Understanding the effects of topic factors and threat exposure on motivation to participate in knowledge artefacts: The case of Wikipedia

Wikipedia’s unique feature that prompts voluntary knowledge creation makes it relevant for researchers to examine what motivates editors to contribute to the platform when there are no obvious compensations that they could receive in exchange of their efforts. Earlier studies have identified various encouraging factors of Wikipedia participation (e.g., fun, ideology, community aspect). In this dissertation, I undertook a psychology perspective and examined the issue with a focus on person-object-environment paradigm that has not been previously studied within the context of Wikipedia motivation. This paradigm explains the human behavior as a product of a person’s interest-oriented relationship with an object and with her/his environment. The aim of this dissertation was then to investigate motivation to work with Wikipedia (in terms of willingness to contribute to the articles and production of article measures) in relation to topic factors (object) and threat exposure (environment). Two laboratory and one Wikipedia textual analysis studies suggested that general (i.e., topic familiarity and controversiality) and specific characteristics (i.e., sentiment and psychological content) of a topic played significant roles in Wikipedia motivation. Specifically, working with familiar and controversial topics that had sociopolitical references increased engagement to Wikipedia articles. Results also suggested that Wikipedia community produced article measures (e.g., longer articles) related to content with both positive and negative sentiments. A closer examination on psychological content showed that affective (positive and negative emotion) and drive states (achievement, reward, power, affiliation and risk) were the best predictors of article production. With regards to threat exposure, although threat manipulations induced in the forms of mortality salience and uncertainty salience led to negative mood states, they did not result in any changes in people’s willingness to work with the articles. Overall, the findings suggest that Wikipedia motivation was significantly influenced by general familiar and controversial characteristics of the presented topic as well as positive/negative polarity and specific psychological orientations of the content. Threat-evoking environmental cues during Wikipedia use, on the other hand, did not seem to affect the motivation levels. These results support the human-oriented aspect of Wikipedia platform that is distinctively fostered by editors’ psychological, social and emotional interests

Doctoral Researchers in the Leibniz Association: Final Report of the 2017 Leibniz PhD Survey

This report provides for the first time a detailed quantitative description based on survey data of those doctoral researchers who work and perform their research at one of the 91 Leibniz Institutes and Research Museums. In November 2017, the Leibniz PhD Network sent out invitations via PhD representatives and works councils to the doctoral researchers within the Leibniz Institutes and Leibniz Research Museums to participate in the survey’s online questionnaire. The present report and the underlying survey are the products of a collaborative process within the Survey Working Group of the Leibniz PhD Network

UPV-Symanto at eRisk 2021: Mental Health Author Profiling for Early Risk Prediction on the Internet

[EN] This paper presents the contributions of the UPV-Symanto team, a collaboration between Symanto Research and the PRHLT Center, in the eRisk 2021 shared tasks on gambling addiction, self-harm detection and prediction of depression levels. We have used a variety of models and techniques, including Transformers, hierarchical attention networks with multiple linguistic features, a dedicated early alert decision mechanism, and temporal modelling of emotions. We trained the models using additional training data that we collected and annotated thanks to expert psychologists. Our emotions-over-time model obtained the best results for the depression severity task in terms of ACR (and second best according to ADODL). For the self-harm detection task, our Transformer-based model obtained the best absolute result in terms of ERDE5 and we ranked equal first in terms of speed and latency.The authors from Universitat Politècnica de València thank the EU-FEDER Comunitat Valenciana 2014-2020 grant IDIFEDER/2018/025. The work of Paolo Rosso was in the framework of the research project PROMETEO/2019/121 (DeepPattern) by the Generalitat Valenciana. We would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers who helped us improve this paper.Basile, A.; Chinea-Ríos, M.; Uban, A.; Müller, T.; Rössler, L.; Yenikent, S.; Chulvi-Ferriols, MA.... (2021). UPV-Symanto at eRisk 2021: Mental Health Author Profiling for Early Risk Prediction on the Internet. CEUR. 908-927. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/19067090892

The Impact of Topic Characteristics and Threat on Willingness to Engage with Wikipedia Articles: Insights from Laboratory Experiments

A growing body of research aims to identify the factors that motivate people to make contributions in Wikipedia. We conducted two laboratory experiments to investigate the connections between topic characteristics, perception of threat, and willingness to engage with Wikipedia articles. In Study 1 (N = 83), we examined how topic familiarity, topic controversiality, and mortality salience influenced participants’ willingness to engage with Wikipedia articles. We presented the introduction parts of 20 Wikipedia articles and asked participants to rate each article with respect to familiarity and controversiality. In addition, we experimentally manipulated participants’ level of mortality salience in terms of the amount of threat they experienced when reading the article. Participants also indicated their willingness to engage with a particular article. The results revealed that familiar and controversial topics increased the willingness to engage with Wikipedia articles. Although mortality salience increased accessibility of death-related thoughts, it did not result in any changes in people’s willingness to work with the articles. The aim of Study 2 (N = 90) was to replicate the effects of topic characteristics by following a similar procedure. We additionally manipulated uncertainty salience by assigning participants to three experimental conditions: uncertainty salience, certainty salience, and non-salience. As expected, familiar and controversial topics were of high interest in terms of willingness to contribute. However, the manipulation of uncertainty salience did not yield any significant results despite the emergence of negative emotional states. In sum, we demonstrated that topic characteristics were factors that substantially influenced people’s willingness to engage with Wikipedia articles whereas perceived threat was not

Indications of Depressive Symptoms During the COVID-19 Pandemic in Germany: Comparison of National Survey and Twitter Data

BackgroundThe current COVID-19 pandemic is associated with extensive individual and societal challenges, including challenges to both physical and mental health. To date, the development of mental health problems such as depressive symptoms accompanying population-based federal distancing measures is largely unknown, and opportunities for rapid, effective, and valid monitoring are currently a relevant matter of investigation. ObjectiveIn this study, we aim to investigate, first, the temporal progression of depressive symptoms during the COVID-19 pandemic and, second, the consistency of the results from tweets and survey-based self-reports of depressive symptoms within the same time period. MethodsBased on a cross-sectional population survey of 9011 German adolescents and adults (n=4659, 51.7% female; age groups from 15 to 50 years and older) and a sample of 88,900 tweets (n=74,587, 83.9% female; age groups from 10 to 50 years and older), we investigated five depressive symptoms (eg, depressed mood and energy loss) using items from the Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-8) before, during, and after relaxation of the first German social contact ban from January to July 2020. ResultsOn average, feelings of worthlessness were the least frequently reported symptom (survey: n=1011, 13.9%; Twitter: n=5103, 5.7%) and fatigue or loss of energy was the most frequently reported depressive symptom (survey: n=4472, 51.6%; Twitter: n=31,005, 34.9%) among both the survey and Twitter respondents. Young adult women and people living in federal districts with high COVID-19 infection rates were at an increased risk for depressive symptoms. The comparison of the survey and Twitter data before and after the first contact ban showed that German adolescents and adults had a significant decrease in feelings of fatigue and energy loss over time. The temporal progression of depressive symptoms showed high correspondence between both data sources (ρ=0.76-0.93; P<.001), except for diminished interest and depressed mood, which showed a steady increase even after the relaxation of the contact ban among the Twitter respondents but not among the survey respondents. ConclusionsOverall, the results indicate relatively small differences in depressive symptoms associated with social distancing measures during the COVID-19 pandemic and highlight the need to differentiate between positive (eg, energy level) and negative (eg, depressed mood) associations and variations over time. The results also underscore previous suggestions of Twitter data’s potential to help identify hot spots of declining and improving public mental health and thereby help provide early intervention measures, especially for young and middle-aged adults. Further efforts are needed to investigate the long-term consequences of recurring lockdown phases and to address the limitations of social media data such as Twitter data to establish real-time public mental surveillance approaches