GroupLens research shines at CSCW 2021

New research from the GroupLens research lab was presented at this year's ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW). This is the premier venue for research on computer-supported cooperative work and social computing.

In total, six papers and posters from CS&E faculty and students were shared during the virtual conference. One paper, Effective Strategies for Crowd-Powered Cognitive Reappraisal Systems: A Field Deployment of the Flip* Doubt Web Application for Mental Health, was awarded an honorable mention from the conference. Links to the video presentations are included below.

Honorable mention: Effective Strategies for Crowd-Powered Cognitive Reappraisal Systems: A Field Deployment of the Flip* Doubt Web Application for Mental Health

Authors: C Estelle Smith (Ph.D 2020), William Lane (M.S. 2021), Hannah Miller Hillberg (Ph.D. 2018), Daniel Kluver (Ph.D. 2018), Loren Terveen (professor), Svetlana Yarosh (associate professor)

Abstract: The post-college transition is a critical period where individuals experience unique challenges and stress before, during, and after graduation. Individuals often use social media to discuss and share information, advice, and support related to post-college challenges in online communities. These communities are important as they fill gaps in institutional support between college and post-college plans. We empirically study the challenges and stress expressed on social media around this transition as students graduate college and move into emerging adulthood. We assembled a dataset of about 299,000 Reddit posts between 2008 and 2020 about the post-college transition from 10 subreddits. We extracted top concerns, challenges, and conversation points using unsupervised Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). Then, we combined the results of LDA with binary transfer learning to identify stress expressions in the dataset (classifier performance at F1=0.94). Finally, we explore temporal patterns in stress expressions, and the variance of per-topic stress levels throughout the year. Our work highlights more deliberate and focused understanding of the post-college transition, as well as useful research and design impacts to study transient cohorts in need of support.

Detecting Expressive Writing in Online Health Communities by Modeling Aggregated Empirical Data

Authors: Haiwei Ma (Ph.D. student), Sunny Parawala (undergraduate research assistant), Svetlana Yarosh (associate professor)

Abstract: Although expressive writing has proved to be beneficial on physical, mental, and social health of individuals, it has been restrained to lab-based experimental studies. In the real world, individuals may naturally engage with expressive writing when dealing with difficult times, especially when facing a tough health journey. Health blogging may serve as an easy-to-access method for self-therapy, if spontaneous expressive writing occurs. However, many posts may not be expressive enough to provide the therapeutic power. In this study, we build a Gaussian naive Bayes model to detect expressive writing in an online health community, CaringBridge. Because we lack full text data as training data, we use a method to learn model parameters from meta-analysis of the literature. The classifier reaches reasonable accuracy on the test set annotated by the authors. We also explore factors that may influence users' spontaneous expressive writing. We find gender, health condition, author type, and privacy settings can affect individuals' spontaneous expressive writing. Finally, we reflect on our methodology and results and provide design implications for online health communities.

Learning to Ignore: A Case Study of Organization-Wide Bulk Email Effectiveness

Authors: Ruoyan Kong (Ph.D. student), Haiyi Zhu (adjunct assistant professor), Joseph A. Konstan (professor)

Abstract: Bulk email is a primary communication channel within organizations, with all-company messages and regular newsletters serving as a mechanism for making employees aware of policies, events, and other needed messages. Ineffective communication could result in substantial wasted employee time and lack of awareness or compliance. Previous studies on organizational emails focused mostly on recipients. However, organizational bulk email systems are a multi-stakeholder problem including recipients, communicators, and organization itself. Thus we study the effectiveness, experience, practice, and assessments of organizational bulk email systems from different stakeholders' perspectives. We conducted a quantitative study within a large organization to understand the extent to which the recipients retained the messages from the organizational bulk emails they received. We conducted a qualitative study with communicators and recipients within the organization. We delved into the bulk email distributing mechanisms of the communicators, the reading behaviors of recipients, and the bulk emails' values from communicators and recipients' points of view. We found that the recipients were not retaining most of the messages from the bulk emails though they opened a large number of them. The tools for designing and distributing organizational bulk email for communicators were very limited. The assessments on bulk emails' values and effectiveness were different between communicators and recipients. We discussed possible solutions that could improve organizational bulk emails' designing and distributing mechanisms.

"The Smartest Decision for My Future": Social Media Reveals Challenges and Stress During Post-College Life Transition

Authors: Crystal Gong, Koustuv Saha, Stevie Chancellor (assistant professor)

Sway Together, Stay Together: Visualizing Spiritual Support Networks Through the SoulGarden Prototype

Authors: Avleen Kaur (B.S. 2020), C. Estelle Smith (Ph.D. 2020), Loren Terveen (professor)

Abstract: Spiritual support is a fundamental yet understudied dimension of support exchange in Online Health Communities. Recent work suggested that visualization of spiritual support networks offers a promising design mechanism for helping patients and caregivers navigate life-threatening physical or mental illnesses. Therefore, through user-centered and community-situated inquiry, we designed and developed SoulGarden--an interface that helps users visualize their spiritual support network in order to reduce loneliness and increase a sense of community and belonging. Initial feedback from user tests suggests that our nature-based theme provides users with feelings of calm and comfort, and that seeing the faces and prayers of supporters adds a meaningful sensory component to online support exchange. Our evaluation also suggests three valuable design considerations for future support network visualizations.

What is Spiritual Support and How Might It Impact the Design of Online Communities?

Authors: C Estelle Smith (Ph.D. 2020), Avleen Kaur (B.S. 2020), Katie Z Gach, Loren Terveen (professor), Mary Jo Kreitzer, Susan O'Conner-Von

Abstract: Online technologies offer great promise to expand models of delivery for therapeutic interventions to help users cope with increasingly common mental illnesses like anxiety and depression. For example, "cognitive reappraisal" is a skill that involves changing one's perspective on negative thoughts in order to improve one's emotional state. In this work, we present Flip*Doubt, a novel crowd-powered web application that provides users with cognitive reappraisals ("reframes") of negative thoughts. A one-month field deployment of Flip*Doubt with 13 graduate students yielded a data set of negative thoughts paired with positive reframes, as well as rich interview data about how participants interacted with the system. Through this deployment, our work contributes: (1) an in-depth qualitative understanding of how participants used a crowd-powered cognitive reappraisal system in the wild; and (2) detailed codebooks that capture informative context about negative input thoughts and reframes. Our results surface data-derived hypotheses that may help to explain what types of reframes are helpful for users, while also providing guidance to future researchers and developers interested in building collaborative systems for mental health. In our discussion, we outline implications for systems research to leverage peer training and support, as well as opportunities to integrate AI/ML-based algorithms to support the cognitive reappraisal task. (Note: This paper includes potentially triggering mentions of mental health issues and suicide.)

GroupLens research shines at CSCW 2021

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