The current study was conducted with the aim of examining the impact of social-cognitive categorization of a victim of aggression on the degree of empathy individuals feel toward him. The innocent victim categorized as an in-group member was hypothesized to evoke the highest empathy, whereas the guilty victim belonging to an out-group was expected to be empathized with the least of all. Participants were 104 Iranian female adults who were sampled form the population of female students at the psychology department of the University of Tehran during 2012-2013. They were randomly assigned to four experimental groups and asked to read scenarios in which one character was the victim of aggression by another. Victims varied with regard to in-group-out-group membership (Iranian vs. Saudi Arabian) and perceived morality (guilty vs. innocent). Participants’ explicit and implicit empathies with the victim were assessed using explicit questions and Implicit Association Test, respectively. Analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used to analyze the data. Social-cognitive categorization of the victim had a significant effect on implicit, affective and motor empathies. The innocent Iranian was the victim empathized with the most, while the innocent Arab and the guilty Arab received the same degree of empathy. Participants empathized more with the guilty Iranian than the innocent Arab. Cognitive empathy was not influenced by social-cognitive categorization of the victim. The present findings suggest that compared to perceived morality, the in-group-out-group dimension had a more noticeable impact on empathy, particularly those kinds of empathy more dependent on the evolutionarily ancient systems of the brain.

The ethical actions are important because of the priority of the mission goal and their close relationship with social progress and development. Therefore, the purpose of this research is the identification and social analysis of these types of actions among the verses of revelation and it deals with the effect of ethical actions in the production of social capital in the process of progress based on religious teachings and answers these questions based on the Quranic teachings. What impact do ethical actions (behavior) have on the formation of social progress? How do moral actions generate social capital and influence progress (development)? What coordinates, examples and dimensions does this group of actions have? What are the effects and consequences of this group of actions? Those actions that are desirable and progressive in the development of social interactions have been socially studied, analyzed and searched by using the inductive content analysis method. Honesty, trustworthiness and fulfillment of an obligation, altruism (Arabic: إیثار, self-sacrifice), asking forgiveness or istighfār (Arabic: استغفار ʾistiġfār), and forgiving others, kindness, non-violence, chastity and purity, patience and honesty and benevolent actions combined with social supervision have been discussed, which lead to sincerity, togetherness, coherence and expansion of social interactions and emotional relationships far from hatred and warm and emotional relationships and as a result, it causes the production of social capital and its improvement and will lead to the density of actions focused on purpose and excellence that are necessary for progress.

Categorization as a form of organization and placing different things, including phenomena, objects, events and the like in different groups, is a kind of cognitive function in human beings that occurs based on the common "taxonomy" of categories or the thematic "relationships" that occur between them. Research shows that Western and East Asian cognitive performance, especially that of the Chinese, is quite different in terms of categorization; Accordingly, Westerners classify things on the basis of "category" (taxonomic categorization) and East Asians do so on the basis of "relationships" (thematic categorization). The present study evaluated and analyzed their cognitive performance by performing two tests in the form of visual and verbal questionnaires on 50 Persian male and female speakers. The visual questionnaire showed that out of 50 Persian participants, 70% carried out the categorization based on "relationships"; the verbal questionnaire also confirmed the result of the former and showed that 76% of Persian speakers, during the process of categorization, have considered the "relationship" criterion and, in fact, have acted on the syntagmatic axis. On this basis, it can be concluded that, firstly, the cognitive function is not the same in all human beings, and secondly, the cognition of Persian speakers in the field of categorization operates on the syntagmatic axis, unlike Westerners who in fact "classify" and act on the paradigmatic axis...

The literature of the constitutional era is a mixture of socio-political conditions of the society. Poets and writers present their poems or writings to the audience based on the events of the day, either as critic, advocate or opponent. The literature study of this era is of paramount importance aligned with social and political changes to get basic texture reading, and is an excellent source for analysis and investigation in the field of sociological-semantic studies. Farrokhi Yazdi is one of the poets of turbulent times of constitutional era who dedicated his poetic talent to the service of social goals and concerns and his poems are full of social and folky themes. Diversity of social and national concepts in Farrokhi Yazdi’s poems require an analysis of its discourse with a society-oriented perspective. Discourse criticism according to Van Leeuwen’s model is helpful in better understanding the ideology and value system governing the poems’ text, as well as understanding Farrokhi Yazdi’s intellectual and social views in the constitutional era. The result of this research is not only the linguistic interpretation of Farrokhi Yazdi’s poems, but also the interpretation of the society in which this freedom-loving poet lived and struggled with its crises and difficulties. In this research, it is assumed that social-political poems of Farrokhi Yazdi contain discourse-oriented components that can be analyzed and examined by Van Leeuwen’s model. This study is done in order to discover the position of social agents and how they are depicted in the poems of Farrokhi Yazdi.In Van Leeuwen’s model, the text is not examined from the perspective of formalism, but rather the impact of social issues on the text. In this model, each text expresses the social intellectual views or the specific class of the writer or poet. The degree of utilization of power sources has a direct effect on the openness and concealment of the text in such a way that the greater access to power sources, the franker and more transparent the text and the social agents are displayed in an active manner, and the lower access to power sources, the image of social agents is more covered Although, in Van Leeuwen’s approach, sociological components are preferred over linguistic, but the analyst is still bound to use linguistic components. This is because the foundations of social functions are in language and words are linked with meaning. The current research has taken advantages of the application of nomination and categorization in the discourse approach of Van Leeuwen’s social agents. This research seeks to show the result of using these two components in Farrokhi Yazdi’s poems and rereading them in his social-political thought system. Based on this, in the first step, verses that have social-political contexts were selected. In the following, discussed components were marked in every verse and the application rate and statistic of the components were determined. The result of the study show that Farrokhi has paid much attention to deliver social matters indirectly and in a hidden way due to the asphyxiation and mutes of the era. Highest frequency based on the numbers of occurrences respectively, is assigned to the components of negative appraisement, classification, nomination and functionalization.