This area examines a connection between mental health and communication in social media and other technologies.
Many people go online for information and support on mental health concerns. Led by the recent PhD graduate Kaylee Kruzan, this project explores how a population that is usually difficult to engage in treatment (individuals who self-injure) exchanges information and support on self-injury through Talklife, an online peer-to-peer support application. This application, developed by clinicians and researchers, allows users to safely share their experiences with different things such as depression, anxiety, and self-harm, and receive support from the community. In this project we aim to (1) describe behavioral and linguistic patterns of users, (2) explore peer support patterns to assess the interaction between solicitation and response, and (3) we examine the relationship between online behaviors and self-injury over the course of two months.
In another project, we examined how to help people with anxiety and non-suicidal self-injury better manage their well-being. Virtual reality (VR) technology has a lot of potential to be useful in a variety of different communication and health contexts, from raising awareness about environmental issues, to assisting with perspective-taking, to helping people with PTSD. But there’s still a lot that’s not understood about how we respond to being transported into these virtual environments, especially around how we sense our bodies when we can’t actually see them. This study, done in collaboration with the Virtual Embodiment Lab, tests a few different methods to help people manage anxiety by transforming their bodies and their environments in VR (to be presented at CHI’2020).
Kruzan, K., Whitlock, J., Bazarova, N.N., Miller, K., Chapman, J., & Won, A.S. (2020) Supporting self-injury recovery: The potential for virtual reality intervention. Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors and Computing Systems. ACM.
Chang, P. F., Bazarova, N. N., & Whitlock, J.L (2016). To respond or not to respond, that is the question: The decision making process of providing social support do distressed posters. Presented at the 2016 Society for Research on Adolescents Biennial Meeting, March 31-April 2, 2016, Baltimore, MD.