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Online mental health support communities have grown in recent years for providing accessible mental and emotional health support through volunteer counselors. Despite millions of people participating in chat support on these platforms, the…
AI companion chatbots are increasingly used for emotional support, with prior work in the domain predominantly documenting their mixed psychosocial impacts, including both increased emotional expression and heightened loneliness. However,…
Online health communities offer the promise of support benefits to users, in particular because these communities enable users to find peers with similar experiences. Building mutually supportive connections between peers is a key…
A growing number of people engage in online health forums, making it important to understand the quality of the advice they receive. In this paper, we explore the role of expertise in responses provided to help-seeking posts regarding…
Mental illness is a global health problem, but access to mental healthcare resources remain poor worldwide. Online peer-to-peer support platforms attempt to alleviate this fundamental gap by enabling those who struggle with mental illness…
Platforms like Reddit and Twitter offer internet users an opportunity to talk about diverse issues, including those pertaining to physical and mental health. Some of these forums also function as a safe space for severely distressed mental…
When faced with complex and uncertain medical conditions (e.g., cancer, mental health conditions, recovery from substance dependency), millions of patients seek online peer support. In this study, we leverage content analysis of online…
Providing mental health support for loved ones across a geographic distance creates unique challenges for the remote caregivers, who sometimes turn to online communities for peer support. We qualitatively analyzed 522 Reddit threads to…
Empathy is critical to successful mental health support. Empathy measurement has predominantly occurred in synchronous, face-to-face settings, and may not translate to asynchronous, text-based contexts. Because millions of people use…
Peer support plays a vital role in expanding access to mental health care by providing empathetic, community-based support outside formal clinical systems. As digital platforms increasingly mediate such support, the design and impact of…
Social support in online mental health communities (OMHCs) is an effective and accessible way of managing mental wellbeing. In this process, sharing emotional supports is considered crucial to the thriving social supports in OMHCs, yet…
Millions of people participate in online peer-to-peer support sessions, yet there has been little prior research on systematic psychology-based evaluations of fine-grained peer-counselor behavior in relation to client satisfaction. This…
This study explores the relationship between informational support seeking questions, responses, and helpfulness ratings in online health communities. We created a labeled data set of question-response pairs and developed multimodal machine…
Internet and online-based social systems are rising as the dominant mode of communication in society. However, the public or semi-private environment under which most online communications operate under do not make them suitable channels…
Prior research on young adults' mental health help-seeking mostly focuses on one particular resource such as a mobile app or digital platform, paying less attention to their lived experiences interacting with the ecosystem of resources. We…
In this paper, we present an approach for predicting trust links between peers in social media, one that is grounded in the artificial intelligence area of multiagent trust modeling. In particular, we propose a data-driven multi-faceted…
Mental health is a growing global concern, prompting interest in AI-driven solutions to expand access to psychosocial support. \emph{Peer support}, grounded in lived experience, offers a valuable complement to professional care. However,…
The integration of AI-driven support systems within online communities has opened new avenues for enhancing user engagement and support efficiency in recent years. This study investigates the differences in user interactions and engagement…
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for emotional support and mental health-related interactions outside clinical settings, yet little is known about how people evaluate and relate to these systems in everyday use. We analyze…
A central challenge in affective computing is determining appropriate empathy levels for different interaction contexts. Prior work has characterized two poles: task-focused interactions, where empathy demand is near zero, and emotional…