Mental Health Promotion with Animated Characters: Exploring Issues and Potential

Mental Health: Yours, Mine and Ours

This list is offered as a supplemental resource to the video series located at z.umn.edu/cmhpbh. It is for those interested in exploring in-depth issues related to the promotion of children’s mental health. Included are broad conceptualizations and frameworks relating to mental health as a public health issue, calls to better connect education and public health fields around mental health promo...

Social and Psychological Dimensions of Urban Green Spaces and the Impact in Living Environment of Epistemological Studies

Many epidemiological studies have found that people living in environments with more green space report better physical and mental health than those with less green space. However, the association between visits to green space and mental health has seldom been studied. The environment surrounding residences and its recreational and commuting opportunities are believed to affect human health and...

Designing Affective Interaction Paradigms for Animated Characters

This paper describes several interaction paradigms designed to enable people to interact in social and emotional ways with autonomous animated characters. By exploring a domain that lends itself to affective interactions, this paper may offer some ideas for enhancing emotional engagement in other kinds of products as well.

Strengthening mental health promotion: zeroing in on the workplace.

Animated Characters in Bullying Intervention

The VICTEC (Virtual ICT with Empathic Characters) project explores the use of animated characters in virtual environments for educational issues, such as bullying behaviour. 76 participants evaluated a prototype of the VICTEC demonstrator. Results revealed high story believability with character conversation rated as convincing and interesting whilst character movement was poorly rated. The res...