Depression is a complex disorder for which there is growing interest in identifying objective behavioral markers that measure precise symptoms, such as anhedonia and blunted emotional reactivity. This study explores the feasibility of using smile and smirk expression dynamics, captured through our novel stimulus-based mobile affective probe, as candidate digital biomarkers of depression severity within a large-scale mobile health intervention trial, BeWell. Data from 684 BeWell participants (2,702 observations) are analyzed longitudinally for 16 weeks, comparing their PHQ-8 survey scores with their facial responses to short videos intended to elicit smiles. Mixed-effects models reveal that higher maximum Duchenne smile intensity in reaction to liked stimuli is associated with lower depression scores over time at both within- and between-person levels. We additionally share insights from our tool, including ease of use, perceptions of the stimulus, and technical challenges, which offer considerations for the future development of stimulus-based affect probes in real-world settings.

As concerns about employee burnout and skilled staff shortages in cybersecurity grow, our study aims to better understand the contributing factors to burnout in this field. Utilizing a mixed-methods approach, we analyze self-reported job and personal characteristics, along with digital activity data from 35 incident responders, identifying several factors such as high workload, time pressure, and lack of support from management. Our findings reveal that over half of the participants experience burnout (N=19), which is linked to increased workload, limited control, poor teamwork, and inadequate recognition. Burned-out responders often work more than 40 hours per week, have poor sleep quality, and engage in more email activities, meetings, and after-hour collaborations. Through our research, we also identify coping strategies individuals use to mitigate these stressors. Based on our findings, we provide practical recommendations to help organizations better support their cybersecurity incident response teams. While our study acknowledges limitations and suggests future research directions, it contributes significantly to understanding the challenges faced by cybersecurity incident responders. Our insights offer a comprehensive understanding of burnout factors in this domain and have broader implications for other high-stress work environments consistent with the interdisciplinary nature of CSCW.

How does empathy influence creative problem solving? We introduce a computational empathy intervention based on context-specific affective mimicry and perspective taking by a virtual agent appearing in the form of a well-dressed polar bear. In an online experiment with 1,006 participants randomly assigned to an emotion elicitation intervention (with a control elicitation condition and anger elicitation condition) and a computational empathy intervention (with control virtual agent and an empathic virtual agent), we examine how anger and empathy influence participants' performance in solving a word game based on Wordle. We find participants who are assigned to the anger elicitation condition perform significantly worse on multiple performance metrics than participants assigned to the control condition. However, we find the empathic virtual agent counteracts the drop in performance induced by the anger condition such that participants assigned to both the empathic virtual agent and the anger condition perform no differently than participants in the control elicitation condition and significantly better than participants assigned to the control virtual agent and the anger elicitation condition. While empathy reduces the negative effects of anger, we do not find evidence that the empathic virtual agent influences performance of participants who are assigned to the control elicitation condition. By introducing a framework for computational empathy interventions and conducting a two-by-two factorial design randomized experiment, we provide rigorous, empirical evidence that computational empathy can counteract the negative effects of anger on creative problem solving.

This work introduces The Guardians: Unite the Realms, a novel free-to-play and publicly released mobile game that encourages the adoption of healthy real-world behaviours in exchange for rewards that enrich the gaming experience. We describe the game, its grounding in a mental health therapy known as behavioural activation, and how we designed it to keep players engaged over time. Instead of using traditional digital health gamification techniques such as badges or leaderboards, The Guardians creates a motivational pull by embedding the therapy into a complete mobile game. In-game items earned via the therapy have an immediate purpose in the game and, thus, they are considered intrinsically valuable by players. Analysis of game interaction data from 7,782 real-world users suggests 15-day and 30-day retention rates of 10.0% and 6.6%, respectively, which is more than double the average retention levels of most digital mental health interventions. Furthermore, players reported completion of a healthy real-world task on 69.0% of days played (37,574 completed tasks in 54,461 total days). We also report interaction metrics with game features and the effectiveness of the players' chosen real-world activities.