论文标题
活动爆发：在线心理健康论坛中寻求帮助和支持的时间模式
Bursts of Activity: Temporal Patterns of Help-Seeking and Support in Online Mental Health Forums
论文作者
论文摘要
近年来，社交媒体平台的增加，为患有精神困扰的人提供点对点支持。这些平台的影响的研究集中在单个螺纹的短期尺度上，或在任意时间（几个月或几年）中长期变化。尽管重要的是，这种任意时期并不一定会跟随用户的进度到急性困扰时期。使用Talklife的数据，一个心理健康平台，我们发现用户活动遵循高活动期的独特模式，没有活动的交织期，并提出了一种识别此类爆发和活动中断的方法。然后，我们展示在爆发期间学习活动如何为在线心理健康社区中的一个关键问题提供个性化的中期分析：用户活动的哪些特征使某些用户找到支持和帮助，而另一些用户则不足？使用两个独立的结果指标，认知变化的时刻和在活动爆发过程中情绪变化的时刻，我们确定了两个可操作的功能，可以改善用户的结果：持续爆发，并为他人提供复杂的情感支持。我们的结果表明，将爆发视为在线精神卫生社区的社会心理变化的自然分析单位的价值。
Recent years have seen a rise in social media platforms that provide peer-to-peer support to individuals suffering from mental distress. Studies on the impact of these platforms have focused on either short-term scales of single-post threads, or long-term changes over arbitrary period of time (months or years). While important, such arbitrary periods do not necessarily follow users' progressions through acute periods of distress. Using data from Talklife, a mental health platform, we find that user activity follows a distinct pattern of high activity periods with interleaving periods of no activity, and propose a method for identifying such bursts and breaks in activity. We then show how studying activity during bursts can provide a personalized, medium-term analysis for a key question in online mental health communities: What characteristics of user activity lead some users to find support and help, while others fall short? Using two independent outcome metrics, moments of cognitive change and self-reported changes in mood during a burst of activity, we identify two actionable features that can improve outcomes for users: persistence within bursts, and giving complex emotional support to others. Our results demonstrate the value of considering bursts as a natural unit of analysis for psychosocial change in online mental health communities.
