The irrationality of the catharsis theory of aggression as justification for educators' support of interscholastic football

Experiences of a Speech-Enabled Conversational Agent for the Self-Report of Wellbeing Among People Living with Affective Disorders: An In-The-Wild Study

The growing commercial success of smart speaker devices following recent advancements in speech recognition technology has surfaced new opportunities for collecting self-reported health and wellbeing data. Speech-enabled conversational agents (CAs) in particular, deployed in home environments using just such systems, may offer increasingly intuitive and engaging means of self-report. To date, however, few real-world studies have examined users’ experiences of engaging in the self-report of mental health using such devices, nor the challenges of deploying these systems in the home context. With these aims in mind, this paper recounts findings from a four-week ‘in-the-wild’ study during which 20 individuals with depression or bipolar disorder used a speech-enabled CA named ‘Sofia’ to maintain a daily diary log, responding also to the WHO-5 wellbeing scale every two weeks. Thematic analysis of post-study interviews highlights actions taken by participants to overcome CAs’ limitations, diverse personifications of a speech-enabled agent, and unique forms of valuing of this system among users’ personal and social circles. These findings serve as initial evidence for the potential of CAs to support the self-report of mental health and wellbeing, while highlighting the need to address outstanding technical limitations in addition to design challenges of conversational pattern matching, filling unmet interpersonal gaps, and the use of self-report CAs in the at-home social context. Based on these insights, we discuss implications for the future design of CAs to support the self-report of mental health and wellbeing.

Sport and delinquency: an examination of the deterrence hypothesis in a longitudinal study

OBJECTIVE

To determine whether involvement in sporting activity in mid-adolescence would deter delinquent behaviour in late adolescence.

METHODS

Members of a longitudinal cohort study were interviewed at ages 15 and 18 years and, among other topics, were asked questions relating to involvement in physical activity and delinquent behaviour. Logistic regression models were used to examine the relation between sports involvement and delinquency at age 15 years and delinquency at age 18.

RESULTS

After controlling for delinquent behaviour and psychosocial factors at age 15, females with moderate or high levels of sporting activity, and males with high levels of sporting activity, were significantly more likely to be delinquent at age 18 years than those with low levels of sporting activity. No significant association was found between sporting activity and aggressive behaviour, team sport participation and delinquency, and team sport participation and aggressive behaviour.

CONCLUSIONS

This study did not support the deterrence hypothesis and showed that high involvement in sporting activity, but not team sport, was associated with a subsequent increase in delinquent behaviour.