Police officers frequently respond to calls involving persons with mental illnesses and in doing so, they are key gatekeepers of access to mental health treatment as well as entry into the criminal justice system. Programs such as Crisis Intervention Teams (CIT) are being implemented across the United States and elsewhere to train officers to respond more effectively and facilitate access to me...

The prevalence of psychiatric conditions among prisoners in Latin America is greatly underestimated, and because of the lack of awareness about mental illness among service providers in Latin American prisons, oftentimes these conditions go unrecognized or are not treated properly. In the worst-case scenarios, human rights violations occur. Despite the high levels of need, many prisoners have n...

Assessing uncertain futures Perceived uncertainties and risks can be considered to be the main motivation behind ‘Futures Thinking’ or ‘Futures Studies’ to assess potential economic, environmental, social or technical developments and their expected consequences on society and environment (or from a systems perspective – feedbacks between the components of complex social-ecological systems, e.g...

Two experiments examined the link between interpretation and memory in individuals diagnosed with Generalized Social Phobia (GSP). In Experiment 1, GSP and control participants generated continuations for nonsocial and ambiguous social scenarios. GSP participants produced more socially anxious and negative continuations for the social scenarios than did the controls. On the subsequent test of r...

In our daily lives dealing with images, we have the mental notion that we are reproducing an original. This notion is generally helpful in guiding image and colour processing decisions, but often it turns into a hindrance when the words we use lead to artifi cial constraints that we impose onto the problem. This paper describes some scenarios in which a broader defi nition of the word ‘reproduc...

In this paper, we generalize our formal approach to modelling PRS agents away from PRS-specific assumptions to more general theories of rationality, while not losing the concreteness of the connection between an agent’s mental states and formal models, using three “puzzles” in the logic of intention to motivate our extended approach. We show how the theory can be used to represent solutions to ...

The aim of this project is to develop a virtual conversational agent that has the ability to touch the user using haptic interfaces. The focus is on generating believable communicative behavior of the virtual agent based on mental models of human-human communication. We will work on generating scenarios, building prototypes of haptic interfaces, and evaluating the user experience with the syste...