How Do Nature-Based Activities Benefit Essential Workers during the COVID-19 Pandemic? The Mediating Effect of Nature Connectedness.

Although many studies have suggested that nature-based activities have a healing effect on human beings, there is little research on the underlying mechanism. This study investigated the role of nature connectedness in the relationship between the perception of nature and individuals' physical and psychological health. We recruited essential workers who participated in disease prevention and control during the COVID-19 pandemic and their family members as the subjects for this study. The stress levels experienced by this group made them an ideal sample. The results of a survey-based study showed that nature-based activities had a positive effect on alleviating state anxiety levels. The results also showed that nature-based activities affected perceived restoration via the feeling of nature connectedness. This study examined the healing effect of nature-based activities that stimulate the five senses and nature connectedness and explored the potential of nature-based treatments for people experiencing high levels of stress.

Towards a Personality AI for Robots: Potential Colony Capacity of a Goal-Shaped Generative Personality Model When Used for Expressing Personalities via Non-Verbal Behaviour of Humanoid Robots.

Engineering robot personalities is a challenge of multiple folds. Every robot that interacts with humans is an individual physical presence that may require their own personality. Thus, robot personalities engineers face a problem that is the reverse of that of personality psychologists: robot personalities engineers need to make batches of identical robots into individual personalities, as oppose to formulating comprehensive yet parsimonious descriptions of individual personalities that already exist. The robot personality research so far has been fruitful in demonstrating the positive effects of robot personality but unfruitful in insights into how robot personalities can be engineered in significant quantities. To engineer robot personalities for mass-produced robots we need a generative personality model with a structure to encode a robot's individual characteristics as personality traits and generate behaviour with inter- and intra-individual differences that reflect those characteristics. We propose a generative personality model shaped by goals as part of a personality AI for robots towards which we have been working, and we conducted tests to investigate how many individual personalities the model can practically support when it is used for expressing personalities via non-verbal behaviour on the heads of humanoid robots.