Network-oriented modeling. Addressing complexity of cognitive, affective and social interactions (Q341063)

This book, divided in eighteen chapters, provides an in-depth study of the rapidly growing field of network-oriented modeling in complex systems. The first two chapters provide a useful introduction to network-oriented modeling in the context of human interactions based on temporal-causal networks, including a historic overview of several approaches to model human complexity (sensory input, cognitive process, actions). The second part of the book moves on to study in detail the role of human emotions and how they could be included in a model in the context of a complex system. A number of mathematical models is presented incorporating the notions of emotion, dream and fear into the human decision-making process and example simulations are presented to demonstrate their usability and applicability. The next five chapters expand the ideas to a social context, in particular how human behavior is influenced by others and the more general social context. This study includes not only the cognitive process of each individual, but also notions of self-ownership and joint decision making and how these can be represented in network-oriented mathematical models. The fourth part of this book considers in detail the analytical aspects of network-oriented modeling. Several simulation and optimization techniques are presented in detail, including examples of how the output of each model should be interpreted. The book contains a large number of colored charts which makes the interpretation of the results very easy to understand. The last four chapters contain a more in-depth discussion of the importance of network-oriented modeling in society and the philosophical and educational perspectives and limitations of such modeling. Overall, this very interesting book considers a novel but important field of complex systems modeling involving human processes as a whole, and is of great use to researchers seeking to develop scientific models for human behavior, decision making, social interactions, including the complexities of human emotions, shared understanding, joint decision making and self-ownership.