Can your phone improve your wellbeing?
Title: Can your phone improve your wellbeing? Ethical, human-centred design and evaluation of a music recommender system that incorporates user mood and personality
When: Thu, 18 May 2023 3:30 PM – 4:30 PM AEST
Speaker: Xanthe Lowe-Brow
Format: 30 minute presentation & 30 minute open discussion via Zoom
Suggested further reading supplied from Xanthe!
Ferwerda, B., & Schedl, M. (2014). Enhancing music recommender systems with personality information and emotional states: A proposal. Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Emotions and Personality in Personalized Sciences (EMPIRE), Denmark, 1-9.
Smith, W., Wadley, G., Webber, S., Tag, B., Kostakos, V., Koval, P., & Gross, J. J. (2022). Digital Emotion Regulation in Everyday Life. Proceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1-15. https://doi.org/10.1145/3491102.3517573
Wadley, G., Krause, A., Liang, J., Wang, Z., & Leong, T. W. (2019, December). Use of music streaming platforms for emotion regulation by international students. In Proceedings of the 31st Australian Conference on Human-Computer-Interaction (pp. 337-341).
Abstract
Background: Research has unveiled that the wellbeing outcomes of music listeners could be improved by enhancing music recommendations to account for their emotional needs by incorporating personality and emotional state information. Although a large body of work has investigated music and emotion regulation, the important step of translating these findings into ethical, practical outcomes to enrich the emotional wellbeing of music listeners by improving the music recommendation algorithms has yet to be taken.
Aims: Therefore, the aim of this research project is to enhance the wellbeing outcomes for music listeners by designing an ethical, human-centred personality and emotion-based music recommender system that facilitates emotion regulation to a desired emotion.
Methods: Study 1 will investigate the perceived ethical concerns and benefits of a proposed new feature for music streaming services that creates personality and emotion-based playlists to help users shift from their current emotion to their desired emotion. Study 2 will investigate the influence of emotional state and personality on music listening in everyday life by employing an Experienced Sampling Method (ESM). The results of Study 1 and 2 will inform Study 3, which will focus on designing an ethical, human centered, personality and emotion-aware Music Recommender System and empirically evaluating whether including personality and emotional state information in the MRS enhances the wellbeing of participants from pre to post-intervention compared to a control group. A crucial aspect of this study will be qualitatively evaluating participants’ views on the effectiveness and digital ethics of this MRS that collects their emotional state and personality information.
Results and conclusions: The findings of this PhD project will inform the creation of a Music Recommender System to evaluate its impact on the wellbeing of music listeners. Enhancing MRSs to recommend songs that regulate listeners’ emotional response may in turn have a positive impact on wellbeing for millions of music streamers.
About the speaker
Xanthe Lowe-Brown is a PhD student at the University of Melbourne, currently completing her doctoral thesis titled “Can your phone improve your wellbeing? Ethical, human-centered design and evaluation of a music recommender system that incorporates user mood and personality.” Working with an exceptional interdisciplinary supervisory team – Dr Greg Wadley, Dr Solange Glasser and Dr Peter Koval, Xanthe’s PhD project aims to enhance wellbeing outcomes for music listeners by improving the appropriateness of music recommendation algorithms to account for mood and personality. Xanthe has also been a volunteer research assistant for Dr Amanda Krause and Dr Melissa Forbes since 2019. Xanthe completed her Bachelor of Music (Honours) from the University of Melbourne in 2022, graduating with first class Honours. Xanthe aspires to pursue research in music psychology and make an impact by discovering more about how improving music recommendations can enhance our wellbeing.
HADES Seminar Series: Humanities in the Digital Age
From the Humanities and Diverse eResearch Scholars group (HADES), this series brings together a wide range of interdisciplinary research at the intersection of Humanities and digital scholarship. We will hear from speakers on topics ranging from digital ethics and machine learning through to architecture and literary studies, but always with a focus on the crucial role that the Humanities play in helping to explain and shape complex human experiences. The series aims to challenge and extend understandings of digital research in the Humanities and present new and emerging work by scholars working across and between disciplines.
Seminars will usually be held monthly on the third Thursday of every month at 3:30pm.
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