Positive expressive technologies for social wellness

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.Drawing on research from the fields of HCI, social and positive psychology, this thesis investigates the design of technologies that encourage the expression of positive emotions. In parallel, it details the deployment of effective design steps to guide, frame and eventually support understandings of positive mental and social usage effects of technology. Different artefacts termed PosiPost have been iteratively developed as exemplars for the discussion and exploration of the ways in which technologies can support positive communication and social sharing. Studies with these technologies have been conducted to explore how these can encourage positive communication and understand how they contribute to social wellness. Specifically, the studies undertaken validate the hypothesis that the sharing of positive emotions as mediated by technology has beneficial social and mental effects. The first stage of the research examined whether and how social technology can be designed for positive affect. A theoretical framework, named THE Medium model was developed to support the design process. Furthermore, design considerations were produced for technologies that encourage the sharing of positive emotions. This latter involved two studies, paper-based and online, which showed the potential for a prefixbased elicitation of positive emotions and drove the design and development of a mobile tool called PosiPost Me (Mobile edition). The second stage of the design process focused on how positive emotions can be mediated by technology in a mobile context and how such tools were used and understood. The iterative design study process continued, resulting in PosiPost Be, a Bluetooth edition, which allows sharing of positive messages with people in close proximity to explore the social and potential positive effects of contextualizing posiposting by adding location as a factor. Results suggest that by using a prefix-strategy, messages of a positive and mundane nature can be shared and mediated by mobile technology. Analysis of the shared messages provides insights into people’s pleasant moments in daily life. A questionnaire instrument named SPOT was developed and used for the measurement of the effects of sharing pleasant moments with the developed mobile expressive technologies in further detail. The results suggest that lightweight positive expressive technologies can have beneficial social wellness effects. In particular, the study showed significant beneficial effects in reducing depressed feelings and increasing social interest in others. Participants also believed that the mobile PosiPost applications supported social connectedness, socio-pleasure, social and positive awareness, and positive thinking

Positive expressive technologies for social wellness

Drawing on research from the fields of HCI, social and positive psychology, this thesis investigates the design of technologies that encourage the expression of positive emotions. In parallel, it details the deployment of effective design steps to guide, frame and eventually support understandings of positive mental and social usage effects of technology. Different artefacts termed PosiPost have been iteratively developed as exemplars for the discussion and exploration of the ways in which technologies can support positive communication and social sharing. Studies with these technologies have been conducted to explore how these can encourage positive communication and understand how they contribute to social wellness. Specifically, the studies undertaken validate the hypothesis that the sharing of positive emotions as mediated by technology has beneficial social and mental effects. The first stage of the research examined whether and how social technology can be designed for positive affect. A theoretical framework, named THE Medium model was developed to support the design process. Furthermore, design considerations were produced for technologies that encourage the sharing of positive emotions. This latter involved two studies, paper-based and online, which showed the potential for a prefixbased elicitation of positive emotions and drove the design and development of a mobile tool called PosiPost Me (Mobile edition). The second stage of the design process focused on how positive emotions can be mediated by technology in a mobile context and how such tools were used and understood. The iterative design study process continued, resulting in PosiPost Be, a Bluetooth edition, which allows sharing of positive messages with people in close proximity to explore the social and potential positive effects of contextualizing posiposting by adding location as a factor. Results suggest that by using a prefix-strategy, messages of a positive and mundane nature can be shared and mediated by mobile technology. Analysis of the shared messages provides insights into people’s pleasant moments in daily life. A questionnaire instrument named SPOT was developed and used for the measurement of the effects of sharing pleasant moments with the developed mobile expressive technologies in further detail. The results suggest that lightweight positive expressive technologies can have beneficial social wellness effects. In particular, the study showed significant beneficial effects in reducing depressed feelings and increasing social interest in others. Participants also believed that the mobile PosiPost applications supported social connectedness, socio-pleasure, social and positive awareness, and positive thinking.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Disentangling the effects of efficacy-facilitating informational support on health resilience in online health communities based on phrase-level text analysis

This study examines the different types of supportive messages posted on a forum at online Healthcare communities (OHCs), which facilitate user self-efficacy and response-efficacy and an issue of how such informational messages encourage users to enhance their health resilience via goal-setting for health improvement. We theorize that self-efficacy-oriented messages affect helpfulness, focusing on the efficiency of the implementation, while response-efficacy-oriented messages influence the relationships among helpfulness, goal-settings, and health resilience based on the outcome expectancy. Using a computer assisted approach which allows for the directed content analysis, we test a conceptual model with the text-data collected from an OHC

MAIS - A Model for the Multi-criteria Analysis of Interaction Solutions

AbstractThe research methodology applied in this work, consisted of the following steps: initially, we collected work that applied subjective analysis methods in a decision making process in order to choose the appropriate interaction solution(s) to the users’ preferences. Then, we verified the characteristics of the multi-criteria approaches found in such works, which did not provide designers with support to define what to evaluate in solutions, how to assess them nor to what purpose the analysis is made. Subsequently, we derived a general process, from which we could identify the main elements to generate an evaluation model. Such elements refer to interaction aspects, concepts, techniques and methods coming from different areas of computer scienc

Detecting Mental Distresses Using Social Behavior Analysis in the Context of COVID-19: A Survey

Online social media provides a channel for monitoring people\u27s social behaviors from which to infer and detect their mental distresses. During the COVID-19 pandemic, online social networks were increasingly used to express opinions, views, and moods due to the restrictions on physical activities and in-person meetings, leading to a significant amount of diverse user-generated social media content. This offers a unique opportunity to examine how COVID-19 changed global behaviors regarding its ramifications on mental well-being. In this article, we surveyed the literature on social media analysis for the detection of mental distress, with a special emphasis on the studies published since the COVID-19 outbreak. We analyze relevant research and its characteristics and propose new approaches to organizing the large amount of studies arising from this emerging research area, thus drawing new views, insights, and knowledge for interested communities. Specifically, we first classify the studies in terms of feature extraction types, language usage patterns, aesthetic preferences, and online behaviors. We then explored various methods (including machine learning and deep learning techniques) for detecting mental health problems. Building upon the in-depth review, we present our findings and discuss future research directions and niche areas in detecting mental health problems using social media data. We also elaborate on the challenges of this fast-growing research area, such as technical issues in deploying such systems at scale as well as privacy and ethical concerns

Emotional Destruction: How Supervisors Can Transform a Subordinate’s Emotions Towards the Workplace

Workplace emotions have become an increasingly important area for researchers and organizations. Organizational structures and interpersonal interactions activate emotional responses for employees. This emotional strain can lead employees to search for outlets, such as social media, to express their emotions and seek emotional support. This thesis uses a content analysis to examine how macro level policies and procedures and micro level interpersonal interactions between supervisors and subordinates impact the messages expressed on Twitter

Making Up Self Harmers: an investigation of the concept over time and from the perspective of two different self harm groups

This thesis aims to illustrate the processes involves in ‘making up’ the human kind of self harmers. Psychiatric attempts at defining, explaining, and controlling self harm behaviours are shaped by the people who they diagnose as much as they shape those who they are diagnosing. This relationship goes further, as the labelled respond to their category, the category changes, which alters the way in which they behave, which then again shifts the meaning of the category (Hacking, 2006). Medicine is a force that shapes and structures people’s experiences of themselves, and through power relationships the array of available actions is limited to the individual (Foucault, 1982; Rose, 2007). In this thesis, Hacking, Foucault and Rose’s theories will be illustrated and grounded by an extensive historiography using psychiatric journals, and applied to rich data gathered using internet forums. This thesis comprises both a history of the emergence and development of the concept of self harm, (i.e. the ‘making up’ of the category of self harmers) and an examination of the modern understandings of self harm (Hacking, 2006), using two clinical self harm discussion boards and two emo forums taken from a two week period in June. From this data, four themes were selected (use of medical discourse, identity presentation, integration with medical professionals and concealment) and will be discussed in detail. The ‘looping effect’ is illustrated using clinical self harmers, where their relationship with medical discourses is shown to influence both their understanding of self harm, and medicine’s knowledge of self harm. A second group of emo self harmers will be compared and contrasted to the clinical self harmers, and their relationship to the medical sphere evaluated. These analyses shall demonstrate that the relationship between medicine and emo self harmers is predominantly unidirectional; medicine studies these teenagers closely, yet emo self harmers do not engage with the medical discourses. It will be shown that the two groups see themselves very differently in relation to medicine; clinical self harmers offered themselves to medicalisation readily, but emo self harmers are not medicalised to the same extent

Exploring the Experiences of Individuals with Head and Neck Cancer Using Online Support Groups

Objectives: Head and neck (H&N) cancer is commonly cited as the most emotionally traumatic of all tumours with potentially severe impacts on quality of life (QoL). Social support is increasingly recognised as playing an important role in helping people cope with the diagnosis, progression, and outcomes of cancer, including H&N cancer. Using online support groups (OSGs) has been found to be associated with a range of positive psychosocial outcomes in relation to several health conditions. The aim of this thesis was three-fold; firstly, to assess the types of social support, sought and offered, within OSGs for H&N cancer. Secondly, to explore the relationship between using OSGs and QoL and examine the psychosocial factors that may influence this relationship and, thirdly, to explore, in depth, the OSGs experiences of people with H&N cancer. Methods: Two studies are reported in this thesis: Study 1 was a content analysis of posted messages within H&N cancer-OSGs. A total of 312 support-offering messages and 87 support-seeking messages (in a one year period) were randomly selected from 18 H&N cancer OSGs. The content of the support-offering messages were analysed using a modified version of Social Support Behaviour Code and the content of the support-seeking messages were analysed using a modified version of the Coursaris and Liu coding scheme. Study 2 was a cross-sectional study consisting of two parts; the first was an online questionnaire using six pre-validated measures for social network, self-efficacy, anxiety and depression, adjustment, empowerment and quality of life. In addition, socio-demographic as well as illness-related and OSGs-related information were collected. This questionnaire was completed by 199 persons with H&N cancer using four OSGs within a 6 month period. The second part of Study 2 was an unstructured online interview in which, 30 people from the previous 199 were interviewed synchronously online using Facebook, Email, Skype, Yahoo messenger and MSN, and a narrative thematic experience analysis was conducted on the data. Results: The content analysis of Study 1 showed that the most frequently offered types of social support by members of OSGs were informational (43.4%) and emotional (32.4%), followed by esteem (15.65%) and network support (6.04%), whereas little tangible assistance was offered (2.47%). The content of messages seeking support included OSGs members sharing personal experience (31.52 %), with the most frequently sought support being informational support (25.54 %). In the quantitative part of Study 2 a series of multiple linear regression analyses indicated that longer use of OSGs was related to better QoL (p= 0.02), and lower levels of depression and anxiety, lower endorsement of negative adjustment behaviour (p = 0.00 for each), greater self-efficacy (p = 0.02) and higher levels of empowerment (p = 0.01). Additional analysis of mediation effects suggested that depression and adjustment were direct mediators of the relationship between OSGs and QoL, whilst anxiety, self-efficacy and empowerment were indirect mediators. The narrative thematic analysis of the qualitative part of Study 2 showed that one main theme emerged (Trust) which included four subthemes: (1) distrust, (2) institutional trust, (3) identification based and relational trust (4) power relationships and normalisation. Conclusion: The advantages of cancer related-OSGs appear to be inclusive; regardless of location, access, availability or user characteristics. The results of the studies tentatively suggest that OSGs could benefit H&N cancer patients by providing support and information related to their condition, enhance empowerment processes and patient’s beliefs in their control over their H&N cancer, as well as reduce anxiety, depression, and negative adjustment behaviours and subsequently improve quality of life. Moreover, these results support previous research on other types of cancer in importance of trust in managing online relationships and further emphasises the complexity of online social relationships

Analyzing user reviews of messaging Apps for competitive analysis

Dissertation presented as the partial requirement for obtaining a Master's degree in Data Science and Advanced Analytics, specialization in Data ScienceThe rise of various messaging apps has resulted in intensively fierce competition, and the era of Web 2.0 enables business managers to gain competitive intelligence from user-generated content (UGC). Text-mining UGC for competitive intelligence has been drawing great interest of researchers. However, relevant studies mostly focus on industries such as hospitality and products, and few studies applied such techniques to effectively perform competitive analysis for messaging apps. Here, we conducted a competitive analysis based on topic modeling and sentiment analysis by text-mining 27,479 user reviews of four iOS messaging apps, namely Messenger, WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram. The results show that the performance of topic modeling and sentiment analysis is encouraging, and that a combination of the extracted app aspect-based topics and the adjusted sentiment scores can effectively reveal meaningful competitive insights into user concerns, competitive strengths and weaknesses as well as changes of user sentiments over time. We anticipate that this study will not only advance the existing literature on competitive analysis using text mining techniques for messaging apps but also help existing players and new entrants in the market to sharpen their competitive edge by better understanding their user needs and the industry trends