Understanding the conditions under which Virtual Environment (VE) users experience a sense of presence may, in the long term, yield valuable insights into human cognition and psychology. More immediately, however, the general assumption is that a sense of presence impacts a user’s ability to perform a task and, therefore, that insights into presence offer a potential payoff in terms of task per...

eLife deputy editor Fiona M Watt recounts some of her personal experiences as a senior female academic in a male-dominated environment.

Suicidal behaviour among young adults is a significant social and psychological problem, however, little research explores its meaning from the suicidal individual's perspective. A qualitative study identified common themes and personal meanings that characterized the experiences of young adults who had made one suicide attempt between ages 20 to 24. Six major themes identified were (a) family ...

Purpose – Successful visionary educational leaders promote a shared vision with great commitment and manage to connect other organizational members to it. In spite of this, the source of their personal commitment to the organizational vision has not yet been the subject of extended study. This study aims to correct this by investigating leaders' personal ethos; the personal experiences and valu...

Death of a life partner and the subsequent bereavement are profound experiences for an individual. By far, the majority of bereavement research reported is focused on heterosexual couples, primarily married and often in the later years of life. The purpose of this study was to describe the bereavement experiences of lesbians whose life partners have died. The study used a descriptive, qualitati...

This study aimed to explore the experiences, responses and conceptualizations of sense of presence experiences in bereavement in terms of family meaning-making. A case study framework was chosen, using group and individual interviews and ethnographically-derived observations in a father-bereaved family in the south of England. Interview data were analyzed by applying both phenomenological and s...

T he history of wearable computing reaches all the way back to the 1980s, with people like Steve Mann and Thad Starner using wearable devices to augment their senses and capture their everyday experiences.1 However, recent developments have brought about a fundamental shift in the digital augmentation of reality. In the near future, it will be feasible to continuously record a plethora of perso...