullish, bearish, or neutral, the application of LDA enabled the extraction of latent themes that underpin these sentiments. This nuanced approach provided deeper insights into the narratives driving market discussions, offering a more comprehensive understanding of how thematic shifts in financial discourse align with market movements. Visualization techniques, including topic-term matrices and word clouds, further elucidated the structure of these conversations, enhancing interpretability and accessibility. The findings contribute to the growing body of research on social media analytics in finance, highlighting the potential of unsupervised learning techniques for financial trend analysis. By bridging the gap between thematic exploration and temporal analysis, this study offers a methodological framework for leveraging social media data to uncover actionable insights. The implications extend beyond academic research, providing practical tools for investors, financial analysts, and policymakers to navigate the dynamic relationship between social media narratives and market behavior. Future research could expand on these insights by integrating more advanced modeling techniques, such as transformer-based models, and exploring domain-specific patterns across asset classes like stocks, commodities, and cryptocurrencies. By examining the intersection of social media, financial events, and market dynamics, this study lays the groundwork for a deeper understanding of digital narratives in financial ecosystems.

The COVID-19 pandemic, as a holistic event of cultural trauma, significantly influenced social structures and behaviors globally. Under its impact, social movements leveraged digital platforms to sustain and amplify their causes, creating new forms of solidarity and resistance, and fostering a rise in digital and hybrid collective actions. Concurrently, social media thrived as a transformative tool for social change, revolutionizing communication, mobilization, and advocacy. Platforms like WhatsApp and X redefined traditional activism by enabling rapid information dissemination and facilitating global grassroots movements. This technological evolution has provided marginalized communities, including the indigenous peoples of Southern Africa, with a powerful voice. These communities face challenges such as land rights disputes, environmental degradation, and socioeconomic marginalization. Social media allows them to raise awareness, galvanize support, and engage with a broader audience beyond their geographical confines. The paper hypothesizes that social media plays a multifaceted role in supporting indigenous movements, by not only providing a platform for activists to organize and advocate, but also enabling engagement with the general public and influencing the perspectives and actions of policymakers and other audiences. Through the lenses of rural or indigenous activists who leverage these digital platforms to drive change, audiences who consume and interact with digital content and feeds, and policymakers who are increasingly mindful of the power of social media narratives, this paper aims to understand the complex interplay of forces that shape the trajectory of digital indigenism (indigenous digital activism). The paper employs a mixed-methods approach to investigate the influence of social media on social movements among indigenous communities in Southern Africa. The methodology incorporates (a) netnography and in-depth interviews to explore the experiences and strategies of indigenous activists, (b) the counterpublics framework to understand the formation and dynamics of indigenous digital activism, and (c) the Technology-Media-Movements Complex (TMMC) as a theoretical anchor to analyze the interplay between technology, media, and social movements. The case study of the Community Leaders Network (CLN) of Southern Africa is used to contextualize the findings. Findings reveal that indigenous activists recognize the power of social media in amplifying their voices but use these platforms out of necessity rather than preference. They find social media solutions often misaligned with their contextual needs, citing concerns over platform constraints, privacy issues, cultural insensitivity, superficial engagement metrics, and breaches of consent. Additionally, they reckon that the global emphasis on social media engagement can divert focus from essential field activities that directly benefit local communities, causing social media fatigue. It was also revealed that trying to convey practical information to an audience with preconceived notions is incredibly time-consuming and often feels like an endless loop for indigenous activists. Subsequently, they expressed a desire for platforms that consider users' mental well-being in their architectural design and incorporate cultural and linguistic practices, suggesting a preference for digital environments that are more aligned with values and modes of communication that contrast with western models. The results underscore social media's complex role in indigenous movements, highlighting its empowering potential while also presenting significant challenges due to algorithms and platform dynamics. While the ability to share stories, disseminate information about rights abuses, and mobilize support has significantly transformed social movement dynamics in rural communities, social media's potential for advocacy and mobilization is tempered by challenges that can limit their effectiveness. The findings highlight a pressing need for social media innovations that resonate with indigenous cultural identities, ensuring that their narratives are disseminated in a manner that faithfully preserves their authenticity. The paper discusses the implications of these findings for policymakers, activists, audiences and technology developers, emphasizing the importance of creating digital spaces that are culturally sensitive and supportive of indigenous activism.

In this paper, we address the tasks of recognition and interpretation of affect communicated through text messaging. The evolving nature of language in online conversations is a main issue in affect sensing from this media type, since sentence parsing might fail while syntactical structure analysis. The developed Affect Analysis Model was designed to handle not only correctly written text, but also informal messages written in abbreviated or expressive manner. The proposed rule-based approach processes each sentence in sequential stages, including symbolic cue processing, detection and transformation of abbreviations, sentence parsing, and word/phrase/sentence-level analyses. In a study based on 160 sentences, the system result agrees with at least two out of three human annotators in 70% of the cases. In order to reflect the detected affective information and social behaviour, an avatar was created.KeywordsAffective sensing from textaffective user interfaceavataremotionsonline communicationlanguage parsing and understandingtext analysis

In this paper, we address the task of affect recognition from text messaging. In order to sense and interpret emotional information expressed through written language, rule-based affect analysis system employing natural language processing techniques was created. Since the purpose of our work is to improve social interactivity and affective expressiveness of computer-mediated communication, we decided to tailor the system to handle style and specifics of online conversations. Proposed algorithm for affect analysis covers symbolic cue processing, detection and transformation of abbreviations, sentence parsing, and word/phrase/sentence-level analyses. To realize visual reflection of textual affective information, we have designed an avatar displaying emotions, social behaviour, and natural idle movements.

This chapter addresses the tasks of recognition, interpretation and visualization of affect communicated through text messaging in virtual communication environments. In order to facilitate sensitive and expressive communication in such environments, we introduced a novel syntactic rule-based approach to affect recognition from text. Our Affect Analysis Model follows the compositionality principle, according to which emotional meaning of a sentence is determined by composing parts that correspond to lexical units or other linguistic constituent types governed by the rules of aggregation, propagation, domination, neutralization, and intensification, at various grammatical levels. The proposed rule-based approach processes each sentence in sequential stages, including symbolic cue processing, detection and transformation of abbreviations, sentence parsing, and word/phrase/sentence-level analyses. Our method is capable of processing sentences of different complexity, including simple, compound, complex (with complement and relative clauses), and complex-compound sentences. Affect in text is classified into nine emotion categories (or neutral), and, additionally, information that indicates social communicative behaviour is identified. The evaluation of the Affect Analysis Model algorithm showed promising results regarding its capability to accurately recognize affective information in text from an existing corpus of informal online conversations. The applications of the developed Affect Analysis Model in Instant Messaging system (AffectIM) and in Second Life (EmoHeart, iFeel_IM!) are described in the chapter.

The lived experience of dementia includes loss of identity due to the negative and pessimistic social narratives that are stigmatizing and socially isolating. In the community-based participatory research (CBPR) project Raising the Curtain on the Lived Experiences of Dementia, eleven individuals living with dementia participated as ‘peer collaborators’ in weekly co-creative workshops over two years. The purpose of this study was to investigate how peer collaborators described their involvement in Raising the Curtain in relation to their social participation and ability to effect social messages about dementia. Data gathered from the workshops, including transcripts (8) and one-on-one evaluation interviews (103), were used for analysis. Research findings revealed that the participants’ engagement as peer collaborators fostered their ability to enact resistance and social citizenship, including sharing lived experiences, combating the stigma of dementia, engendering inclusion and belonging, and promoting advocacy. Using CBPR to foster social citizenship suggests that meaningful and purposeful approaches to leisure are possible for individuals living with dementia.

Animations of simple geometric shapes are readily interpreted as animate agents engaged in meaningful social interactions. Such animations have been shown to activate brain regions implicated in the detection of animate motion, in understanding the intentions of others as well as areas commonly linked to the processing of social and emotional information. However, attribution of animacy does not occur under all circumstances and the precise conditions under which specific regions are activated remains unclear. In a functional magnetic resonance imaging study we manipulated viewers' perspective to assess the part played by selective attention. Participants were cued to attend either to spatial properties of the movements or to the kind of social behavior it could represent. Activations that occurred to the initial cue, while observing the animations themselves and while responding to a postpresentation probe, were analyzed separately. Results showed that activity in the social brain network was strongly influenced by selective attention, and that remarkably similar activations were seen during film viewing and in response to probe questions. Our use of stimuli supporting rich and diverse social narratives likely enhanced the influence of top-down processes on neural activity in the social brain.

The main recommendations of the panel report can be summarised under five key headings. Underpinning all five areas is the recognition that human narratives remain crucial for ensuring the widest access to our shared past. There is no wish to see political and economic narratives abandoned but the need is recognised for there to be an expansion to more social narratives to fully explore the potential of the diverse evidence base. The questions that can be asked are here framed in a national context but they need to be supported and improved a) by the development of regional research frameworks, and b) by an enhanced study of Scotland’s international context through time. 1. From North Britain to the Idea of Scotland: Understanding why, where and how ‘Scotland’ emerges provides a focal point of research. Investigating state formation requires work from Medieval Scotland: a future for its past ii a variety of sources, exploring the relationships between centres of consumption - royal, ecclesiastical and urban - and their hinterlands. Working from site-specific work to regional analysis, researchers can explore how what would become ‘Scotland’ came to be, and whence sprang its inspiration. 2. Lifestyles and Living Spaces: Holistic approaches to exploring medieval settlement should be promoted, combining landscape studies with artefactual, environmental, and documentary work. Understanding the role of individual sites within wider local, regional and national settlement systems should be promoted, and chronological frameworks developed to chart the changing nature of Medieval settlement. 3. Mentalities: The holistic understanding of medieval belief (particularly, but not exclusively, in its early medieval or early historic phase) needs to broaden its contextual understanding with reference to prehistoric or inherited belief systems and frames of reference. Collaborative approaches should draw on international parallels and analogues in pursuit of defining and contrasting local or regional belief systems through integrated studies of portable material culture, monumentality and landscape. 4. Empowerment: Revisiting museum collections and renewing the study of newly retrieved artefacts is vital to a broader understanding of the dynamics of writing within society. Text needs to be seen less as a metaphor and more as a technological and social innovation in material culture which will help the understanding of it as an experienced, imaginatively rich reality of life. In archaeological terms, the study of the relatively neglected cultural areas of sensory perception, memory, learning and play needs to be promoted to enrich the understanding of past social behaviours. 5. Parameters: Multi-disciplinary, collaborative, and cross-sector approaches should be encouraged in order to release the research potential of all sectors of archaeology. Creative solutions should be sought to the challenges of transmitting the importance of archaeological work and conserving the resource for current and future research.