Personal Space Research Articles

Kazakhstan in the age of digital technologies: Between digitalization of the sphere of public security and control of personal data

The policy of a number of countries that have embarked on the path of legalized mobile phone tracking to ensure compliance with quarantine restrictions on people infected with COVID-19 has generated heated discussions in the scientific community about the threats posed by modern digital technologies. The excessive use of digital technologies has led not only to the strengthening of the powers of the State in public life, but also threatened the privacy and confidentiality of personal data. However, the beginning of these extraordinary powers of the State was laid back in 2001, when the global war on terrorism unfolded. It is from this moment that the beginning of the process of the decline of the rule of law, which led to the restriction of the personal space of citizens, should be dated. Today, the governments of a number of countries are seen to be inclined to use anti-terrorist measures to visualize a virtual threat as an internal threat, which often serves as an excuse to strengthen the system of control over their own citizens. While in the United States, the member states of the European Union, Russia and a number of other countries, this policy is now mainly used to justify the violation of the confidentiality of personal data, in China this policy has intensified so much that it has actually led to the surveillance and persecution of political dissent and discrimination against Muslim ethnic minorities. In fact, China has launched an invasive system of internal surveillance of its own citizens, which causes serious concern to the world community and human rights organizations, who rightly fear a violation of the balance of interests between state control of citizens and the security of personal data. The strengthening of state control over citizens has recently been more and more clearly observed in Kazakhstan. The public of the country is concerned about the facts of violation of the confidentiality of personal information and privacy. Keywords: Kazakhstan, Russia, China, digital technologies, Internet space, telecommunications industry, control over citizens, privacy, confidentiality of personal data.

The impact of Covid-19 on the well-being of young people with conduct disorder and their families

IntroductionThe Covid-19 pandemic has significantly changed family dynamics and parents experience greater psychological distress. Conduct problems in young people have increased by 35%. However, it is not known how Covid-19 associated stresses have affected parenting practice, conduct problems, and comorbidities and what additional support is needed for families at risk.ObjectivesThis study uses self-report measures and semi-structured interviews to examine and explore the impact of Covid-19 on the families of young people with conduct problems and comorbid mental health conditions.MethodsThis is a sequential mixed-methods study. Eligible families with children aged between 11-18 years have participated. One-hundred-and-eighty-two families have completed eight online questionnaires and 12 have participated in semi-structured follow-up interviews.ResultsAnalyses indicate that parental harshness, warmth, educational background, and employment have a significant impact on Covid-19 exposure and worries, as well as significantly higher scores of conduct disorder symptoms. Interview codes reveal that young peoples’ behaviour became more severe during the pandemic, and this was associated with reduced in-person support services, reduced personal space at home, and parents taking on the additional role of educator.ConclusionsThe findings suggest that Covid-19 is a significant risk factor to young people with conduct problems and their families. For example, reduced parental warmth and increased parental harshness increased conduct problems for young people during the lockdown. This study highlights that policies and services should work to better support such families. Future online psychosocial interventions are needed to empower families and improve parenting practice at home during the lockdown period and in general.DisclosureNo significant relationships.

Impact of Cyberbullying on Adolescent Mental Health in the midst of pandemic – Hidden Crisis

IntroductionCyberbullying has become more prevalent with the increased use of social media among younger population. It is more harmful than traditional bullying as it can happen at any time, has a much wider audience, and can invade personal space. YouTube, Instagram and Snapchat are the most popular online platforms among teens. The victims of cyberbullying can present with social anxiety (41%), depression (37%), suicidal thoughts (26%) among many others (self-harm, substance use, etc). In the past year, these numbers have significantly risen due to switch to virtual learning due to the pandemic, hence the risk of exposure to cyberbullying has risen.ObjectivesTo study the impact of cyberbullying on Adolescent Mental healthMethodsA review of articles (2016-2021), was done using PubMed and Google scholar focusing on impact of cyberbullying in children and young adults.ResultsJohn et al group showed that both victims [OR- 2.10 (95% CI 1.73-2.55)] and perpetrators [ OR 1.21 (95% CI 1.02-1.44)] have increased risk of exhibiting suicidal behaviors. Kwan I et al group showed a negative association between cyberbullying and mental health. One study suggested that during the pandemic there has been increased online perpetrators due to increased amount of fear and anger which has projected in the form online aggression.ConclusionsThere is an increase in prevalence of cyberbullying with young population spending more time on internet and social media. Psychoeducation of parents and mental health experts is needed to recognize early warning signs in order to take steps for early intervention.DisclosureNo significant relationships.

Performing Plainness in Sarah Stickney Ellis’s Friends at Their Own Fireside: Or, Pictures of the Private Life of the People Called Quakers

Abstract While Quaker plainness has encapsulated multiple positive meanings such as piety, worldliness and even human equality, many were attentive to its rootedness in social discipline and surveillance. Drawing on nineteenth-century assessments of Quaker plainness, both in journals and fiction, this article explores the dynamics of self-fashioning and performance that are exposed to be an important part of these bodily experiences of Quaker plainness. Plainness is not only self-disciplining but also controls the social and visual dynamics of displaying, seeing, and interpreting the body. Sarah Stickney Ellis’s Friends at Their Own Fireside: Or, Pictures of the Private Life of the People Called Quakers (1858) provides an intriguing account of the private experiences of plain Quaker women and their resistance to forms of social control and scrutiny. I use the context of this novel to examine the subjective experience of Quaker women as wearers of plain dress in ways that expose their agency and involvement in observing and adhering to these codes rather than completely or obliviously succumbing to social authority and control. The exploration of female plainness in this novel, as I will argue, confounds the notions of discipline attached to Quaker plainness, and instead brings to light women’s agency in navigating their identity and personal space in such a context.

The Nest: post evaluation study on intentional learning space in public housing Malaysia

PurposeAligned with the United Nations 2030 agenda of leaving no one behind, a project called The Nest was initiated to create an in-house intentional learning space at two public housings in Klang Valley. In a small unit of public housing, most children in these houses sit on the floor in the living room to do their schoolwork or study with the TV switched on. Poor indoor environmental quality and lack of personal space are among the main reasons that lead to children not being able to study at home comfortably.Design/methodology/approachThe research employed a quasi-experimental approach as the research field setting was not randomly assigned. Observation on the change in the quality of space and post-evaluation interviews with beneficiaries were conducted.FindingsThe findings show that besides the tangible space that the Nest project has created, it also has created in-tangible space. It has shown that even small spatial changes to existing spaces could improve children's active learning and the participation of parents in their children's learning.Research limitations/implicationsThis study focuses on the home learning experience and parental involvement in their children's learning, so perhaps future research can be done to measure the impact of home learning space on academic achievement.Practical implicationsThe research outcomes show that a good quality of learning space influences the children's learning experience at home and the parents' involvement. It will also contribute to the development of the building regulation for high-rise affordable housing in Malaysia. Particularly in improving the optimum requirement to achieve better comfort quality for the learning space at the residential unit.Social implicationsThe Nest project will contribute to raising the awareness among all residents of public housing on the importance of in-house learning space and encourage them to build their own learning spaces through the Do-It-Yourself Guidelines.Originality/valueThe research outcomes show that both parental involvement and the quality of learning space influence the children's learning experience at home. It will contribute to the development of the building regulation for high-rise affordable housing in Malaysia. Particularly in improving the optimum requirement to achieve better comfort quality for the learning space at the residential unit.

The Issue on Classification of Needs of Families Raising Children with Special Needs (Systematic Approach)

Families raising children with special needs differ from other families in the large number and variability of needs. Scientific studies highlight the issue of the specific needs of the family, but for the most part their generalized totality is described. Therefore, the purpose of the article is to explore and highlight the needs in such families and describe them in the context of the individual, marital, paren-tal and sibling subsystems of the family system. To achieve the goal the following methods were used: theoretical – analy-sis, systematization, classification and generalization; empirical – observation, conversation, interview and method of expert assessments. research results. A total of 18 family needs were identified and distributed in accordance with family subsystems – individual, marital, parental and sibling. In the context of the individual subsystem the following needs are identified: the need for emotional response to negative emotions, the need for personal space, the need for support, the need for care in relation to one’s own self. For the marital subsystem common needs for both partners are defined (in love, sup-port, guardianship, closeness of the partner, material and sexual needs). In the parental subsystem specific needs are characterized: for truthful information, adaptation and acceptance of the role of “parents of a special child”, in finding the meaning of interaction in the “parents­special child” system; in society’s ac-ceptance of a special child, the need to confirm the changes/dynamics of the child’s development. The needs of brothers and/or sisters in the sibling subsys-tem are formulated: in attention and love from parents, informing about the somato­psychological characteristics of a special child, distribution of responsi-bilities according to the age of siblings. conclusions.Identifying the needs of the family and determining the de-gree of their severity is of practical importance for the implementation of ef-fective socio­psychological support. Frustration of unconscious needs leads to increased tension and deterioration of the family microclimate. At the same time awareness of the needs of family members will be the impetus for finding the necessary resources and finding the best ways to meet them.

Listening to Passengers, Listening to Stories

In metropolitan life, public transportation is essential to the everyday commute of people. Although they manifest important aspects of our culture, they also sometimes present issues of conflict by the violation of personal space, privacy, and other harmful and abusive behavior. This workshop aims to increase awareness of these conflicts and abusive behaviors in public transportation especially from the eyes of the victims. Transportation creates an impact on our daily roles, public persona, and social identity. This project aims to expose these issues by the contemporary critique of the cultural norms shaped by compulsory encounters happening in urban transportation. The project traces the ways that the participants, as passengers, would survive in such an oppressive cultural context. In doing so, we aim to ask the questions of how can one body turn invisible in such a physically limiting and politically controlling, gaze-centered space? In this workshop, participants are given a story that takes place in public transportation with the circumstance of being in a threatening zone. While they are being told of how the story begins, it is up to them to decide how such conflict is, or can be, resolved given their imagined narrative construction. In this dialogical exchange of stories, participants are also welcomed to tell their personal stories regarding a trip in public transportation. After the participants share their stories, they are motivated to produce tactics and strategies to cope with what they have encountered in their experiences. The participants will practice listening to each other’s stories that stayed hidden or ignored by the public.

Residents’ perception of privacy in selected public housing estates in Ibadan, Nigeria

ABSTRACT The study assessed the residents’ perception of privacy and their privacy regulating mechanisms with a view to providing information that could improve public housing design. The study used quantitative and qualitative approach. A sample size of 565 household heads was selected for questionnaire administration using systematic random sampling, representing 50% of the sampling frame. In-depth interviews were conducted on twelve (12) key informants from among the executive of neighbourhood associations. Descriptive and inferential statistics were used to analyse quantitative data while content analysis was used for the qualitative data. About half of the residents (50.38%) perceived privacy as low or very low, with visual privacy being rated least (Privacy Perception Index, PPI = 2.34), followed by family (2.22), olfactory (2.12), aural (2.00), neighbourhood (1.79) and personal privacy (1.64). Positioning of spaces, orientation of openings, and absence of dedicated guest room, contributed to low perception of visual and family privacy. About 92% of the respondents agreed or strongly agreed to the use of privacy regulating mechanisms, with personal space and territorial behaviour being more adopted, while non-verbal behaviour was least adopted. The study concluded that perception of privacy was influenced more by housing characteristics than by residents’ socio-economic and cultural characteristics.

Inflorescence appearance timing and production rate traits in wild Zoysiagrass (Zoysia spp)

Zoysiagrass (Zoysia spp.) has excellent turf quality and can be applied to various uses for personal space to public sports areas or commercial landscapes. However, it has disadvantages such as slow growth rate, cold hardiness, low seed yield, and hard to establish from seeds, which cannot be improved with agricultural practices. Therefore, breeding a new cultivar as a hybrid could be an efficient strategy to improve the Zoysiagrass cultivar. In fact, hybrid zoysiagrass shows mixed traits of both parents in morphology and heterosis in growth. However, inflorescence appearance and its rate are known to make a hybrid. Thus, the variety of inflorescence appearance timing and production rate were investigated among 549 genetic resources. As a result, only 5.38% of the variety among survived zoysiagrass after transplanting showed more than 30% inflorescence appearance within the given period. During that, some varieties showed a reduction of total inflorescence. Hence, we report the diversity of inflorescence appearance timing and production rate that could be useful for breeders and researchers breeding new Zoysiagrass cultivars.

Application-Based Cab Services in India: Commuters’ Barriers due to COVID-19

The outbreak of the novel Coronavirus pandemic has brought the world to a standstill. The constant increase in the rise of cases and deaths has compelled nearly all countries to impose lockdowns and other restrictive measures. The restrictions on travel and other non-essential activities have raised some serious business concerns for ridesharing, carpooling, and cab rental services. This study aims to identify, analyze, and prioritize the commuters’ barriers to App-based Ridesharing Services during COVID-19’s first and second waves, and potential ways of adaptation for an anticipated third wave in Indian contexts. The hierarchy of barriers is established using the responses from sixty respondents and their analysis using the multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) technique, the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). ‘Safety from contagion’ was found to be the most significant and strong factor followed by the desire for personal space and personal security as the most important inhibitors for not choosing ridesharing services during COVID-19. Socio-economic status and the lack of reliability of service were not given much importance by the respondents. The current and potential implications for sustainable business and the environment are also discussed.

People Centric Model to Harness User Value Reflection on Personal Data Spaces in Transformation of Health and Care

People Centric Model to Harness User Value Reflection on Personal Data Spaces in Transformation of Health and Care

The Impact of Embodiment and Avatar Sizing on Personal Space in Immersive Virtual Environments.

In this paper, we examine how embodiment and manipulation of a self-avatar's dimensions - specifically the arm length - affect users' judgments of the personal space around them in an immersive virtual environment. In the real world, personal space is the immediate space around the body in which physical interactions are possible. Personal space is increasingly studied in virtual environments because of its importance to social interactions. Here, we specifically look at two components of personal space, interpersonal and peripersonal space, and how they are affected by embodiment and the sizing of a self-avatar. We manipulated embodiment, hypothesizing that higher levels of embodiment will result in larger measures of interpersonal space and smaller measures of peripersonal space. Likewise, we manipulated the arm length of a self-avatar, hypothesizing that while interpersonal space would change with changing arm length, peripersonal space would not. We found that the representation of both interpersonal and peripersonal space change when the user experiences differing levels of embodiment in accordance with our hypotheses, and that only interpersonal space was sensitive to changes in the dimensions of a self-avatar's arms. These findings provide increased understanding of the role of embodiment and self-avatars in the regulation of personal space, and provide foundations for improved design of social interaction in virtual environments.

Robert Sommer (1929-2021).

Memorializes Robert Sommer (1929-2021). Sommer's enduring commitment, reflected in A Practical Guide to Behavioral Research (1997) coauthored with his wife Barbara, was to evaluate all kinds of environments, from psychiatric institutions to cooperative grocery stores, bicycle paths, farmer markets, and funeral homes. Starting in 1969 with Personal Space: The Behavioral Basis of Design, Bob helped usher in a new field, Environmental Psychology. Personal Space was the first of several books that shaped, and continue to shape, the architecture and design professions. In 1963, Bob came to University of California Davis, and in 1965, he became chair of the Psychology Department. Bob brought fresh and innovative thinking not just to his own writing and research, but to administration. It is hard to imagine any other academic being asked by the university to chair and revive three other departments: Environmental Design, Rhetoric and Communication, and Art. Bob died February 27, 2021. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Гендерные перспективы представления пространства в романе Вирджинии Вулф «Миссис Дэллоуэй»

Gender aspects of Virginia Woolf’s writings have become an immensely expanded field of interdisciplinary research in the West. In Russia, however, they remain quite little known. The article focuses on the gender-spatial division of space in Virginia Woolf’s novel “Mrs Dalloway”. Drawing from a number of Marxist philosophical and literary conceptions of modernist space and, mostly, from the literary narrative methodology, the authors present a model of interrelations between the narrative social and personal spaces from the perspectives of the two protagonists and of the collective character, that is, various minor characters sharing post-Edwardian societal norms. Literary narrative approach makes it possible to characterize the modernist traits of Virginia Woolf’s novel which she shared with the contemporary writers and her individual, specifically Woolfian literary inventions. One of them consists in a specific use of free indirect discourse imitating the perceptions of the two gender-opposite realities, namely, the “material” reality of the actual story world and the mental reality of the subjective experiences from the protagonists’ pasts. The other is Woolf’s innovative contribution to feminist writing. It may be described as a representation of the female “modernist body” via the female protagonist’s stream-of-consciousness saturated with meaningful gaps. The obtained results include specifying Woolf’s gender principle of structuring her narrative space and the alternations of the female protagonist’s two bodies, which are her gender body “for others” and her mental “modernist” body freed from social limitations.

A Postcard for Annie by Ida Jessen

Reviewed by: A Postcard for Annie by Ida Jessen Elaine Margolin Ida Jessen A Postcard for Annie Trans. Martin Aitken. Brooklyn. Archipelago Books. 180 pages. IT'S HARD NOT to become hooked by Ida Jessen's stubbornness; her refusal to tidy things up for us. This sixty-year-old Danish author harbors no illusions about women's troubled relationships with men; nor does she hold out hope for the muchtalked-about benefits of female self-discovery and empowerment. She knows women have no clue as to what pushes them into failing relationships and even less insight as to why they remain. In her wonderful new collection of stories, A Postcard for Annie, we hear the collective howl of women falling hard upon the ravages of middle age, which has exacerbated their bitterness, grief, and loneliness. In an earlier stellar work, "A Change of Time," a woman visits her dying husband in the hospital only to find he is always sleeping when she arrives. The nurse fills her in, but she can't help thinking something is amiss. She will soon be a widow at fifty, and although her marriage has been one without laughter or intimacy, she fears for the future. He is the town's physician, and for reasons that remain mysterious to her, he always took umbrage with her inability to come up with a quick retort in conversation. "Human kindness is my nourishment and my fatigue," she thinks. "Why is it not sufficient? I have more than most." The book is set in a form of diary entries where, even in this personal space, she remains restrained. Jessen doesn't allow her to condemn her husband outright. Instead, she circles her sadness, always considering that perhaps there is something she doesn't see. This insecurity is present in most of Jessen's characterizations. In one of the captivating stories in her new collection, a woman named Tine is frustrated by her husband who is refusing all her advances: "Beautiful underwear, she's tried that. She's tried beautiful. She's tried intelligent, good, and loving. She's tried funny, naughty, and wild." But nothing has worked. She retreats to her son's room and thinks how long it has been since he left home; but her thoughts wander back to her husband. Jessen often seems to consider children as nothing more than an afterthought, transitory beings that are no longer essential. She keeps rethinking about how they first fell in love and how overwhelming it felt: "Once, they existed. Love existed, hope existed, and faith existed. As if, suspended in that bashful and benign state of being, they each knew they were lovingly anticipated." But now there was a void where wonderment once was. Jessen knows better than to have her characters perform autopsies on their dying love affairs; she knows the pointlessness of such endeavors. In another tale, "An Excursion," Tove is a successful businesswoman who reupholsters furniture and sells material for curtains. On a random day at an antique fair, she finds herself captured by a yellow floor vase whose color was precisely the shade of yellow that had always overwhelmed her: "Even now, in the home she had made as an adult, she possessed very little that was yellow, as if she were afraid of overdosing, just as she would rarely go to the doctor, fearing herself at bottom to be a hypochondriac." Behind her, a man was staring at her looking at the vase, and soon enough they were intricately caught up in each other's lives. She learned to cook to please him and liked when he called her "honey." But soon enough things shifted and she heard that when she spoke to him her voice was timid, her laughter more restrained. But she couldn't address the thought of leaving him, because she knew that "without him she was shapeless." Ida Jessen is a master chronicler of the messiness that overtakes the female mind. She writes unburdened by polemics of any kind. Her characters are vividly drawn—sometimes eccentric, and at other times ordinary—but they seem strangely authentic to us. We see ourselves in almost all of them. Jessen never...

Consciousness, Awareness, and Presence: A Neurobiological Perspective.

It is proposed that consciousness is different from awareness. Consciousness can be thought of as a dualistic, embodied, and embedded cognitive process, whereas awareness is a nondual and nonlocal process. Nonlocal awareness is the ever-present, ever-fresh, and an affective self-awareness that can be aware of itself as well as of the ongoing subject-object duality, and cognitive conscious contents. This nonlocal awareness is our default mode state. Although very few of us are aware of it due to our habitual mental preoccupation and mind-wandering. We need to relax, learn to meditate, let go of all preoccupations, and return to our default mode state of being, which is peaceful, silent, fulfilling, energetic, and ever-fresh. Then, one feels effortlessly alive and free and at home in the world. This is the essence of meditation for living a happy, peaceful, and meaningful life. The rest of the article provides details of meditative presence, yoga meditation, and mindfulness meditation with their current practice and applications. The main focus of the article is on the neurobiology of meditation, which is discussed in detail. It covers the experientially perceived mind-space including personal, peripersonal, and extrapersonal space, the concepts of mind in the Western and Eastern literature, and the neurobiological foundation in the brain stem, reticular-limbic system, forebrain including the five thalamo-cortical-basal ganglia circuits, multiple sensory modalities, integrated perception, speech production, language communication, voluntary movements, and intentional actions. The wholeness of conscious mind is expressed as bio-psycho-social-abstract/spiritual.

Domestic Spaces as Showcases: Interior Photography in the beginning of twentieth-century Istanbul

Domestic Spaces as Showcases: Interior Photography in Early twentieth-century Istanbul Ece Zerman (bio) keywords Domestic interiors, late Ottoman Empire, photography, self-representation, visual culture At the beginning of the twentieth century, paintings, reproductions of paintings, and photographs of family members, relatives or of “great men” crowded domestic interiors. On the walls, historical scenes were intermingled with landscapes, and often combined with family photographs. The diffusion of photography and the development of new techniques allowing for the faster reproduction of images facilitated their circulation, which had, in turn, effects on the ways in which the interiors were decorated.1 Novels narrated these new trends; etiquette books gave advice on the arrangement of photographs in interiors, or on the decoration of the walls of a room. This constantly changing imagery provides clues to understand the ways in which contemporaries represented themselves in a period of profound transformation, from the late Ottoman Empire to the early Republic of Turkey. Following this path, this short paper explores through a variety of case studies the images displayed on the walls of late Ottoman domestic spaces, and considers these interiors as a space of self-representation. Complementing visual documents with textual ones helps to give insights into the ways in which the images circulated and served to display multiple identities and social affiliations within interior spaces. The principal object of this paper is both interior photography and the images exposed on the walls, as observed through this genre of photography. In other words, I focus on interior photographs to analyze what notions of self-representation the images on the walls may reveal. The “class” dimension of these photographs has to be underlined: interior photographs, compared with those produced in a studio, required the possession of a camera or a photographer [End Page 325] to come specifically to a home. This was hardly an easily affordable practice. This explains the fact that interior photographs for this period come, almost exclusively, from relatively wealthy families. With cameras being expensive and requiring long exposure times at the beginning of the twentieth century,2 we may assume that interior photographs from this period correspond to an intentional representation of a personal space.3 According to Sarah Anne Carter, “interior photographs documented a process of personalization within the home, arranging individual possessions and spaces as part of a unified, aesthetic composition.”4 We may pursue her line of argument here and assert that it was not a random part of the house that was photographed, but a space carefully defined by the photographic frame and chosen by the inhabitants or the photographer. It was probably no coincidence that these places reflected, in many cases, imagery to which the inhabitants seemed to have a personal connection. The family archives of Said Bey (1865–1928), an Ottoman high official and teacher living in Istanbul, provides my first case study.5 An undated photograph (Figure 1) shows a living room. It is framed to depict the space in its entirety. In front of the window, we see two men sitting, barely visible because of the overexposure. This is most likely Said Bey’s konak [mansion] in the old neighborhood of Aksaray. If so, the photograph must have been taken before 1913, since it was during this year that the family moved to an apartment in the fashionably modern district of Şişli. The two sides of a large open door are decorated with small rugs, and each is topped by a rectangular frame, probably bearing a calligraphic inscription. On the left, above the carpet and the calligraphy, there is a painting placed in a prominent position. We have some hard data on this painting (Figure 2) as it was in the possession of Said Bey’s great-granddaughter, Hatice Gonnet Bağana. According to her testimony, the [End Page 326] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. SALT Research, Said Bey Archive, AFMSBTH035. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. Portrait on the wall in Figure 1. Oil painting on canvas. From the personal archive of Said Bey’s great granddaughter, Hatice Gonnet Bağana, donated to the Sadberk Hanım Museum, Istanbul (SHM 19554-E.50). [End Page...

Towards Next Generation Cleaning Tools: Factors Affecting Cleaning Robot Usage and Proxemic Behaviors Design

Among all healthcare sectors and working processes, the janitorial section is a prominent source of work-related injuries due to its labor-intensive nature and rising need for a hygienic environment, thus requiring extra attention for prevention strategies. Advancement in robotic technology has allowed autonomous cleaning robots to be a viable solution to ease the burden of janitors. To evaluate the application of commercial-grade cleaning robots, a video-based survey was developed and distributed to participants. Results from 117 participants revealed that: 1) participants were less tolerant when their personal space was invaded by humans compared with the cleaning robot, 2) it is better to inform the surrounding humans that the cleaning robot has been sanitized to make them feel safe and comfortable during the pandemic, and 3) to make the interaction more socially acceptable, the cleaning robot should respect human personal space, especially when there is ample space to maneuver. The findings of the present study provide insight into the usage and Proxemic behaviors design of future cleaning robots.

Measuring the Neurobehavioral Mechanisms Regulating Social Space Using Virtual Reality and High Field fMRI

In humans, many social interactions occur near the boundary of a "safety zone" immediately surrounding the body. This safety zone is sometimes called “personal space”. Prior work has found that the regulation of this space plays a role in social communication in both healthy individuals and patients with neuropsychiatric disorders. However, the function of this neural system has not been measured quantitatively at the level of the individual.

Person of Interest: Experimental Investigations into the Learnability of Person Systems

Person systems convey the roles entities play in the context of speech (e.g., speaker, addressee). As with other linguistic category systems, not all ways of partitioning the person space are equally likely crosslinguistically. Different theories have been proposed to constrain the set of possible person partitions that humans can represent, explaining their typological distribution. This article introduces an artificial language learning methodology to investigate the existence of universal constraints on person systems. We report the results of three experiments that inform these theoretical approaches by generating behavioral evidence for the impact of constraints on the learnability of different person partitions. Our findings constitute the first experimental evidence for learnability differences in this domain.