This paper investigates some aspects of how location-based game concepts are challenging the traditions of gaming. The initial hypothesis is that location-based gaming that utilizes city space as a game board seem to be in confl ict with the classical defi nitions of ‘play’ and ‘game’. The nature of pervasive gaming is investigated in relation to different levels of mobile use and the social co...

If the life of everyday language can be captured by any single domain of linguistic research, surely pragmatics must be among the top candidates for that honor. Casting its wide net around phenomena as diverse as intonational, morphological and syntactic variation with implications for social and interpersonal meanings, speech acts and their diverse realizations, discourses coherence and cohesi...

People everywhere select among multiple alternatives, but are they always making choices? In five studies, we found that people in U.S. American contexts, where the disjoint model of agency is prevalent, are more likely than those in Indian contexts to construe their own and other individuals’ behaviors as choices, to construe ongoing behaviors and behaviors recalled from memory as choices, to ...

To acquire in-depth understanding of meanings attributed by young men to sexual health care, the similarities and asymmetries present in a corpus of 60 reports of men from two different generations were analyzed regarding this type of care. A process of in-depth hermeneutics was undertaken under the theoretical sociological perspectives of sexual scripts, male habitus and generation. Fifteen an...

A qualitative study conducted in a teaching hospital with 15 nursing professionals. Attempted to analyze the reasons, attitudes and beliefs of nursing staff regarding adherence to personal protective equipment. Data were collected through focus groups, analyzed by the method of interpretation of meanings, considering Rosenstock's model of health beliefs as a reference framework. Data revealed t...

In this paper, we propose an asynchronous community system named TelMeA, which employs avatarlike agents, or scriptable animated agents, as the conversation interface. Few of current online community systems are close to real communities both in reality and in functions. We show with the proposed system that online community can be more like our real community in awareness of participants and o...

This study aimed to understand the meanings caregivers attributed to the process of caring for a neutropenic child at home and know their needs for orientation related to care for these children. This descriptive study was carried out at the Pediatric Oncology Institute through semi-structured interviews, involving eleven caregivers. Data were organized according to the content analysis techniq...

Semantics is the essence of human communication. It concerns the manufacture and use of symbols as representations to exchange meanings. Information technology is faced with the problem of using intelligent machines as intermediaries for interpersonal communication. The problem of designing such semantic machines has been intractable because brains and machines work on very different principles...

Communication consists in an intentional exchange of verbal and non-verbal signs (symbols) undertaken in order to improve cooperation or share meanings among partners. The communication occurs on many levels, from the intrapersonal through interpersonal (involving a group), to the public level. In the context of palliative care, special importance is gained by the basic social behaviours, such ...

This article reviews cultural variations in the clinical presentation of depression and anxiety. Culture-specific symptoms may lead to underrecognition or misidentification of psychological distress. Contrary to the claim that non-Westerners are prone to somatize their distress, recent research confirms that somatization is ubiquitous. Somatic symptoms serve as cultural idioms of distress in ma...