Stress-Coping Tweets Acquisition: A Two-phase Bootstrapping Method on Patterns and Semantic Features

Stress is integral to biological survival. However, without an appropriate coping response, high stress levels and long-term stressful situations may lead to negative mental health outcomes. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, remote assessment of mental health has become imperative. The majority of past studies focused on detecting users' stress levels rather than coping responses using social media. Because of the diversity of human expression and because people do not usually express stress and the corresponding coping response simultaneously, it is challenging to extract users' tweets about their coping responses to stressful events from their daily tweets. Consequently, there are two goals being pursued in this study: to anchor users' stress statuses and to detect their stress responses based on the existing stressful conditions. In order to accomplish these goals, we propose a framework that consists of two phases: the construction of stress dataset and the extraction of coping responses. Since the stressed users' data are lacking, the first phase is to construct a stress dataset based on stress-related hashtags, personal pronouns, and emotion recognition. In addition, to ensure the collection of enough tweets to observe the coping responses of stressed users, we broadened the survey's scope by collecting all tweets from the same user. In the second phase, stress-coping tweets were extracted by utilizing bootstrapping-based patterns and semantic features. The bootstrapping method was used to enrich word patterns for text expression and the semantic feature to assess the meaning of sentences. The collected data included the tweets of the stressed users identified in Phase 1 and the various coping responses from Phase 2 can contribute to developing a tool for the remote assessment of mental health. The experimental results show that our two-phase method outperforms the baseline and can help improve the efficiency of extracting stress-coping tweets. © 2022 IEEE.

Heart Rate Variability of Healthcare Workers during Covid-19

The outbreak of Covid-19 has exacerbated the mental health of Healthcare Workers (HCWs), caused by an increase in their stress levels owing to an exponential rise in their workloads. Previous works have revealed visible changes in Heart Rate Variability (HRV), in response to increased/decreased stress levels. This study focused on analyzing HRV as a parameter to observe the impact of higher stress levels, on clinicians, due to the pandemic. Their responses to a Perceived Stress Score (PSS) questionnaire were used as a reference to determine their escalated stress levels. The responses showed that 40% of clinicians revealed increased levels of high chronic stress while the remaining were affected by moderate chronic stress. We computed HRV for each clinician from HR data obtained using a chest-based wearable device during sleep and ward sessions. Through detailed analysis of HRV, we observed clinicians with high chronic stress showed lower HRV when compared to clinicians with moderate chronic stress during both sleep and ward sessions. Later we did a close investigation of their HRV on Day 1 and Day 2 in Covid-IP (Inpatient) and compared the HRV features. Finally, we compared the HRV features of clinicians between Covid-IP Covid-OP (Outpatient) ward sessions. The above study validated that HRV is a reliable parameter for an objective assessment of stress levels. © 2022 IEEE.

Is There a Relationship Between Pilot Stress and Short- and Long- Haul Flights?

Past studies have been conducted to identify whether short-haul (SH) or long-haul (LH) pilots experience a higher level of stress during a single flight. An extensive literature review revealed high stress levels in both groups (i.e., LH pilots were more stressed than SH pilots, and vice versa). To investigate these mixed results, quantitative and qualitative survey data were collected from 49 international commercial airline pilots from various countries in the Asia-Pacific, Europe and in North America. The General Health Questionnaire–12 (GHQ-12) was used to measure the stress levels of pilots during the pandemic. The study found that there was no significant difference between the stress levels of SH pilots compared to the stress levels of medium-, long-, and ultra long-haul pilots. To further investigate stress levels, pilots’ qualitative responses indicated that 75.5% of pilots were impacted by factors related to the COVID-19 pandemic, including increased stress associated with the uncertain future of the aviation industry, and income instability. In summary, this study aims to raise the attention of industry stakeholders such as aviation authorities and airlines of the need for targeted initiatives to support pilots who are most vulnerable to high-stress levelsas. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Team Lavender Supports Healthcare Workers: "Our Spiritual, Emotional and Mental Health Matters".

Team Lavender, a coordinated response team addresses the spiritual, emotional, and psychological needs of healthcare workers following adverse events and accumulated stress, including Covid-19. Proven to be a valuable peer-to-peer support team in reducing stress levels. Team Lavender is modeled from Code Lavender in the United States. This article addresses the background to justify the need of Team Lavender, its' significance in a regional acute care setting, and justification for implementing Team Lavender.