Some Assembly Required: Player Mental Models of Videogame Avatars.

In playing videogames, players often create avatars as extensions of agency into those spaces, where the player-avatar relationship (PAR) both shapes gameplay and is the product of gameplay experiences. Avatars are generally understood as singular bodies; however, we argue they are functional and phenomenological assemblages-networks of social and technological components that are internalized by players as networks of knowledge about the avatar. Different PARs are based on different internalizations (i.

From Warranty Voids to Uprising Advocacy: Human Action and the Perceived Moral Patiency of Social Robots.

Moral status can be understood along two dimensions: moral agency [capacities to be and do good (or bad)] and moral patiency (extents to which entities are objects of moral concern), where the latter especially has implications for how humans accept or reject machine agents into human social spheres. As there is currently limited understanding of how people innately understand and imagine the moral patiency of social robots, this study inductively explores key themes in how robots may be subject to humans' (im)moral action across 12 valenced foundations in the moral matrix: care/harm, fairness/unfairness, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, purity/degradation, liberty/oppression. Findings indicate that people can imagine clear dynamics by which anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, and mechanomorphic robots may benefit and suffer at the hands of humans (e.

Framing Effects on Judgments of Social Robots' (Im)Moral Behaviors.

Frames-discursive structures that make dimensions of a situation more or less salient-are understood to influence how people understand novel technologies. As technological agents are increasingly integrated into society, it becomes important to discover how native understandings (i.e.

Optimus Primed: Media Cultivation of Robot Mental Models and Social Judgments.

Media influence people's perceptions of reality broadly and of technology in particular. Robot villains and heroes-from Ultron to Wall-E-have been shown to serve a specific cultivation function, shaping people's perceptions of those embodied social technologies, especially when individuals do not have direct experience with them. To date, however, little is understood about the nature of the conceptions people hold for what robots are, how they work, and how they may function in society, as well as the media antecedents and relational effects of those cognitive structures.

The Space Between: Nature and Machine Heuristics in Evaluations of Organisms, Cyborgs, and Robots.

Cues delivered by agents are known to trigger mental shortcuts associated with ontological category or the kind of thing an agent is. Two such heuristics are key to considering organic and machine agents, and result in biased evaluations: the machine heuristic (MH) (if machine, then systematic/unbiased, therefore its products are good) and the nature heuristic (NH) (if natural, then pure/innate, therefore good). As machine agents such as robots are increasingly integrated into human spheres, it is yet unknown (a) if invocation of agent-cued heuristics is inherently tied to activities and (b) whether either/both heuristics are evoked when agents exhibit both organic and machinic properties (as with cyborgs).

Connection, meaning, and distraction: A qualitative study of video game play and mental health recovery in veterans treated for mental and/or behavioral health problems.

Rationale: Mental and behavioral health recovery includes concepts related not just to symptom improvement, but also to participating in activities that contribute to wellness and a meaningful life. Video game play can relieve stress and provide a way to connect, which may be especially important for military veterans.

Objective: We examined how military veterans used video game play to further their mental and behavioral health recovery by conducting an exploratory thematic analysis of the gaming habits of 20 United States military veterans who were in treatment for mental or behavioral health problems.

Psychosocial Assessment as a Standard of Care in Pediatric Cancer.

This paper presents the evidence for a standard of care for psychosocial assessment in pediatric cancer. An interdisciplinary group of investigators utilized EBSCO, PubMed, PsycINFO, Ovid, and Google Scholar search databases, focusing on five areas: youth/family psychosocial adjustment, family resources, family/social support, previous history/premorbid functioning, and family structure/function. Descriptive quantitative studies, systematic reviews, and meta-analyses (n = 149) were reviewed and evaluated using grading of recommendations, assessment development, and evaluation (GRADE) criteria.