Speaker: Professor Xin Li City University of Hong Kong

Time: 23 November 2021 (Tuesday) 15:00-16:30 pm

Tencent Conference Number: [875 521 189

Brief description of the report.

Online health communities (OHCs) play an important role in enabling patients to exchange information and obtain social support from each other. However, do OHC interactions always benefit patients? In this research, we investigate different mechanisms by which the sentiment of OHC content may affect patients’ moods. Specifically, we notice users can read not only emotional support intended to help them, but also emotional support targeting other persons or posts unintended to generate any emotional support (named auxiliary content). Drawing from emotional contagion theories, we argue even though emotional support may benefit targeted support seekers, it could have a negative impact on the moods of other patients. Our empirical study on an OHC for depression patients supports these arguments. Our findings are new to the literature and critical to practice since they suggest that we should carefully manage OHC-based interventions for depression patients. In the follow-up analysis, we show the possibilities to alter the intervention volume, length, and frequency to tackle the challenge of the negative effect. In the study, we design a novel deep learning model to differentiate emotional support from auxiliary content. We show this differentiation is critical for identifying the negative effect of emotional support on unintended recipients.

About the Rapporteur:

Xin Li is a Professor in the Department of Information Systems at the City University of Hong Kong. He received his PhD in Management Information Systems from the University of Arizona and his BSc and MSc in Automation from Tsinghua University. His research interests include digital economy, healthcare, data science/machine learning, social networks and applied econometrics. Professor Xin Li's work has been published in MISQ, ISR, JMIS, INFORMS JOC, DSS, I&M, JASIST, IEEE/ACM Transactions, Nature Nanotechnology and other journals. He is a senior member of IEEE and ACM, and a member of INFORMS and AIS.

(Organised by: Department of Management Engineering, Centre for Research and Scholarly Communication)