As people around the world are spending increasing amounts of time online, the question of how online experiences are linked to health and well-being is essential. This paper presents how activities on Facebook are associated with the depressive states of users. Based on online logs of 212 young adults, we show not only the sheer size of the network but also the frequency and diversity of interactions on social networks have close associations with depression. Depressed individuals reported smaller involved networks regarding comments and likes, the two popular forms of interactions. In contrast to the decreased level of interactions, depressed individuals showed an increase in the wall post rates and were active online during midday, which can be interpreted as an endemic behavior linked to the perceived degree of loneliness among young adults who are avid users of social media. We discuss these findings from theoretical, empirical, and subjective perspectives.
With the increasingly frequent appearance of mobile phones in college classrooms, there have been growing concerns regarding their negative aspects including distractive off-task multitasking. In this work, we design and evaluate Let’s FOCUS, a software-based intervention service that assists college students in self-regulating their mobile phone use in classrooms. Our preliminary survey study (with 47 professors and 283 students) reveals that it is critical to encourage voluntary participation by framing intervention as a learning tool and to raise awareness regarding appropriate mobile phone usage by establishing social norms in colleges. Let’s FOCUS introduces a virtual limiting space for each class (or a virtual classroom) where the students can explicitly restrict their mobile phone use voluntarily. Furthermore, it promotes students’ willing participation by leveraging social facilitation and context-aware reminders associated with virtual classrooms. We conducted a campus-wide campaign for approximately six weeks to evaluate the feasibility of the proposed approach. The results confirm that 379 students used the app to limit 9,335 hours of mobile phone usage over 233 classrooms. Let’s FOCUS was used in diverse learning contexts and for different purposes and its social learning and context-awareness features significantly motivated prolonged participation. We present the design considerations of software-based intervention.
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