This paper focuses on issues of interaction with a particular type of mobile information system – virtual pets. It examines the impact of owner age on companionship with virtual pets, and tests the hypothesis that younger virtual pet owners will experience closer companionship with their virtual pet than older owners. This is in response to the marketing stance adopted by virtual pet manufactur...

in order to express his visionary experiences, baha-e-valad has innovated his own symbols and imagery. such illustrations of imagination may be interpreted as the product of his intuitive experiences of visits to the realm of ideas referred to as a vision of one's self in psychological, mystic terms. the present study, in an attempt to study and analyze the nature of the symbols in baha-e-valad...

This study is concerned with the development of companionship and intimacy. Subjects in the second, fifth, and eighth grades (mean ages, respectively, 7.5, 10.4, and 13.4) rated the importance and extent of companionship and intimate disclosure experienced in social life in general and in each of 8 types of relationships. Companionship was perceived as a desired social provision at all 3 grade ...

This paper is a survey of some of the most elementary consequences of the JSJ-decomposition and geometrization for knot and link complements in S3 . Formulated in the language of graphs, the result is the construction of a bijective correspondence between the isotopy classes of links in S3 and a class of vertex-labelled, finite acyclic graphs, called companionship graphs. This construction can ...

This study used a method similar to one introduced by Dawkins in 1990 to assess the magnitude of the psychological need for social companionship in pair-housed tufted capuchin monkeys (Cebus apella). This method permits classification of commodities as necessities or luxuries. The study directly compared the commodity of social companionship to the commodity of food, a known physiological neces...

Use of animals for therapeutic purposes, animal assisted therapy or AAT is a method for improving quality of life for long-term inpatients. The object of this paper was to evaluate dog companionship as a form of AAT and its effects on perception of loneliness in geriatric nursing home residents. The participants were involved in a six-month program of dog companionship three times weekly for 90...

As people age, physical and mental abilities begin to degenerate. This often leads to disabilities. Many family members may not always be able to help the elderly, and home medical care can be discouragingly expensive. Currently, there are existing agencies that provide companionship services for the elderly by sending hired staff to the homes of elderly people who choose to live independently....

The recent progress in artificial intelligence is allowing assistive systems like the voice-based assistant, virtual agents to become more personalized and adaptable. The role of these systems is also shifting from being a mere assistant to a personal companion. However ‘personal companionship’ being a subjective term lies open to interpretation, thus posing a challenge for the creators of thes...

PURPOSE/OBJECTIVES To explore the relationships between adult cancer survivor and caregiver social support, self-efficacy for physical activity (SEPA), physical activity (PA) behavior, and quality of life (QOL); and to understand cancer survivors' and their caregivers' perceptions of social support in PA participation. DESIGN Quasi-experimental. SETTING Five community-based exercise sites l...