The Psychology of Religion: A Social Force

Although the twenty-first century is deemed as a new era of globalization, waves of immigration continue, due to disparities between politically and economically unstable regions and Western democratized and developed countries. Immigration research has therefore reignited its attention on the successful adaptation of immigrants’ offspring, which has profound implications for Western immigrant-receiving countries, as well as worldwide stability. Although immigration research mainly informed by the conventional assimilation theory and/or segmented assimilation perspective accentuates the importance of structural factors, termed as social forces here, in relation to immigrant children’s successful adaptation in adolescence, an argument of determinism and tenability keeps on and the contribution of human mental resources and determination, termed as mental forces here, in shaping life trajectories of immigrant children should be not ignored. For this, with a representative sample of 3344 immigrant children from the Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study (CILS), we examined and compared both the effects of social and mental forces measured in adolescence of immigrant children on their multiple adaptation outcomes in terms of college graduation, engagement in postgraduate study, and first and current job attainments in young adulthood with a Bayesian multilevel modeling framework. The results found that both social forces of segmented assimilation theory and mental forces of immigrant children in adolescence were significantly predictive of immigrant children’s successful adaptation in young adulthood (OR = 1.088–2.959 and β = 0.050–0.639 for social forces; OR = 11.290–18.119 and β = 0.293–0.297 for mental forces), in which, although the latter showed stronger effects than the former, the effects of mental forces on adaptation of immigrant children were conditionally shaped by the contexts of the social forces informed by segmented assimilation theory. The findings of the current study highlight the significance of the organism–environment interaction perspective on immigration research and provide an insight to consider a context-driven response thesis proposed.

Social force model is one of the well-known approaches that can successfully simulate pedestrians’ movements realistically. However, it is not suitable to simulate high-density crowd movement realistically due to the model having only three basic crowd characteristics which are goal, attraction, and repulsion. Therefore, it does not satisfy the high-density crowd condition which is complex yet unique, due to its capacity, density, and various demographic backgrounds of the agents. Thus, this research proposes a model that improves the social force model by introducing four new characteristics which are gender, walking speed, intention outlook, and grouping to make simulations more realistic. Besides, the high-density crowd introduces irregular behaviours in the crowd flow, which is stopping motion within the crowd. To handle these scenarios, another model has been proposed that controls each agent with two different states: walking and stopping. Furthermore, the stopping behaviour was categorized into a slow stop and sudden stop. Both of these proposed models were integrated to form a high-density crowd simulation framework. The framework has been validated by using the comparison method and fundamental diagram method. Based on the simulation of 45,000 agents, it shows that the proposed framework has a more accurate average walking speed (0.36 m/s) compared to the conventional social force model (0.61 m/s). Both of these results are compared to the real-world data which is 0.3267 m/s. The findings of this research will contribute to the simulation activities of pedestrians in a highly dense population.

In this work, we provide an approach for Modeling and Simulation (M&S) of crowds using Cellular Discrete EVent System Specification (Cell-DEVS). We present many examples of Cellular Discrete EVent System Specification entity-based crowd models, and we show how to use Cellular Discrete EVent System Specification for entity-based modeling and simulation of crowds. We provide an approach for using Cellular Discrete EVent System Specification theory in modeling and simulation of crowds, and we propose Cellular Discrete EVent System Specification entity-based models for modeling and simulation of one-, two-, and three-dimensional movement of crowds. We extend the models above, and propose a more advanced model for crowd movement in multi-level building. Furthermore, we use this model for simulation of building evacuations. We propose another advanced model for crowd modeling, and deploy the model in occupancy analysis of buildings. Simulation results verify the usability of the proposed models.

This study introduces an improved Social Force (SF) model, the CE-SF model, which incorporates context effects (CE) to better mimic evacuees' real exit choice behavior during building evacuations. The efficacy of the CE-SF model was evaluated through a comparative analysis of exit utilities and movement trajectories against those generated by a utility-function-based SF (UF-SF) model and a shortest-path-based SF model. Additionally, we proposed a novel approach for the quantitative comparison of experimental and simulated evacuation trajectories. Our findings indicate that the CESF model excels in accurately modeling exit choices and movement trajectories across different levels of urgency. Notably, simulation results suggest that setting the context-influenced evacuee percentage to 80% minimizes exit choice errors. This validation supports the broader applicability of the CE-SF model in scenarios with multiple exits, enhancing its utility for emergency evacuation planning and safety protocol development.

The social force (SF) model has been successfully applied to the simulation of flows of pedestrians. Nevertheless, in some scenarios with low density, experiments show that the simulated individuals do not behave as expected, working as irrational particles rather than smart people. For example, by the means of the cited model, it is common to see many simulated individuals going several times straightly against columns, before finding a way to deviate and safely exit the room. Aiming to deal with such problems, this article proposes a way to provide the simulated pedestrians the ability of changing the direction of their displacement at reasonable times, in order to bypass eventually blocked or crowded near areas. To do so, it applies concepts from the lattice-gas model to the SF model. Experiments were driven in order to evaluate the proposed model. As results, it maintained the ability of the SF model to reproduce phenomena like the formation of arcs in evacuated one-door rooms. Focusing on the scenario with a column-blocked one-door room, the simulated pedestrians presented softer and more coherent trajectories, when compared to the pure SF model solution.

A modified social force model with different categories of pedestrians for subway station evacuation

There has been considerable interest in crowd simulation and creating crowds of virtual humans that will move in a virtual environment in a believable way. This paper presents an experimental design for assessing human behavior in emergency evacuation of an aircraft among a team of players in a game set in a virtual environment. We present the sense of presence in a virtual environment as a possible way of validating human behavior and crowd simulation models. We are conducting a pilot experiment to explore crowd simulation in aircraft evacuation using Virtual Reality to achieve high levels of presence and thus could be used as a framework for validating crowd behavior simulations. We present two approaches for controlling crowd behavior. First by defining rules for computer simulated agents, second by providing controls to the users to navigate in the environment as autonomous agents and guiding other agents. Our contribution lies in our approach to combining these two approaches of behavior in order to simulate the crowd behavior in emergencies.

For Marx, labor is the creative, subjective factor in production conceived as a necessary part of the material metabolism between people and nature. Individual and collective human labors take place and evolve in and through definite social relations. Human production is thus constituted jointly by social production relations and the material characteristics of nature itself (see Chapter 2). Marx often emphasizes the jointly material and social character of production by characterizing human labor and labor power as natural and social forces. Hence he describes labor power as a “natural force of human beings,” or as a “living . . . social force,” and human labor as “a social and natural force,” or “human exertion as a specifically harnessed natural force” (1967a, III, 813, I, 239; 1977, 1056; 1973, 400, 612). While insisting that human laboring capacities are socially developed, organized, and utilized, Marx still emphasizes that “labour . . . is only the manifestation of a natural force, human labour power” (1966, 3).KeywordsProductive PowerSocial ForceHuman LaborSocial CharacterNatural ForceThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Crowd modeling and simulation are very important in the investigation and study of the dynamics of a crowd. They can be used not only to understand the behavior of a crowd in different environments, but also in risk assessment of spaces and in designing spaces that are safer for crowds, especially during emergency evacuations. This paper provides an overview of the use of the crowd simulation model for three main purposes; (1) as a modeling tool to simulate behavior of a crowd in different environments, (2) as a risk assessment tool to assess the risk posed in the environment, and (3) as an optimization tool to optimize the design of a building or space so as to ensure safer crowd movement and evacuation. Result shows that a simulation using the magnetic force model with a pathfinding feature provides a realistic crowd simulation and the use of ABC optimization can reduce evacuation time and improve evacuation comfort. This paper is expected to provide readers with a clearer idea on how crowd models are used in ensuring safer building planning and design.

Modeling group structures in pedestrian crowd simulation

The continued widespread use of tobacco is one of the greatest paradoxes of the 20th century. The cigarette was introduced to society early in this century, received a broad public acceptance in response to massive marketing and distribution efforts, and survives--or, more accurately, thrives--in a complex and controversial social, medical, and legal environment. Today, over 50 million Americans continue to use tobacco regularly, despite the fact that it is almost universally known that use of the product as intended is likely to result in ultimate death and disability for one out of two regular users. The latest statistics tell us that over 400,000 Americans die each year, accounting for over 5 million years of lost life, $50 billion in medical expenditures, and another $50 billion in indirect costs. We estimate that 10 million Americans have died from smoking since the first Surgeon General's Report in 1964, and another 25 million Americans alive today will ultimately die, including 5 million children, as a result of a fundamentally adolescent decision. Clearly, a unique mix of social and political forces have combined to result in a deadly and addicting product being sold and marketed like candy, resulting in 90% of users acknowledging the addictive nature of the product, 70% of whom would like to quit and wish they had never started. But despite near-universal knowledge of the harm and addictive nature of the product and widespread public support for changes in the status quo, the status quo has not changed. Despite a consistent belief that tobacco should be treated commensurate with the harm that it causes, changes in public policy have been surprisingly recalcitrant. This introduction briefly examines the social, cultural, economic, and public policy forces that have contributed to maintaining the status quo for nearly 100 years, the barriers to meaningful change, and the research needs that could result in profound improvements in public health.

The social, political, and economic forces operative in nineteenth-century Britain are briefly described. This permits tracing the birth of both the scientific study of individual differences and the field of eugenics to the infrastructure of society at that time. The distinction is made between the normative doctrine of individualism and the factual study of individual differences. It is argued that democratic--liberal--capitalistic--individualism, in part, conditioned the beginning of differential psychology and eugenics. In this process, Galton's liberal views concerning individual freedom and opportunity for full development became transformed into their dialectic--totalitarian--collectivism--a vision of an ideal state which did not come into being. It is paradoxically concluded that those same social forces which helped bring about the birth of differential psychology and the entailing eugenics ideology prevented the latter from being accepted and implemented.

Objectives: The study aims to analyze the impact of the state of conflict and lack of harmony between the internal Libyan political and social forces, on the continuity and development of the Libyan crisis 2014-2018, and the failure of all political initiatives proposed to solve it. Methods: The subject was studied through the analytical descriptive approach based on analyzing the data and statements issued by the active forces in the course of the crisis, and its alignment with the reality of the course of events . Results: The study showed that the main factor in the continuity and the development of the Libyan crisis is related, in the first place, to the rejection of all the internal Libyan conflict forces, specially the Islamic and liberal ones of all the proposed political agreement attempts, and the endeavor of each of them to monopolize power and exclude the other, and the rejection of the principle of polititical pluralism. Conclusions: The Libyan crisis 2014-2018 was formed by what Libya inherited after the 2011 revolution, embodied by a weak authority that was unable to impose state sovereignty on all parts of the country, This led to the ignition of conflict between all internal political and social Libyan forces and the spread of civil war. The intervention of greedy foreign powers, especially the European power, helped in its development. They were looking forward to dominating Libyan wealth.

Nussbaum, Martha C. <i>Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice</i>.Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013. Pp. 457. $35.00 (cloth).

To avow that gender is more than an independent--or dummy--variable is to posit the centrality of gender (as well as race and class) in economic analysis. Conventional economic methods tend to neglect the process by which gender interacts with and shapes other social forces and institutions. The basis for a feminist alternative is the assertion that the social construction of gender permeates men's and women's labor market experiences. A feminist definition of discrimination is proposed which emphasizes process as well as outcomes; measurable as well as unquantifiable repercussions. Labor market discrimmation is a multidimensional interaction of economic, social, political, and cultural forces in both the workplace and the family, resulting in differential outcomes involving pay, employment, and status. Several propositions toward developing feminist approaches to labor market discrimination are illustrated with examples of feminist research. These propositions delineate feminist work on: the importance of praxis-based research; the necessity for methodological pluralism; the role of power in wage-setting within the firm; the impact of macro-social institutions; and the intersections of gender, race, class, and other social forces.