Search

The global pandemic and the uncertainty if and when life will return to normality have motivated a series of studies on human mental health. This research has elicited evidence for increasing numbers of anxiety, depression, and overall impaired mental well-being. But, the global COVID-19 pandemic has also created new opportunities for research into quantifying human emotions: remotely, contactless, in everyday life. The ubiquitous computing community has long been at the forefront of developing, testing, and building user-facing systems that aim at quantifying human emotion. However, rather than aiming at more accurate sensing algorithms, it is time to critically evaluate whether it is actually possible and in what ways it could be beneficial for technologies to be able to detect user emotions. In this workshop, we bring together experts from the fields of Ubiquitous Computing, Human-Computer Interaction, and Psychology to - long-overdue - merge their expertise and ask the fundamental questions: how do we make sense of emotion-sensing, can and should we quantify human emotions?

Research increasingly shows that technology can improve access to mental health interventions. However, unaccompanied migrant youth (UMY) still struggle in accessing appropriate mental health resources in spite of their high need for mental health support. Through co-design workshops, and using the lens of the social-ecological model of resilience, we explored the social-ecological factors that support or hinder UMY’s use of mental health apps as resources. We identified the strong influence of the macro-system (i.e. resettlement policies) on the bio-and micro-systems, which in turn limits participants’ abilities to use the apps. Our findings highlight the factors specific to each social-ecological system—including personal experiences, technological infrastructure and social environment—that need to be accounted for when designing technological mental health resources for UMY. This contributes: a rich description of the interplay of mental health apps with social-ecological systems in which UMY are embedded; and the corresponding design considerations.

This virtual workshop will bring together practitioners and researchers from the fields of HCI and the learning sciences to discuss the challenges associated with the evaluation of emerging educational technologies in the classroom. In alignment with the conference's "designing for the future" theme, the aim of this workshop is to stimulate a discussion with the educational technology research community around the best practices and challenges of evaluation of such emerging educational technologies in the classroom as well as the challenges associated with moving beyond targeting numeracy and literacy to aim for the development of 21st century skills.

Beyond being the world's largest social network, Facebook is for many also one of its greatest sources of digital distraction. For students, problematic use has been associated with negative effects on academic achievement and general wellbeing. To understand what strategies could help users regain control, we investigated how simple interventions to the Facebook UI affect behaviour and perceived control. We assigned 58 university students to one of three interventions: goal reminders, removed newsfeed, or white background (control). We logged use for 6 weeks, applied interventions in the middle weeks, and administered fortnightly surveys. Both goal reminders and removed newsfeed helped participants stay on task and avoid distraction. However, goal reminders were often annoying, and removing the newsfeed made some fear missing out on information. Our findings point to future interventions such as controls for adjusting types and amount of available information, and flexible blocking which matches individual definitions of 'distraction'., Comment: 10 pages (excluding references), 6 figures. To appear in the Proceedings of CHI '20 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, April 25--30, 2020, Honolulu, HI, USA

The ability to constructively resolve interpersonal conflicts is a crucial set of social skills people need to effectively work and live well together. Is it possible to design social robots to support the early development of children’s interpersonal conflict resolution skills? To investigate this question, 64 (32 pairs of) children ages 3-6 years engaged in a 50-minute play session consisting of 5 activities facilitated by the robot Keepon. Children were randomly assigned to 1 of 2 conditions. In the mediation condition, Keepon directed the play session flow by indicating when and which activity to switch to, and whenever possible, signaled the onset of object possession conflicts that occurred between the pair and offered prompts for constructive conflict resolution. In the control condition, Keepon only facilitated and directed the play session and did not intervene during children’s conflicts. Results show that children were more likely to resolve conflicts constructively in the mediation condition than in the control condition, and that a key function for a robot mediator within the conflict process is to successfully flag the conflict onset. Drawing from these findings, we discuss design recommendation for a robot mediator.

Designing for reflection is becoming an increasingly important part of many HCI systems in a wide range of application domains. However, there is a gap in our understanding of how the process of reflection can be supported through technology. In fact, an implicit assumption in the majority of existing work is that, just by providing access to well-selected data, in-depth reflection can and will occur. To counter this view, we draw on Schön's notion of reflective practicum and apply it as a sensitising concept to identify the complex interplay of factors that support transformative reflection in the context of two social-emotional learning (SEL) studies. The results highlight the need to carefully scaffold the process of reflection, rather than simply assume that the capability to reflect is a broadly available trait to be 'triggered' through data. Building on this analysis, we develop a conceptual framework that extends the concept of the reflective practicum towards identifying appropriate roles of technology to support transformative reflection. While our case is within the context of SEL, we argue that a deeper understanding of these opportunities can also benefit designing for reflection in other areas.

The development of strong social and emotional skills is central to personal wellbeing. Increasingly, these skills are being taught in schools through well researched curricula. Such social-emotional learning (SEL) curricula are most effective if reinforced by parents, thus transferring the skills into everyday contexts. Traditional SEL programs have however had limited success in engaging parents, and we argue that technology might be able to help bridge this school-home divide. Through interviews with SEL experts we identified central design considerations for technology and SEL content: the reliance on experiential learning and the need to scaffold the parents in scaffolding the interaction for their children. This informed the design of a technology probe comprising a magnet card and online SEL activities, deployed in a school and via Mturk. The results provide a nuanced understanding of how technology-based interventions could bridge the school-home gap in real-world settings and support at-home reinforcement of children's social-emotional skills.

Positive social and emotional wellbeing are essential for peoples' general health and quality of life. This workshop will bring together an inter-disciplinary community of wellbeing researchers, designers and practitioners to explore how digital technology can increase wellbeing by enabling users to develop new skills, build on existing personal strengths or social support, and promote self-efficacy more generally. We will jointly reach a better understanding of the opportunities that technology can bring for skills development across a broad range of contexts. Our aim is to consider how digital technology can support wellbeing skills for the general public and also for specific, at-need groups including the care givers of people coping with irreversible loss of mental or physical capacity and psycho-education for people experiencing mental health difficulties.

Social and emotional skills are crucial for all aspects of our everyday life. However, understanding how digital technology can facilitate the development and learning of such skills is yet an under-researched area in HCI. To start addressing this gap, this paper reports on a series of interviews and design workshops with the leading researchers and developers of 'Social and Emotional Learning' (SEL) curricula. SEL is a subfield of educational psychology with a long history of teaching such skills, and a range of evidence based curricula that are widely deployed in primary and secondary schools. We identify the shared challenges across existing curricula that digital technology might help address: the support for out-of-session learning, scaffolding for parental engagement, and feedback for the curricula developers. We argue how this presents an opportunity for mutually beneficial collaborations, with the potential for significant real-world impact of novel HCI systems, and can inform HCI work on supporting social and emotional skills development in other domains.

Well-developed interpersonal skills are crucial for all social interactions. However, understanding how interpersonal skills are taught or learned, and how technology can play a part in this, is yet an under-researched area in CSCW and HCI research. To start addressing this gap, our research explores the learning processes of counselling students, for whom developing interpersonal skills forms a fundamental part of their university education. We followed an iterative process to gain an in-depth understanding of a specific counselling program in the UK, combining interviews and low-fidelity technology prompts. Overall, 26 participants comprising tutors, students and expert counsellors took part. Our findings first provide insights into the highly collaborative and social learning process of the students. We highlight the complexity of interpersonal reflection as a crucial process for developing counselling skills, and identify the challenges to learning that students face. Second, we build on this understanding to draw out empirically grounded design considerations around opportunities for technology innovation in this setting.

Detecting interpersonal and emotional aspects of behaviour is a growing area of research within HCI. However, this work primarily processes data from individuals, rather than drawing on the dynamics of an interaction between people. Literature in social psychology and neuroscience suggests that the synchronisation of peoples' biosignals, in particular skin conductance (EDA), can be indicative of complex interpersonal aspects such as empathy. This paper reports on an exploratory, mixed methods study to test the potential of EDA synchronisation to indicate qualities of interpersonal interaction in real-world relationships and contexts. We show that EDA synchrony can be indicate meaningful social aspects in everyday settings, linking it to the mutual emotional engagement of those interacting. This connects to earlier work on empathy in psychotherapy, and suggests new interpretations of EDA sychronisation in other social contexts. We then outline how these findings open opportunities for novel HCI and ubicomp applications, supporting training of social skills such as empathy for doctors, and more generally to explore shared experiences such as multiplayer games.

Detecting and supporting interpersonal and emotional aspects of behaviour is a growing area of research within HCI. However, most of this work is still based primarily on single persons' data, and there is little research on supporting complex interpersonal aspects such as empathy. To address this gap, the goal of my PhD work is to explore ways in which technology can facilitate learning and teaching of situational empathy, with particular focus on counselling students.

Previous work has shown that supporting trust via computer-mediated communication can be a challenge, especially among strangers. In this paper, we report on an experiment comparing two group-to-group video-conferencing environments and face-to-face communication in their ability to support trust and mutual cooperation in a social dilemma task. There are pronounced differences in participant behaviour between the two video-conferencing designs, indicating higher mutual trust in one of the video-conferencing conditions. The decisive factor seems to be a discrepancy in the type of group identity that develops during the game. Moreover, our results suggest that a combination of personal displays and a unique video-stream of each participant present in the better video-conferencing condition contributed to this result.

In this paper we describe a quantitative study of a group-to-group videoconferencing environment called GColl that provides a compromise between the need for preserving non-verbal cues and the requirements of low-cost and flexibility. We have compared the task process and outcome of participants interacting over an environment analogous to common commodity solutions, those using face-to-face communication, and groups communicating over GColl. Our results demonstrate that it is possible to design a group-to-group collaboration environment with modest technical requirements and low overall cost that still shows measurable advantages over the common environment in its ability to support trust in social dilemma games.