Empathic Responding for Digital Interpersonal Emotion Regulation via Content Recommendation

Interpersonal communication plays a key role in managing people's emotions, especially on digital platforms. Studies have shown that people use social media and consume online content to regulate their emotions and find support for rest and recovery. However, these platforms are not designed for emotion regulation, which limits their effectiveness in this regard. To address this issue, we propose an approach to enhance Interpersonal Emotion Regulation (IER) on online platforms through content recommendation. The objective is to empower users to regulate their emotions while actively or passively engaging in online platforms by crafting media content that aligns with IER strategies, particularly empathic responding. The proposed recommendation system is expected to blend system-initiated and user-initiated emotion regulation, paving the way for real-time IER practices on digital media platforms. To assess the efficacy of this approach, a mixed-method research design is used, including the analysis of text-based social media data and a user survey. Digital applications has served as facilitators in this process, given the widespread recognition of digital media applications for Digital Emotion Regulation (DER). The study collects 37.5K instances of user posts and interactions on Reddit over a year to design a Contextual Multi-Armed Bandits (CMAB) based recommendation system using features from user activity and preferences. The experimentation shows that the empathic recommendations generated by the proposed recommendation system are preferred by users over widely accepted ER strategies such as distraction and avoidance.

Digital Emotion Regulation on Social Media

Emotion regulation is the process of consciously altering one's affective state, that is the underlying emotional state such as happiness, confidence, guilt, anger etc. The ability to effectively regulate emotions is necessary for functioning efficiently in everyday life. Today, the pervasiveness of digital technology is being purposefully employed to modify our affective states, a process known as digital emotion regulation. Understanding digital emotion regulation can help support the rise of ethical technology design, development, and deployment. This article presents an overview of digital emotion regulation in social media applications, as well as a synthesis of recent research on emotion regulation interventions for social media. We share our findings from analysing state-of-the-art literature on how different social media applications are utilised at different stages in the process of emotion regulation.

Data-driven behavioural biometrics for continuous and adaptive user verification using Smartphone and Smartwatch

Recent studies have shown how motion-based biometrics can be used as a form of user authentication and identification without requiring any human cooperation. This category of behavioural biometrics deals with the features we learn in our life as a result of our interaction with the environment and nature. This modality is related to change in human behaviour over time. The developments in these methods aim to amplify continuous authentication such as biometrics to protect their privacy on user devices. Various Continuous Authentication (CA) systems have been proposed in the literature. They represent a new generation of security mechanisms that continuously monitor user behaviour and use this as the basis to re-authenticate them periodically throughout a login session. However, these methods usually constitute a single classification model which is used to identify or verify a user. This work proposes an algorithm to blend behavioural biometrics with multi-factor authentication (MFA) by introducing a two-step user verification algorithm that verifies the user's identity using motion-based biometrics and complements the multi-factor authentication, thus making it more secure and flexible. This two-step user verification algorithm is also immune to adversarial attacks, based on our experimental results which show how the rate of misclassification drops while using this model with adversarial data.