Interreality in the Management of Psychological Stress: a Clinical Scenario

The term “psychological stress” describes a situation in which a subject perceives that environmental demands tax or exceed his or her adaptive capacity. According to the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, the best validated approach covering both stress management and stress treatment is the Cognitive Behavioral (CBT) approach. We aim to design, develop and test an advanced ICT based solution for the assessment and treatment of psychological stress that is able to improve the actual CBT approach. To reach this goal we will use the “interreality” paradigm integrating assessment and treatment within a hybrid environment, that creates a bridge between the physical and virtual worlds. Our claim is that bridging virtual experiences (fully controlled by the therapist, used to learn coping skills and emotional regulation) with real experiences (allowing both the identification of any critical stressors and the assessment of what has been learned) using advanced technologies (virtual worlds, advanced sensors and PDA/mobile phones) is the best way to address the above limitations. To illustrate the proposed concept, a clinical scenario is also presented and discussed: Paola, a 45 years old nurse, with a mother affected by progressive senile dementia

Presence and rehabilitation: toward second-generation virtual reality applications in neuropsychology

Virtual Reality (VR) offers a blend of attractive attributes for rehabilitation. The most exploited is its ability to create a 3D simulation of reality that can be explored by patients under the supervision of a therapist. In fact, VR can be defined as an advanced communication interface based on interactive 3D visualization, able to collect and integrate different inputs and data sets in a single real-like experience. However, "treatment is not just fixing what is broken; it is nurturing what is best" (Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi). For rehabilitators, this statement supports the growing interest in the influence of positive psychological state on objective health care outcomes. This paper introduces a bio-cultural theory of presence linking the state of optimal experience defined as "flow" to a virtual reality experience. This suggests the possibility of using VR for a new breed of rehabilitative applications focused on a strategy defined as transformation of flow. In this view, VR can be used to trigger a broad empowerment process within the flow experience induced by a high sense of presence. The link between its experiential and simulative capabilities may transform VR into the ultimate rehabilitative device. Nevertheless, further research is required to explore more in depth the link between cognitive processes, motor activities, presence and flow

Teixeira Duarte Real Estate : an analysis of environmental sustainability

In industrialized economies, issues about the sustainability in the delivery of real estate projects have risen to the fore. The real estate industry has a big impact on the environment. It accounts for over 40% of energy consumption and 36% of the carbon dioxide emissions in the European Union. In this scenario, new regulations have been issued from the European Commission to force companies to disclose the percentage of their business that it can be label as environmentally sustainable. This research is dedicated to understanding where the real estate department of Teixeira Duarte stands from an environmental point of view. An archival analysis is performed to understand which will be the effort that Teixeira Duarte will need to make in to comply with the new European regulations. Furthermore. a competitor benchmark analysis is performed to understand which are the best practices that real estate companies adopt to communicate their policy to the relevant stakeholders through their sustainability reports. Lastly the data from two online surveys are analyzed and presented. One survey is directed to Teixeira Duarte real estate’s employees, while the other is targeted to the Portuguese general population. This research presents a set of recommendations to Teixeira Duarte to help understand which are the best concrete actions that the company should make in order to become more environmentally sustainable.Nas economias industrializadas, as questões sobre a sustentabilidade na entrega de projectos imobiliários têm vindo a ganhar destaque. A indústria imobiliária tem um grande impacto no ambiente. É responsável por mais de 40% do consumo de energia e 36% das emissões de dióxido de carbono na União Europeia. Neste cenário, novos regulamentos foram emitidos pela Comissão Europeia para forçar as empresas a revelar a percentagem do seu negócio que pode ser rotulada como ambientalmente sustentável. Esta investigação é dedicada a compreender onde se situa o departamento imobiliário da Teixeira Duarte de um ponto de vista ambiental. É realizada uma análise de arquivo para compreender qual será o esforço que a Teixeira Duarte terá de fazer a fim de cumprir a nova regulamentação europeia. Além disso, é realizada uma análise de referência concorrente para compreender quais são as melhores práticas que as empresas imobiliárias adoptam para comunicar a sua política aos interessados relevantes através dos seus relatórios de sustentabilidade. Finalmente, são analisados e apresentados os dados de dois inquéritos em linha. Um inquérito é dirigido aos empregados da imobiliária Teixeira Duarte, enquanto que o outro é dirigido à população portuguesa em geral. Esta pesquisa apresenta um conjunto de recomendações à Teixeira Duarte para ajudar a compreender quais acções concretas que a empresa deve empreender para se tornar mais sustentável

Being There: Understanding the Feeling of Presence in a Synthetic Environment and its Potential for Clinical Change

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Editorial for the Special Issue on Multimodality and Sequential Therapy in Locally Advanced Head and Neck Cancer

Multimodal and sequential treatment for locally advanced head and neck cancer (HNC) included induction chemotherapy, chemoradiation organ preservation protocols, immunotherapy, and targeted therapy [...

The Social Appearance Anxiety Scale in Italian adolescent populations: Construct validation and group discrimination in community and clinical eating disorders samples

Anxiety in situations where one’s overall appearance (including body shape) may be negatively evaluated is hypothesized to play a central role in Eating Disorders (EDs) and in their co-occurrence with Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD). Three studies were conducted among community (N = 1995) and clinical (N = 703) ED samples of 11- to 18-year-old Italian girls and boys to (a) evaluate the psychometric qualities and measurement equivalence/invariance (ME/I) of the Social Appearance Anxiety (SAA) Scale (SAAS) and (b) determine to what extent SAA or other situational domains of social anxiety related to EDs distinguish adolescents with an ED only from those with SAD. Results upheld the one-factor structure and ME/I of the SAAS across samples, gender, age categories, and diagnostic status (i.e., ED participants with and without comorbid SAD). The SAAS demonstrated high internal consistency and 3-week test–retest reliability. The strength of the inter-relationships between SAAS and measures of body image, teasing about appearance, ED symptoms, depression, social anxiety, avoidance, and distress, as well as the ability of SAAS to discriminate community adolescents with high and low levels of ED symptoms and community participants from ED participants provided construct validity evidence. Only SAA strongly differentiated adolescents with any ED from those with comorbid SAD (23.2 %). Latent mean comparisons across all study groups were performed and discussed

Interacting with Presence. HCI and the Sense of Presence in Computer-mediated Environments

The experience of using and interacting with the newest Virtual Reality and computing technologies is profoundly affected by the extent to which we feel ourselves to be really ‘present’ in computer-generated and -mediated augmented worlds. This feeling of 'Presence’, of “being inside the mediated world”, is key to understanding developments in applications such as interactive entertainment, gaming, psychotherapy, education, scientific visualisation, sports training and rehabilitation, and many more. This edited volume, featuring contributions from internationally renowned scholars, provides a comprehensive introduction to and overview of the topic of mediated presence - or ‘tele-presence’ - and of the emerging field of presence research. It is intended for researchers and graduate students in human-computer interaction, cognitive science, psychology, cyberpsychology and computer science, as well as for experienced professionals from the ICT industry. The editors are all well-known professional researchers in the field: Professor Giuseppe Riva from the Catholic University of Milan, Italy; Professor John Waterworth from Umeå University, Sweden; Dianne Murray, an HCI Consultant and editor of the journal “Interacting with Computers”

The Link between Action and Language: Recent Findings and Future Perspectives

This paper aims to present a critical review of studies focused on embodied cognition and, more specifically, on the relationship between language and action. A critical analysis of studies using methods such as TMS and fMRI will be presented, and results reported by the different studies will be discussed, both theoretically and methodologically. Then, in response to some inconsistency detected by the analysis of literature, Virtual Reality will be presented as a possible answer or enrichment for the study of this topic. Possible future research tracks and application are discussed

Genomics of Acute Myeloid Leukemia: The Next Generation

Acute myeloid leukemia (AML) is, as other types of cancer, a genetic disorder of somatic cells. The detection of somatic molecular abnormalities that may cause and maintain AML is crucial for patient stratification. The development of mutation-specific therapeutic interventions will hopefully increase cure rates and improve patients’ quality of life. This review illustrates how next generation sequencing technologies are changing the study of cancer genomics of adult AML patients