Negative stereotypes of aging, such as dependency, tend to paint a picture of older adults as frail or a burden on society. This study aimed to explore the relationship between the Fear of Dependency Scale and anxiety and depression, evaluating gender, age, and physical health as moderators. Findings suggest that age moderated the relationship between fear of dependency and depression and anxiety in women, with middle-aged women reporting the highest levels of depression and anxiety. Similarly, poor physical health in women with high fear of dependency being related to higher levels of depression and anxiety. Fear of dependency was related to higher levels of depression, but not anxiety in men. Age did not moderate the relationship between fear of dependency and mental health measures, but physical health did moderate the relationship. Men with poor perceived health and a high fear of dependency reported higher levels of depression.

Online LARPing has been practiced for a long time, but gained its popularity as the Covid-19 pandemic hit. However, online platforms have some drawbacks and limitations in various aspects, for example, in embodiment, in accessibility, etc. This thesis aims to gain deeper insights into factors influencing players in terms of embodiment during online LARPing and important features that future online LARP designers should pay attention to. This thesis is a qualitative research aiming to create design guidelines through empirical investigations of online LARPing. For the empirical investigations, the study embraced an ethnographic approach through participatory observations, complimented by analysis of scripts and interviews with writers. The study then used the findings from the empirical investigations to understand what make players feel more embodied during an online LARPing and let the results inform the creation of design guidelines that could bring a higher degree of embodiment to online LARPing. The work is mainly a design proposal or a design guidance intended for future online LARP designers, instead of building a new technology or a new prototype. The design guidelines aim to create comprehensive recommendations to bring out more embodiment while LARPing online.

This dissertation argues that early modern English drama portrays touch as a crucial means of social negotiation. In the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, a diverse array of contacts between characters, from kicks to kisses to handshakes, embody social relations including dominance, reciprocity and mutuality, in contexts ranging from friendship to marriage to the political realm. But the relations embodied by a given form of touch are not fixed: even as the stage depicts characters using touch to negotiate social relations, many touch gestures are themselves the subjects of social struggle. Amid changing religious views of the senses and emergent discourses of civility, the theater tests, critiques, and reformulates competing codifications of the social role of touch. Five chapters, organized by body part—feet, laps, arms, hands, and mouth respectively—outline the most contested features of the theater’s surprisingly diverse vocabulary of touch. Chapter One considers plays from Love’s Labor’s Lost to the anonymous A Yorkshire Tragedy that contest prevalent associations of the foot with hierarchical dominance in portrayals of such gestures as kicking, foot-kissing, and playing footsy. Chapter Two argues that Hamlet and other plays rework the culturally expected meanings of a male laying his head in a female’s lap, to suggest this action could signify affectionate reciprocity rather than masculine dissipation or dangerous female dominance. Chapter Three argues that Coriolanus, Marlowe’s Edward II, and Arden of Faversham resist a prominent historical tendency to restrict both same-sex and cross-gendered embracing and linking arms to erotically intimate contexts, with each play suggesting that such restriction supports patriarchal power and surveillance. Chapter Four considers hand-holding, betrothal, and hand clasps accompanying business deals and political alliances in Julius Caesar, Jonson’s Poetaster, Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, and others, which portray touch as enacting mutuality, in contexts otherwise marked by hierarchies of gender and status. Finally, Chapter Five analyzes depictions of kissing, whether erotic or sociable, in plays ranging from Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair to Romeo and Juliet. In depictions of contested courtship and neighborly kisses, plays represent female agents strategically claiming a measure of autonomy among patriarchal structures. / 2026-02-28T00:00:00Z

No / This paper develops an argument about transformations in the experience of the urban as a consequence of the rise in, so called, augmented public space. Contemporary media spaces of which media architecture now plays center stage. The argument is this: that through artistic and creative interventions that deploy these technologies and the spaces that they are embedded within can have a direct impact on issues such as the mediation of place and locality and consolidates the central role of the body as a frame in contemporary media spaces. The intention is to map the potential of a media architectural body.

The aim of this thesis is to report on a transdisciplinary approach, regarding the complexity of thinking about human embodiment in relation to machine embodiment. A practical dimension of this thesis is to elicit some principles for the design and evaluation of virtual embodiment. The transdisciplinary approach suggests, firstly, that a single discipline or reality is, on its own, not sufficient to explain the complexity and dynamism of the embodied interaction between the human and machine. Secondly, the thesis argues for thinking of transdisciplinary research as a process of individuation, becoming or transduction, that is, as a process of mediation between heterogeneous approaches rather than perceiving research as a stabilized cognitive schema designed to accumulate new outcomes to the already-there reality. Arguing for going beyond the individualized approaches to embodiment, this thesis analyzes three cases where the problems that appear in one case are resolved through the analysis of the following one. Consisting of three phases, this research moves from objective scientific ¿reality¿ to more phenomenological, subjective and complex realities. The first study employs a critical review of embodied conversational agents in human¿computer interaction (HCI) in a learning context using a comparative meta-analysis. Meta-analysis was applied because most of the studies for evaluating embodiment are experimental. A learning context was selected because the number of studies is suitable for meta-analysis and the findings could be generalized to other contexts. The analysis reveals that there is no ¿persona effect¿, that is, the expected positive effect of virtual embodiment on the participant¿s affective, perceptive and cognitive measures. On the contrary, it shows the reduction of virtual embodiment to image and a lack of consideration for the participant¿s embodiment and interaction, in addition to theoretical and methodological shortcomings. The second phase solves these problems by focusing on Mark Hansen¿s phenomenological account of embodiment in new media. The investigation shows that Hansen improves on the HCI account by focusing on the participant¿s dynamic interaction with new media. Nevertheless, his views of embodied perception and affection are underpinned by a subjective patriarchal account leading to object/subject and body/work polarizations. The final phase resolves this polarization by analyzing the controversial work of Alan Turing on intelligent machinery. The research provides a different reading of the Turing Machine based on Simondon¿s concept of individuation, repositioning its materiality from the abstract non-existent to the actual-virtual realm and investigating the reasons for its abstraction. It relates the emergence of multiple human¿machine encounters in Turing¿s work to the complex counter-becoming of what it describes as ¿the Turing Machine compound¿. / Ministry of Higher Education in the Sultanate of Oman

No description available.

Yes / Though many women may be dissatisfied with their bodies, maternity represents a period when the body deviates significantly from Western beauty ideals. However, the developing corpus of literature is contradictory and there is limited knowledge about the longer-term implications of maternity. Further, much of the early postpartum literature focuses on body image, precluding consideration of broader embodiment and other potential issues. Taking account of recent feminist critiques about acknowledging women’s reproductive capacities, the study reported here explores the embodied subjectivity of longer-term bodily changes resulting from pregnancy, childbirth and early mothering. The data explored are from three focus groups. Mothers were recruited from two universities in the North of England, UK. Data were transcribed and analysed thematically and discursively using a feminist and poststructuralist approach, while also taking account of where language was elusive. A number of contradictory, yet interrelated embodied constructions were identified including the aesthetic, the maternal, the suffering/sentient, the strong and the embarrassing body. New insights are offered, in that, not only are the postpartum body and the ‘work of mothering’ inextricably linked, but also that maternal embodied identities are in continuous process across the life course and may have implications for health and well-being.

Display technology has developed significantly over the last decade, and it is becoming increasingly feasible to construct large, high-resolution displays. Prior work has shown a number of key performance advantages for these displays that can largely be attributed to the replacement of virtual navigation (e.g., panning and zooming) with physical navigation (e.g., moving, turning, glancing). This research moves beyond the question of performance or efficiency and examines ways in which the large, high-resolution display can support the cognitive demanding task of sensemaking. The core contribution of this work is to show that the physical properties of large, high- resolution displays create a fundamentally different environment from conventional displays, one that is inherently spatial, resulting in support for a greater range of embodied resources. To support this, we describe a series of studies that examined the process of sensemaking on one of these displays. These studies illustrate how the display becomes a cognitive partner of the the analyst, encouraging the use of the space for the externalization of the analyst's thought process or findings. We particularly highlight how the flexibility of the space sup- ports the use of incremental formalism, a process of gradually structuring information as understanding grows. Building on these observations, we have developed a new sensemaking environment called Analyst's Workspace (AW), which makes use of a large, high-resolution display as a core component of its design. The primary goal of AW is to provide an environment that unifies the activities of foraging and synthesis into a single investigative thread. AW addresses this goal through the use of an integrated spatial environment in which full text documents serve as primary sources of information, investigative tools for pursuing leads, and sensemaking artifacts that can be arranged in the space to encode information about relationships between events and entities. This work also provides a collection of design principles that fell out of the development of AW, and that we hope can guide future development of analytic tools on large, high-resolution displays. / Ph. D.

This paper explores the intersection of healing, movement, and landscape architecture, focusing on the concept of therapeutic movement. Drawing from the author's background in both landscape architecture and dance, the research investigates how outdoor environments can be designed to facilitate healing through mindful movement practices. By examining existing outdoor spaces designed for various purposes such as recreation, yoga, tai chi, and other forms of mindful movement, the study seeks to understand how landscape architects can integrate therapeutic movement into their designs. The research is centered on a design project situated in Blacksburg, VA, proposing the seamless transformation of unused areas to a nature park tailored for therapeutic movement, adjacent to actively used recreational areas. Throughout the paper, the author engages with topics including the human experience of landscapes, the therapeutic value of movement, and the design considerations for creating healing landscapes. By analyzing practices such as Dance/Movement Therapy, Yoga Therapy, and Tai Chi, the paper offers insights into how landscapes can enhance healing benefits and foster a deeper connection to oneself, community, and the landscape. The proposed design guidelines aim to inform future landscape architecture projects, contributing to the field's understanding of designing spaces for therapeutic movement and promoting holistic well-being. / Master of Landscape Architecture / This paper dives into how nature, movement, and designing outdoor spaces intersect to promote healing. The author, a student of landscape architecture and a dancer, looks at how being mindful about movement outdoors can help people heal. They study existing outdoor areas used for things like yoga and tai chi to see how landscape architects can create spaces that encourage healing through other types of movement, like dance. The research focuses on a project in Blacksburg, VA, where they suggest turning unused areas into a nature park specifically for therapeutic movement, next to places where people already go for recreation. The goal is to give guidelines for future projects in landscape architecture that promote well-being through movement and nature.

Essa tese apresenta a reflexão resultante de dois anos de pesquisa em campo junto a duas escolas da cidade de Uberlândia, em que estive focada na observação das experiências corporais de crianças, adolescentes e professores em interação em aulas de Teatro e em diferentes situações no contexto escolar. Uma perspectiva que entrelaça etnografia e fenomenologia conduziu os processos de observação e de escritura das descrições dos processos pedagógicos sobre os quais reflito. O enraizamento da investigação na noção de experiência corporal e de embodiment partiu especialmente da fenomenologia de Merleau-Ponty e das formulações do pesquisador Thomas Csordas, respectivamente. Tais noções foram férteis para dimensionar a compreensão das práticas teatrais na escola como experiências corporais frutos da intersubjetividade e intercorporalidade em que estamos imersos, como seres-no-mundo e num mundo cultural. As descrições dos processos acompanhados nas escolas partem dessas experiências intercorpóreas apontando para eixos estruturantes emergentes delas: corpo e espaço / corpo e matéria-materialidade; jogo e performatividade; derivas. Ao formulá-los, percebo outras emergências desde as experiências observadas: o embodiment como condição de existência e manifestação da complexidade da constituição dos corpos-pessoas de professores e estudantes; a abertura para as emergências como microconduta que pode orientar práticas do professor em ação na escola; a subversão dos vetores da interação como projeto político e pedagógico no campo das experiências estéticas de e desde os corpos. / This thesis presents the resulting reflection from two years of field research, which took place in two schools in the city of Uberlândia, and in which I\'ve been focused on observing the body experiences of children, teenagers and teachers while interacting in theater classes and in different situations of the school context. A perspective that entwines ethnography and phenomenology led the observation process as well as the writing of descriptions from the pedagogical processes which I reflect upon. The rooting of the investigation on the notion of corporeal experience and embodiment were inspired especially from Merleau-Ponty´s phenomenology and the formulations from the researcher Thomas Csordas, respectively. Such notions were fertile to scale the understanding of theatrical practices in school as body experiences born from the intersubjectivity and intercorporeality in which we are all immersed, as beingsin- world and a cultural world. The descriptions from the processes observed in the schools come from these intercorporeal experiences pointing to emerging structural axes: body and space / body and raw materiality; play and performativity; drifts. As I formulate them, I perceive other emergencies from the observed experiences: the embodiment as a condition of existence and manifestation of the complexity found in the bodies-people\'s constitution from teachers and students; opening for emergencies as microconduct - which can guide teacher´s practices in action at school; subversion of the interactional vectors as a political and pedagogical project in the field of aesthetic experiences of/and from the bodies.