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Background: Cancer patients often search for information about their health conditions online. Cancer patient narratives have established themselves as a way of providing information and education but also as an effective approach to improving coping with the disease. Objective: We investigated how people affected by cancer perceive cancer patient narratives and whether such stories can potentially improve coping during their own cancer journeys. Additionally, we reflected on whether our co‐creative citizen science approach can contribute to gaining knowledge about cancer survival stories and providing peer support. Design, Setting and Stakeholders: We applied a co‐creative citizen science approach by using quantitative and qualitative research methods with stakeholders (i.e., cancer patients, their relatives, friends and health professionals). Main Outcome Measures: Understandability and perceived benefits of cancer survival stories, coping, emotional reactions to the stories and helpful characteristics of the stories. Results: Cancer survival stories were considered intelligible and beneficial, and they potentially support positive emotions and coping in people affected by cancer. Together with the stakeholders, we identified four main characteristics that evoked positive emotions and that were considered especially helpful: (1) positive attitudes towards life, (2) encouraging cancer journeys, (3) individual coping strategies for everyday challenges and (4) openly shared vulnerabilities. Conclusions: Cancer survival stories potentially support positive emotions and coping in people affected by cancer. A citizen science approach is suitable for identifying relevant characteristics of cancer survival stories and may become a helpful educational peer support resource for people coping with cancer. Patient or Public Contributions: We adopted a co‐creative citizen science approach, wherein citizens and researchers were equally involved throughout the entire project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Affective processes appraise the salience of external stimuli preparing the agent for action. So far, the relationship between stimuli, affect, and action has been mainly studied in highly controlled laboratory conditions. In order to find the generalization of this relationship to social interaction, we assess the influence of the salience of social stimuli on human interaction. We constructed reality ball game in a mixed reality space where pairs of people collaborated in order to compete with an opposing team. We coupled the players with team members with varying social salience by using both physical and virtual representations of remote players (i.e., avatars). We observe that, irrespective of the team composition, winners and losers display significantly different inter- and intrateam spatial behaviors. We show that subjects regulate their interpersonal distance to both virtual and physical team members in similar ways, but in proportion to the vividness of the stimulus. As an independent validation of this social salience effect, we show that this behavioral effect is also displayed in physiological correlates of arousal. In addition, we found a strong correlation between performance, physiology, and the subjective reports of the subjects. Our results show that proxemics is consistent with affective responses, confirming the existence of a social salience effect. This provides further support for the so-called law of apparent reality, and it generalizes it to the social realm, where it can be used to design more efficient social artifacts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: With the advance of novel brain imaging technology more correlations between complex human properties and the neuronal substrate can be assessed. However, thus far, not many well-validated paradigms exist that would allow for a systematic and quantitative exploration of these phenomena. For instance, despite the rapid technological advances in the domain of mixed and virtual reality systems, a fundamental issue remains how we can define and quantify “presence”. A standard approach has been to use questionnaires and self-report measures. However, it has been well established that humans’ capabilities to access and externalize their internal states are limited. Hence, we have investigated the question whether other less subjective measures can be devised that can corroborate subjective self-reports on presence. In particular, we have developed a quantitative recollection task that assesses the ability of human subjects (N =40) to recollect the factual structure and organization of a structured and fully controlled experience in a human accessible mixed reality space, the eXperience Induction Machine (XIM). In this structured experience – referred to as the “Autodemo” – a virtual guide explains the key elements and properties of XIM while the user is able to freely move around in the space. To evaluate the users’ experience and the amount of factual information retained about the Autodemo, we used the ITC-SOPI questionnaire and a recall test specifically designed for the Autodemo. We found significant correlations between spatial presence and engagement factors of ITC-SOPI and recall performance. Moreover we observed an interaction with the participants’ gender. Our results show that we can assess correlates of “presence” by focusing on other dependent measures such as those related to memory and performance. Additionally, our work exemplifies how virtual and mixed reality systems provide new ways to address fundamental questions in psychology and cognitive neuroscience. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]