Meaningful Social Interactions Research Articles

Comment on: Stopping Eating and Drinking by Advance Directives: Choose Your Injustice

This case is not an ambiguous one. I think that in real life very few physicians would implement an order to withhold food and sedate someone who still appears to want food, can still feed himself, and is able to swallow safely like Bill in this vignette. That would probably be a criminal act. But it gets a lot more complicated when the person does not appear to desire food and is unable to put food or fluids into his own mouth, even when it is offered by being placed on a tray in front of him. And the situation becomes more complicated still when the person appears to be experiencing severe suffering in other ways or is having severe difficulties swallowing. We should not be placing value judgments on other people’s quality of life, but there does come a point for almost everyone where the burdens of sustaining life — or as others might say, prolonging the dying process — outweigh any perceptible benefit beyond biological functioning. This is especially true when there is severe apparent suffering in a patient with profound dementia or in someone for whom virtually everything going into the mouth is going to wind up in the airway. Electing not to hand-feed selected patients under these circumstances when it is in accordance with their previously expressed wishes seems much less ethically fraught. We equate feeding with nurturance and love, but it may not always work out that way. Nursing homes will probably never be a place where SED by AD will be practicable or permissible, but other care settings may be. There will be much more discussion on this topic in the bioethics community and beyond, in the years to come. Stopping Eating and Drinking by Advance Directives: Choose Your InjusticeCaring for the AgesVol. 20Issue 3PreviewJim, I have a hypothetical case for you. One of my residents with dementia, let’s call him Bill, has an advance directive stating that when he no longer has meaningful social interaction, his caregivers should stop giving him food or water. He is now mostly mute, though rarely he may say a word or two. He still eats reasonably well and seems to enjoy mealtimes, occasionally saying “That’s good” when eating ice cream. His agent with POAHC [power of attorney for health care] is his wife, Alice, who also has advanced dementia and can no longer function as his decision-maker but is more verbal than Bill. Full-Text PDF

A pilot digital intervention targeting loneliness in young people with psychosis.

Loneliness has been identified as a significant challenge for people with psychosis. Interventions targeting loneliness are lacking but adopting a positive psychology approach may reduce loneliness, promote well-being, and support meaningful social interactions. Together with youth mental health consumers, we developed a digital smartphone application (app) called +Connect, which delivers positive psychology content daily for 6 weeks. Twelve participants diagnosed with a psychotic disorder were recruited from early psychosis services. Loneliness was assessed pre-intervention, post-intervention, and 3-month post-intervention. Acceptability, feasibility, and usability were measured post-intervention, including a semi-structured interview on the user's experience of +Connect. We found evidence for the feasibility of +Connect. All but two participants completed the +Connect program, completing 95% (40.10 out of 42 days) of the program. Furthermore, 66.67% (8 out of the 12 participants) remained engaged with the program 3-months post-intervention. Our data indicates preliminary evidence that +Connect may reduce loneliness, with scores from pre-intervention (M = 50.00, SD = 8.47) to post-intervention (M = 48.10, SD = 10.38) and 3-months post-intervention (M = 42.89, SD = 7.04). We found that positive reinforcement of in-game rewards and evidence of positive mood changes added to the feasibility of the app. Regarding acceptability, while 10% (1/10 participants) reported not finding +Connect useful or enjoyable, 90% of participants agreed that +Connect helped them to increase their social confidence, enjoy life, look forward to being with other people, and feel more connected with others. Participant interviews supported these results, with participants highlighting the app's strengths in providing useful information, stimulating self-reflection, fostering positive affect, and encouraging transfer of skills into their social interactions. While preliminary findings indicated that +Connect yielded high levels of acceptability and feasibility, it is important to consider that we recruited a small and selected sample of lonely young people. Further iterations of this proof of concept app, which can incorporate participant feedback such preferences for increased personalisation, in-app feedback, and gamification, may allow an opportunity to test an improved version in the future.

TELE-BEHAVIORAL ACTIVATION FOR SOCIAL ISOLATION IN OLDER HOME-DELIVERED MEALS RECIPIENTS: PRELIMINARY RESULTS FROM AN ONGOING RANDOMIZED CONTROLLED TRIAL

Introduction Homebound older adults are often unable to participate in social interactions and activities that require leaving the home, resulting in a high prevalence of isolation among this population. Isolation is associated morbidity, disability, and mortality. Technology has been explored as a potential avenue for meaningful social interaction for homebound seniors. We present preliminary results of an ongoing randomized controlled trial evaluating the acceptability, feasibility and comparative effectiveness of delivering two interventions by video-conferencing technology to promote social connectedness among homebound older adults receiving home-delivered meals: 1. Behavioral activation (tele-BA) vs. 2. Friendly visitors (tele-FV). To our knowledge, this is the first randomized controlled trial to leverage local Meals on Wheels (MoWs) agencies to engage homebound, socially isolated older adults in a telehealth intervention for social isolation. Methods Older adults in New Hampshire and central Texas were recruited for our study by local MoWs agencies during the routine annual evaluation of their home-delivered meals clients. After a brief eligibility screening by their MoWs case workers and indicated interest, MoWs clients were referred to our study team and contacted by telephone for a full eligibility assessment. Eligible participants endorsed social isolation (6 or greater on the 3-item UCLA Loneliness Scale), but did not report symptoms of moderate to severe depression (PHQ-9 Results In the first year of our study, 50 socially isolated older adults (age M±SD73.5±9.2 years; range 51 to 90 years) participated in either the tele-BA intervention (n=28) or tele-FV comparison condition (n=22). Participants were predominantly non-Hispanic white (70%), female (65%), of lower SES (56% less than $20,000 annual income) and living alone (68%). When asked, all participants indicated they would recommend this tele-program to family and friends (Net Promotor Scale 0-10: M±SD 9.7±0.9; range 6-10). Most participants (92%) found these tele-sessions moderately to very acceptable for their social isolation and 95% indicated somewhat positive to very positive general reaction to the program. Preliminary data at 12-week follow-up showed reduction on the 8-item Social Isolation measure and the PHQ-9, with a trend towards greater improvement in participants who participated in the tele-BA group. Conclusions Overall, participants found tele-Behavioral Activation and tele-Friendly Visits to be positive experiences and acceptable for their social isolation, and would recommend the program to their friends and family. Preliminary data showed improvement in isolation and depressive symptoms for both groups, which is sustained through 12 weeks of post-intervention follow-up. Our preliminary results suggest the feasibility, acceptability and potential effectiveness of using tele-technology to deliver interventions for homebound older adults who report social isolation. We also found potential evidence of the effectiveness of modified tele-behavioral activation program, compared to friendly visitors, in reducing social isolation and subclinical depressive symptoms in this population. Finally, we demonstrated the feasibility of working in collaboration with community-based Meals on Wheels agencies to identify socially isolated clients and refer them to this program. This research was funded by AARP-Foundation

Online professional development for environmental educators: strategies to foster critical thinking and social interactions

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) offer opportunities for professional development of environmental educators globally, yet we lack understanding of participants™ cognitive and social learning processes and of how instructors can enhance these processes. Based on the Community of Inquiry framework, we used a survey and coded participant discussion board and Facebook posts to examine the cognitive, social, and teaching presence in the Environmental Education: Transdisciplinary Approaches to Addressing Wicked Problems MOOC, offered by Cornell University. Rather than train educators in a specific curriculum, the goal of the MOOC is to expand educators™ critical and transdisciplinary thinking about the field of environmental education and to enhance social interactions to support learning, educators, and knowledge co-creation. Results indicate that cognitive presence is higher on the discussion board whereas social presence is higher on Facebook. Over half of cognitive posts focused on exploration, a lower level of learning, whereas just less than a fifth reflected higher level integration, suggesting room for enhancing cognitive learning. Our results suggest strategies to encourage higher levels of thinking and more meaningful social interactions to foster learning, educator support, and co-creation of knowledge, thereby improving online professional development.

Zeitgeist publication: a storytelling project with residents and design students

In Spring 2018 and then again in Fall 2018, residents in a long-term care facility came together with undergraduate communication design students, to co-design and co-write a mini publication series featuring resident stories. Through our project, small teams of two to three students were paired with two to three residents, to create a mini-publication over the course of six visits with each other. The purpose of the Zeitgeist project was to create a platform for meaningful exchange and social interaction between students, residents, their families and care home staff through both the design process and the final design outcomes. This project gives voice to residents, providing an opportunity for creative and emotional expression, stimulation of positive memories and the engagement of residents in a unique and meaningful activity. Simultaneously this project offers design students learning opportunities in storytelling, publication design, co-design and participatory design research. This project was inspired by the Zeitgeist Kollektiv, a public editorial design and storytelling project within a care home system.

Augmented Experiences in Cultural Spaces through Social Participation

Technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and Social Computing offer promising opportunities to envision and shape augmented experiences in a wide variety of cultural spaces. Such interactive technologies act as a hook to attract visitor's attention, but if they do not provide opportunities to engage people in a more personal and meaningful way, they can be soon discarded. Augmented experiences need to be motivating and connect with values and expectations of visitors and institutions. In a world that is becoming more and more connected and moving towards a participatory culture, the need to participate actively to co-produce knowledge and meaning can be exploited as a powerful intrinsic motivator. In this article, we describe how the Social Display Environment (SDE) promotes participation in cultural spaces whilst keeping the physical connection with the exhibition objects. The SDE makes use of Augmented Reality (AR) technology to augment physical artifacts in an exhibition with overlays of digital information that is generated by the end user (e.g., the visitor). The prototype was exhibited in a cultural center over a weekend to investigate different dynamics in terms of content generation, visitors’ interactions and perceptions with respect to the interplay of digital information and physical artifacts. The prototype was assessed as easy to learn and useful and showed potential to promote a number of meaningful social interactions around the objects involved in the exhibition.

Empathy, social relationship and co-occurrence in young adults with DCD

Empathy is defined as an emotional or cognitive response to another’s emotional state. It is considered essential for navigating meaningful social interactions and is closely linked to prosocial behavior. Developmental coordination disorder (DCD) is characterized by an impairment of motor coordination that has a marked impact on both academic and day-to-day living activities. Children and adolescents with DCD have been shown to have less developed social support and friendships. The research linking empathy and DCD is scarce. The aims of this study are to gain an understanding of the relationship between DCD and empathy in young adults with DCD only, and with DCD coupled with other neurodevelopmental disorders, in comparison with typically developing adults. MethodsThe study included 212 young adults aged 18–40 years. The subjects in this study were from mainstream populations in the UK. The study groups included: (a) “DCD only” with 42 individuals; (b) “DCD + ASD” with 21 individuals; (c) “DCD + ADHD” with 45 individuals; (d) “DCD + ASD + ADHD” with 29 individuals; and (e) the control group of 75 individuals. ResultsANOVA on the Empathy Questionnaire (EQ) showed a statistically significant difference between groups (F [4,257] = 35.63; p < 0.001; ηp2 = 0.409). No significant differences were found between the DCD-only and the control. MANOVA was performed to assess differences in the Socialising and Friendship Questionnaire (SAF-Q) scores. The results showed a statistically significant difference between groups (F [8,257] = 9.98; p < 0.001; η = 0.162). Pearson correlation coefficients were performed, revealing significant high correlations between the EQ and the two parts of the SAF-Q (“past” and “currently”). ConclusionThe results of this study indicate that social difficulties in the DCD-only group are not due to lack of empathy, but may be driven by an accumulation of external factors. In this study we also concluded that DCD does not appear to be the factor that reduces the ability to empathize, but rather the presence of ADHD and/or ASD.

Digital identities – overcoming visual bias through virtual embodiment

ABSTRACTThis study sheds new light on the role of identity in virtual environments when virtual representation of self is in support of disabled individuals and the potential impact of their virtual identity on work opportunities. It is widely understood that individuals who live with disability often experience a lifetime of bullying, exclusion, marginalization and rejection. They often experience workplace bias and discrimination. Yet, when they can create an identity and experience embodiment in virtual environments, the results can be extraordinarily powerful – even life-changing. This research builds on nearly a decade of ethnographic research in 3D online immersive social virtual worlds; seven of those years working with disability communities to answer the following: RQ1: In a virtual world where one can choose any avatar form, how does that visual sense of self-representation influence one’s ability to gain access to a social network, to be a leader in that network, and to find work? RQ2: How does realism in representation influence work experiences in these digital worlds? The results reveal the importance of choice in online representation of avatars in creating work and online social engagement. Implications contribute to our understanding of visual bias in the workplace and how emerging virtual reality technologies may open new avenues for meaningful work and social interactions for people with disabilities.

Reframing HRI Design Opportunities for Social Robots: Lessons Learnt from a Service Robotics Case Study Approach Using UX for HRI

Over the last few decades, semi-autonomous machine’s technology started to promote awareness towards the importance of human–robot interaction (HRI) for improving daily activities. More affordable social robots are being commercially released and in order to implement viable applications of HRI, a combination human-computer interaction and user experience methodologies could play a pivotal role in assessing new scenarios and evaluating new investigations. However, literature shows that it is still challenging to reach an optimal user experience with robotic companions. The aim of the study was to determine the chance to enhance the user experience with a semi-autonomous social robot, using user experience and human–computer interaction methodologies. In this study, a social robotic companion has been developed and prototyped in order to be adopted in a specific public environment such as a company workspace. The challenges emerged from this peculiar environment triggered the need for a more productive and comfortable office for the employees, and, at the same time, the usability, acceptance and likeability of the robotic companion have been evaluated. The results emphasize that, since HRI is highly interdisciplinary, the benefits of combining approaches from other fields could positively benefit from a meaningful social interaction with the users.

How Theatre Encourages Well-being – and Can Engage a Wider Audience

A recent study of single-ticket buyers and subscribers at a major regional theatre – Actors Theatre of Louisville, Kentucky – focused on measuring quantitatively the psychological benefits of engaging with theatre and gathering qualitatively observations by focus groups. Both confirmed the hypothesis that regular attendance promotes flourishing and meaningful social interaction, psychological stimulation, and positive emotions. The study also affirms that attending theatre contributes to a shared sense of community, this at a time when such community appears starkly diminished in the United States. In addition, focus groups wished that audiences better reflected the demographic diversity outside the auditorium. Evident disparities include urban vs. rural, prosperous vs. not, more education vs. less, black vs. white – reflecting those that splinter national politics. One microcosm of one theatre's audience provokes suggestions to foster a more democratic audience and plural istic culture that endeavours to cross rather than ignore the divides. Russell Vandenbroucke is Professor of Theatre at the University of Louisville and Director of its Peace, Justice &amp; Con flict Transformation programme. He was previously Artistic Director of Chicago's Northlight Theatre. Suzanne Meeks is Professor and Chair of the Psychological and Brain Sciences Department, University of Louisville. Her research focuses on mental health in later life.

Priming Adult Learners for Learning Transfer: Beyond Content and Delivery

In adult education, we have skilled instructional designers, expertise in structuring learning events and delivering content, and we have robust learning theories to draw from, and yet the effective transfer of learning still seems elusive. Recent literature reviews on learning transfer indicate that a large percentage of adult learning does not successfully transfer. The research also suggests transfer needs to be supported at the individual, instructional, and organizational levels. Conventional educational practices often do not provide sufficient scaffolding and social learning to promote learning transfer processes beyond the initial learning event. This article discusses three practices to support mindful learning transfer at each of these levels. Educators are not only responsible for designing and delivering learning content but also scaffolding meaningful social interactions and the development of transfer skills.

Children’s Agency in Multi-Belief Settings: The Case of Community National Schools in Ireland

ABSTRACTChildhood studies place emphasis on children’s agency, their ability to understand their own world and act upon it. Children actively participate in meaningful social interactions in both formal and informal settings. Considering recent large-scale migration in Ireland, it is vital to understand how children interact in an increasingly diverse world where they encounter cultural and religious difference. This article draws on a mixed-methods case study exploring religious education (RE) in community national schools (CNS), a new model of multi-denominational primary schools in Ireland. The results from focus groups with 10- to 12-year-old children show the role of agency in developing religious knowledge and forming inter-ethnic friendships, and the crucial role schools play in empowering pupils to interact with an increasingly diverse society.

Exploring the relationship between online discourse and commitment in Twitter professional learning communities

Educators show great interest in participating in social-media communities, such as Twitter, to support their professional development and learning. The majority of the research into Twitter-based professional learning communities has investigated why educators choose to use Twitter for professional development and learning and what they actually do in these communities. However, few studies have examined why certain community members remain committed and others gradually drop out. To fill this gap in the research, this study investigated how some key features of online discourse influenced the continued participation of the members of a Twitter-based professional learning community. More than 600,000 tweets generated over six years under the hashtag #edchat were gathered. Online discourse was deconstructed to the cognitive dimension, the interactive dimension, and the social dimension. Text-mining methods were then used to automatically identify these dimensions in the tweets. Finally, survival analysis was used to quantify the influences of these dimensions on users' commitment time to the Twitter community. The implications of the results and findings are then discussed.Wanli Xing is an Assistant Professor in Instructional Technology at Texas Tech University, USA with background in learning sciences, statistics, computer science and mathematical modeling. His research interests are educational data mining, learning analytics, and CSCL.Gao Fei is an Associate Professor at Bowling Green State University. Her current research involves examining the types of interaction and learning enabled by online social technologies, designing technology-mediated environments that encourage meaningful social interaction, and exploring pedagogical methods that promote deep learning in such environments.

Using a robotic fish to investigate individual differences in social responsiveness in the guppy.

Responding towards the actions of others is one of the most important behavioural traits whenever animals of the same species interact. Mutual influences among interacting individuals may modulate the social responsiveness seen and thus make it often difficult to study the level and individual variation in responsiveness. Here, open-loop biomimetic robots that provide standardized, non-interactive social cues can be a useful tool. These robots are not affected by the live animal's actions but are assumed to still represent valuable and biologically relevant social cues. As this assumption is crucial for the use of biomimetic robots in behavioural studies, we hypothesized (i) that meaningful social interactions can be assumed if live animals maintain individual differences in responsiveness when interacting with both a biomimetic robot and a live partner. Furthermore, to study the level of individual variation in social responsiveness, we hypothesized (ii) that individual differences should be maintained over the course of multiple tests with the robot. We investigated the response of live guppies (Poecilia reticulata) when allowed to interact either with a biomimetic open-loop-controlled fish robot—‘Robofish’—or with a live companion. Furthermore, we investigated the responses of live guppies when tested three times with Robofish. We found that responses of live guppies towards Robofish were weaker compared with those of a live companion, most likely as a result of the non-interactive open-loop behaviour of Robofish. Guppies, however, were consistent in their individual responses between a live companion and Robofish, and similar individual differences in response towards Robofish were maintained over repeated testing even though habituation to the test environment was detectable. Biomimetic robots like Robofish are therefore a useful tool for the study of social responsiveness in guppies and possibly other small fish species.

Object-Based Attention on Social Units: Visual Selection of Hands Performing a Social Interaction

Traditionally, objects of attention are characterized either as full-fledged entities or either as elements grouped by Gestalt principles. Because humans appear to use social groups as units to explain social activities, we proposed that a socially defined group, according to social interaction information, would also be a possible object of attentional selection. This hypothesis was examined using displays with and without handshaking interactions. Results demonstrated that object-based attention, which was measured by an object-specific attentional advantage (i.e., shorter response times to targets on a single object), was extended to two hands performing a handshake but not to hands that did not perform meaningful social interactions, even when they did perform handshake-like actions. This finding cannot be attributed to the familiarity of the frequent co-occurrence of two handshaking hands. Hence, object-based attention can select a grouped object whose parts are connected within a meaningful social interaction. This finding implies that object-based attention is constrained by top-down information.

An immersive flipped classroom for learning Mandarin Chinese: design, implementation, and outcomes

ABSTRACTOnline kindergarten to twelfth grade (K-12) language learners have usually been found to hold more negative perceptions of their courses and to perform less well academically than their face-to-face counterparts, despite the well-attested benefits of computer-mediated communication in language learning. In an attempt to improve upon such outcomes, this study designed, implemented, and evaluated a 12-day immersive online high-school Chinese-language course that included daily synchronous sessions and interactive technology-enhanced tasks, with a special emphasis on engaging the students in meaningful social interactions. Based on the analysis of the 35 participants’ survey responses and their language performance, they had a very positive experience of the course, felt satisfied by it, and showed statistically significant improvement in their language skills. These findings are discussed in relation to prior studies’ findings and current online-education policies and practices.

The Relationship between Executive Functioning and Emotional Intelligence in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) demonstrate marked deficits in the ability to initiate, maintain and sustain meaningful social interaction. While the social-emotional deficits represent a core set of problems, persons with ASD also demonstrate significant problems in initiating, sustaining and maintaining appropriate goal directed behaviors. Emotional Intelligence (EI) is a construct that has been successfully applied to a range of skills that allow for the prediction of competent human social behavior. Executive Functions (EF) refer to constructs involving cognitive abilities necessary for initiating, sustaining and maintaining purposeful goal-oriented behavior. While both children and adults with ASD have previously shown to have atypical patterns of EF skills, little is known about EI in either children or adults with ASD. Moreover, there is no study examining the relationship between EI and EF that has been reported in individuals with ASD. The current study examined the relationship between EF and EI in children with ASD. Twenty children with ASD were compared to twenty neurotypical children on self-report and clinical assessments of EI and EF. Although the relationship between EF and EI was not statistically significant, results showed that children with ASD have deficits in interpersonal skills, intrapersonal skills and overall EI when compared to their neurotypical peers. These results suggest that EF and EI are relatively independent domains of development that show compromise in persons with ASD and each may be necessary to support typical socially directed behaviors.

Managing longitudinal exposure of socially shared data on the Twitter social media

On most online social media sites today, user-generated data remains accessible to allowed viewers unless and until the data owner changes her privacy preferences. In this paper, we present a large-scale measurement study focused on understanding how users control the longitudinal exposure of their publicly shared data on social media sites. Our study, using data from Twitter, finds that a significant fraction of users withdraw a surprisingly large percentage of old publicly shared data—more than 28% of 6-year old public posts (tweets) on Twitter are not accessible today. The inaccessible tweets are either selectively deleted by users or withdrawn by users when they delete or make their accounts private. We also found a significant problem with the current exposure control mechanisms—even when a user deletes her tweets or her account, the current mechanisms leave traces of residual activity, i.e., tweets from other users sent as replies to those deleted tweets or accounts still remain accessible. We show that using this residual information one can recover significant information about the deleted tweets or even characteristics of the deleted accounts. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to study the information leakage resulting from residual activities of deleted tweets and accounts. Finally, we propose two exposure control mechanisms that eliminates information leakage via residual activities. One of our mechanisms optimize for allowing meaningful social interactions with user posts and another mechanism aims to control longitudinal exposure via anonymization . We discuss the merits and drawbacks of our proposed mechanisms compared to existing mechanisms.

Can Digital Technology Enhance Social Connectedness Among Older Adults? A Feasibility Study.

This study examined the feasibility of a novel communication technology to enhance social connectedness among older adults in residential care. Research suggests that technology can create opportunities for social connectedness, helping alleviate social isolation and loneliness. Studies on implementation and feasibility of such technological interventions, particularly among frail and institutionalized older adults, are scant. Data were gathered in a 3-month deployment with 12 older adults, including semistructured interviews with participants and relatives/friends, psychometric scales, field observations, and usability tests. Data were analyzed with qualitative profiling, thematic analysis, and Friedman tests. The technology was a feasible communication tool, although requiring an adaptation period. Use increased perceived social interaction with ties, but increased social connectedness (meaningful social interaction) was only reported by participants with geographically distant relatives. Sense of well-being and confidence with technology was enhanced, but negative effects were also observed. Findings are useful for researchers and practitioners interested in technological interventions.

Education Student Perceptions of Virtual Reality as a Learning Tool

The purpose of this study was to ascertain student perceptions of the use and value of three-dimensional virtual environments. A grounded theory approach was used to gather and examine data. Just over half of student participants reported positive experiences. However, most experienced technical difficulties. Despite the technical challenges of operating within the virtual space, the majority reported positive aspects of using the virtual space, including increased meaningful social interactions and reduced social anxiety. Overall, students reported positive experiences and value of virtual reality, but technical difficulties demonstrate the need for adequate technology and institutional technology support.