The diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease (AD) is stressful for both patients and their family caregivers (FCG). As the disease progresses, the patient's memory, functioning status, and behavioral problems get worse, and the needs of the patient that must be addressed by family caregivers increase dramatically. This research examines the impact of the subjective burden with the objective stressors on FCG's depression and to determines which psychosocial resources can be used to either mediate or moderate this relationship. I examine the baseline data that was collected from 670 family caregivers of Alzheimer's patients in the Resources for Enhancing Alzheimer's Caregiver Health (REACH) II clinical trial (REACH II), 2001-2004. The measurements used in the current study are caregivers' background and context factors, objective stressors, subjective burden, psychosocial resources, and symptoms of depression. Three research questions will be investigated in this study: (1) How do the caregivers' background and context factors affect FCGs experiences of objective stressors and subjective burden during the caregiving process? (2) What is the relationship between the objective stressors and subjective burdens, and what impact, if any, do they have on FCGs'depressive symptoms? (3) How do psychosocial resources mediate and or moderate the relationship between the primary stressors and FCGs'depression experiences? / Master of Science / The diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is stressful for both patients and their family caregivers (FCG). In 2018, an estimated 5.7 million Americans have been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease (Alzheimer’s Association 2018). As the disease progresses, the patient’s memory, functioning status, and behavioral problems get worse, and the needs of the patient that must be addressed by family caregivers increase dramatically. As Aneshensel, Carol S., Leonard I. Pearlin, Joseph T. Mullan, Steven H. Zarit, and Carol J. Whitlatch (1995) noted in their book Profiles in Caregiving: The Unexpected Career, the role of caregiving is generally an ‘unexpected job’ for FCGs (Aneshensel et al. 1995). Based on Pearlin’s stress process model (SPM), the primary goal of my thesis is to compare the impact of the subjective burden of caregiving with that of objective stressors on FCG’s depression, and to determine whether psychosocial resources can either mediate or moderate this relationship. Objective stressors refer to the AD patient’s memory and behavior problems, his or her cognitive impairment, self-care activities, and functional status. Subjective burden is the FCG’s emotional response to objective stressors. Objective stressors and subjective burden are associated with each other, and they are primary stressors in the SPM. Psychosocial resources include FCG’s religious coping, their positive experiences of caregiving, their social networks and whether they were satisfied with social support that they received from others. The present study is important for two reasons. First, rather than focusing on subjective burden alone, the model examined how objective stressors (i.e. burden) influence mental health through their impact on subjective burden. Second, previous influential studies of the stressors of caregiving either did not include the moderating effects of psychosocial resources (Pearlin et al., 1999), or included a limited number of resources and found that they did not play a significant role in how caregiving stress influences caregivers mental health (Aneshensel et al. 1995). In my thesis, I will explore both of the mediating and moderating effects of four types of psychosocial resources. I examine the baseline data that was collected from 670 family caregivers of Alzheimer’s patients from the Resources for Enhancing Alzheimer’s Caregiver Health (REACH) II clinical trial (REACH II), 2001–2004 (Schulz, Burgio, and Stevens 2006). The study participants target on FCGs who are vulnerable to the caregiving stressors. The purpose of the baseline data was to describe the AD patients’ cognitive impairment and behavior problems at the initial stage of the REACH II study, the demands caused by the impairments imposed upon FCGs, the psychosocial resources adopted by FCGs to relieve the caregiving stress, and the consequences of the primary stressors on FCGs’ daily lives. I will explore three research questions in the current study: (1) How do the caregivers’ background and context factors affect FCGs experiences of objective stressors and subjective burden during the caregiving process? (2) What is the relationship between the objective stressors and subjective burdens, and what impact, if any, do they have on FCGs’ depressive symptoms? (3) How do psychosocial resources mediate or moderate the relationship between the primary stressors and FCGs’ depression experiences? The measurements used in the current study are caregivers’ background and context factors, objective stressors, subjective burden, psychosocial resources, and symptoms of depression. Data analysis is primarily based on multiple linear regression. I will also use the post-hoc probing methods to specifically test the significance of the moderating test. There are four key findings in the present study. First, caregivers’ background and context factors have some significant associations with objective stressors and subjective burden, but overall, their impact is minimal. Second, subjective burden has a stronger impact on depressive symptoms than all of the objective stressors do. Third, subjective burden undermines all four psychosocial resources tested in the current study. Fourth, the mediating and moderating effects of psychosocial resources have a negligible impact in the caregiving stress process. Surprisingly, the effect of subjective burden on depressive symptoms among FCGs remained largely unchanged after all psychosocial resources were included in the model as mediators and moderators. In the mediational test, the effects of subjective burden on depression decreased by only 14 percent after all psychosocial resources were taken into account. Likewise, each of these psychosocial resources had only a negligible effect on moderating the impacts of stressors. The study suggests that unless there is a full understanding of the effects of these stressors on caregivers’ well-being, any interventions or preventive actions will be of limited utility. Future research should pay more attention to exploring the relationships between the subjective burden and objective stressors, and examining their different impacts on FCGs’ depression experience. Additionally, the fact that none of the psychosocial resources have a buffering effect in the caregiving process suggests that there is little in the lives of caregivers that mitigates the deleterious effects of caregiving stress on Alzheimer’s caregivers. Policymakers and mental health providers should consider the stress of caregiving, as reflected in both its objective and subjective aspects, as a major risk factor in the lives of those who care for family members with Alzheimer’s disease. Those factors may play a causal role in caregivers’ mental disorders and suicidal ideation.

Online video platforms receive hundreds of hours of uploads every minute, making manual moderation of inappropriate content impossible. The most vulnerable consumers of malicious video content are children from ages 1-5 whose attention is easily captured by bursts of color and sound. Prominent video hosting platforms like YouTube have taken measures to mitigate malicious content, but these videos often go undetected by current automated content moderation tools that are focused on removing explicit or copyrighted content. Scammers attempting to monetize their content may craft malicious children's videos that are superficially similar to educational videos, but include scary and disgusting characters, violent motions, loud music, and disturbing noises. A robust classification of malicious videos requires audio representations in addition to video features. However, recent content moderation approaches rarely employ multimodal architectures that explicitly consider non-speech audio cues. Additionally, there is a dearth of comprehensive datasets for content moderation tasks which include these audio-visual feature annotations. This dissertation addresses these challenges and makes several contributions to the problem of content moderation for children’s videos. The first contribution is identifying a set of malicious features that are harmful to preschool children but remain unaddressed and publishing a labeled dataset (Malicious or Benign) of cartoon video clips that include these features. We provide a user-friendly web-based video annotation tool which can easily be customized and used for video classification tasks with any number of ground truth classes. The second contribution is adapting state-of-the-art Vision-Language models to apply content moderation techniques on the MOB benchmark. We perform prompt engineering and an in-depth analysis of how context-specific language prompts affect the content moderation performance of different CLIP (Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training) variants. This dissertation introduces new benchmark natural language prompt templates for cartoon videos that can be used with Vision-Language models. Finally, we introduce a multimodal framework that includes the audio modality for more robust content moderation of children's cartoon videos and extend our dataset to include audio labels. We present ablations to demonstrate the enhanced performance of adding audio. The audio modality and prompt learning are incorporated while keeping the backbone modules of each modality frozen. Experiments were conducted on a multimodal version of the MOB (Malicious or Benign) dataset in both supervised and few-shot settings.

Anonymity on social media is a complex topic that has garnered attention from politicians and legislators alike. However, the opinions of end users on this matter have not been given due consideration. This study aims to explore the attitudes of active social media users (aged 30 and below) towards a possible change in how anonymity operates on social media platforms, in order to increase accountability and improve safety. A sample of 112 respondents in Sweden was surveyed, and five users were interviewed to gain deeper insights. Although a majority of users express a desire for change in how anonymity operates on social media platforms, there is currently no sense of urgency to effect change. Educating users and providing better reporting tools may be an effective alternative option for increasing safety online, as a small percentage of users are perceived to be responsible for the majority of harm on social media platforms. Different kinds of verification of users has been suggested as a possible solution to address the issue of malicious bots and impersonation accounts, with some social media platforms introducing paid verification subscriptions. However, the results suggest that the vast majority of users aren’t willing to pay, which could further exacerbate the issue at hand. Paid verification services brings with it the potential of dividing the user base (as verified paying users are attributed a status badge), whilst simultaneously continuing to provide malicious anonymous actors with a way to hide in the masses. Hence, whilst paid verification subscriptions may be a lucrative solutions for the social media companies, and provide them with an additional high-margin revenue stream, it may ultimately be to the detriment of safety and inclusivity. Further research on anonymity in relation to demographics, societal norms and backgrounds are needed to be able to definitively tell if a change to anonymity at scale is plausible. Furthermore, future work into the potential impact of the paid verification subscriptions are also needed, as these recent implementations have consequences on both the user base and the platforms as a whole. / Anonymitet på sociala medier är ett komplext ämne som har uppmärksammats av politiker och lagstiftare. Trots detta har användares åsikter i frågan inte fått tillräckligt med uppmärksamhet. Denna studie syftar till att undersöka attityder hos aktiva användare av sociala medier (30 år och yngre) gentemot hur anonymitet fungerar på sociala medieplattformar, i syfte att öka ansvarstagande och säkerhet. En grupp på 112 respondenter i Sverige undersöktes och fem användare intervjuades för att få djupare insikter. Resultaten visar att även om majoriteten av användare uttrycker en önskan om förändringar i hur anonymitet fungerar på sociala medieplattformar, finns det för närvarande ingen känsla av brådska att åstadkomma förändring. Att utbilda användare och tillhandahålla bättre rapporteringsverktyg kan vara ett effektivt alternativ för att öka säkerheten online, eftersom en liten andel av användarna uppfattas som ansvariga för den största delen av skadorna på sociala medieplattformar. Olika typer av användarverifiering har föreslagits som en möjlig lösning för att adressera problemet med skadliga botar och falska konton, vissa sociala medieplattformar har även introducerat betalda verifieringsprenumerationer. Resultaten tyder på att majoriteten av användarna inte är villiga att betala för en sådan prenumeration, vilket kan förvärra problemet. Betalda verifieringstjänster riskerar också att dela upp användarbasen (eftersom betalande användare tilldelas en statussymbol), samtidigt som det fortsätter att ge skadliga anonyma aktörer ett sätt att gömma sig bland massorna. Betalda verifieringsprenumerationer kan vara en lukrativ lösning för sociala medieföretag och ge dem ytterligare en intäktsström med hög marginal, men det kan i slutändan vara på bekostnad av säkerhet och inkludering. Ytterligare forskning om anonymitet i relation till demografi, samhällsnormer och bakgrund behövs för att kunna fastställa om en förändring av anonymitet i stor skala är möjlig. Dessutom behövs framtida arbete om de potentiella konsekvenserna av betalda verifieringsprenumerationer, eftersom dessa nyligen införda implementeringar har konsekvenser både för användarbasen och plattformarna som helhet.

The purpose for our study was to see whether reporting mothers and fathers safe base separately protects adolescents who are ethnically harassed from developing low self-esteem. To examine this, we use secondary longitudinal data with immigrant adolescents. In addition to bivariate correlations we ran two moderation regression analyses to test if perceived safe base from mothers or fathers could affect the link between ethnic harassment and self-esteem. Moreover, we wanted to see if perceiving safe base with either parent could change the level of self-esteem within the adolescent. The results showed significance when mothers safe base was tested as a moderator. However, this was not the case for the fathers. The findings in our study were discussed and compared to previous research. / Syftet med vår studie var att se om mammors och pappors säkra anknytning skyddar ungdomar som är etniskt trakasserade från att utveckla lågt självförtroende. För att undersöka detta använde vi longitudinell data med invandrarungdomar. Utöver bivariata korrelationer har vi genomfört två moderationsanalyser för att testa om en uppfattad säker anknytning till mammor eller pappor kan påverka sambandet mellan etniska trakasserier och självförtroende. Utöver detta ville vi se om uppfattad säker anknytning med ena föräldern kan ändra graden av självförtroende hos ungdomarna. Resultaten visade signifikanta resultat när mammors säkra anknytning testades som en moderator. Men detta var inte fallet för papporna. Resultaten i vår studie diskuterades och jämfördes med tidigare forskning.

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South Africans are engaged in daily battles with work-related and non-work related issues. Although an organisation is not capable of addressing or changing all the issues experienced by the South African population, it can intervene in order to improve the quality of its employees’ working lives. A suggested starting point is person-environment fit (PE fit), due to its effect on job satisfaction and intentions to leave. Consequently, when an individual experiences low PE fit, it will contribute to job dissatisfaction, and intentions to leave as international research has shown. To possibly decrease the impact of these relationships, it is important for leader empowering behaviour to be evident throughout the organisation. The objectives of this study were to determine possible relationships, indirect effects, and moderating effects between PE fit, job satisfaction, intentions to leave, and leader empowering behaviour. A convenience sample of employees working under the guidance of a leader/manager/supervisor was taken from a retail company in Gauteng. Participation in the study was voluntary. A measuring battery measuring PE fit (i.e. person-organisation fit, needs-supplies fit, and demands-abilities fit), job satisfaction, intentions to leave, and leader empowering behaviour (i.e. delegation of authority, accountability, self-directed decision making, information sharing, skills development, and coaching for innovative performance) was used. Descriptive and inferential statistics, Raykov’s rho coefficients, Pearson product-moment correlations, measurement models, structural models, and goodness-of-fit statistics were used to analyse the data. The results indicate that PE fit has a positive relationship with job satisfaction. Job satisfaction has a negative relationship with intentions to leave. PE fit has an indirect effect on intentions to leave via job satisfaction. Leader empowering behaviour moderates the relationship between job satisfaction and intentions to leave. Various recommendations were made for the selected retail company as well as for future research. The retail company and employees should comprehend the impact of PE fit on outcomes such as job satisfaction and intentions to leave, as both parties are equally affected by its implications. Therefore, both pro-active and re-active measures should be institutionalised to address PE fit. Additionally, the retail company should understand the importance of leader empowering behaviour and the impact it can have on their business unit and the organisation as a whole. Recommendations for future research include longitudinal research designs, as well as the expansion of research beyond the selected company in the retail industry. / MCom (Industrial Psychology)--North-West University, Vaal Triangle Campus, 2015

South Africans are engaged in daily battles with work-related and non-work related issues. Although an organisation is not capable of addressing or changing all the issues experienced by the South African population, it can intervene in order to improve the quality of its employees’ working lives. A suggested starting point is person-environment fit (PE fit), due to its effect on job satisfaction and intentions to leave. Consequently, when an individual experiences low PE fit, it will contribute to job dissatisfaction, and intentions to leave as international research has shown. To possibly decrease the impact of these relationships, it is important for leader empowering behaviour to be evident throughout the organisation. The objectives of this study were to determine possible relationships, indirect effects, and moderating effects between PE fit, job satisfaction, intentions to leave, and leader empowering behaviour. A convenience sample of employees working under the guidance of a leader/manager/supervisor was taken from a retail company in Gauteng. Participation in the study was voluntary. A measuring battery measuring PE fit (i.e. person-organisation fit, needs-supplies fit, and demands-abilities fit), job satisfaction, intentions to leave, and leader empowering behaviour (i.e. delegation of authority, accountability, self-directed decision making, information sharing, skills development, and coaching for innovative performance) was used. Descriptive and inferential statistics, Raykov’s rho coefficients, Pearson product-moment correlations, measurement models, structural models, and goodness-of-fit statistics were used to analyse the data. The results indicate that PE fit has a positive relationship with job satisfaction. Job satisfaction has a negative relationship with intentions to leave. PE fit has an indirect effect on intentions to leave via job satisfaction. Leader empowering behaviour moderates the relationship between job satisfaction and intentions to leave. Various recommendations were made for the selected retail company as well as for future research. The retail company and employees should comprehend the impact of PE fit on outcomes such as job satisfaction and intentions to leave, as both parties are equally affected by its implications. Therefore, both pro-active and re-active measures should be institutionalised to address PE fit. Additionally, the retail company should understand the importance of leader empowering behaviour and the impact it can have on their business unit and the organisation as a whole. Recommendations for future research include longitudinal research designs, as well as the expansion of research beyond the selected company in the retail industry. / MCom (Industrial Psychology)--North-West University, Vaal Triangle Campus, 2015

The objective of this dissertation study is to provide the theoretical foundation for collaborative information technology moderation on team performance and give empirical evidence to support this relationship. The model provided in this study is supported by analytical proofs for the proposed hypotheses to define relationships among constructs in this research including departure (reduction in the number of team members), collaborative information technology functionality, transactive memory strength, and team performance. This research offers a theory that utilizes transactive memory systems (TMS) to examine the departure problem. The main research question is: Can collaborative information technologies (CIT) alleviate negative effects of departure? The theory in this study is structured around the indicators of TMS: specialization, coordination, and credibility. Findings showed that CIT functionality level plays a role in enhancing the group performance. This role is not direct but instead, is a moderation effect that alleviates the negative departure impact. In absence of departure, CIT impact can be confusing as it can be either positive or negative. My analytical results explain why information systems literature has had conflicting arguments on the role of technology. I propose that particular dynamic events and incidents, such as employee departure, help us understand the impact of CIT more clearly. Moreover, I employ transactive memory theory to explain how individuals develop and exchange knowledge in a group and how skills and knowledge can be lost due to departure. I also explain why and how team performance benefits from CIT when departure occurs. / text

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Loving-kindness meditation (LKM) has the potential to improve intrapersonal and interpersonal functioning. This unique quality of LKM makes it a desirable candidate for buffering the stress of being social evaluated or socially excluded. Using the Trier Social Stress Test and the Cyberball social exclusion paradigm, the present study investigated the effectiveness of a brief LKM session in buffering against social evaluative and social exclusion stress. Three specific questions were addressed: In what domains can LKM exert positive effects? For whom does it work? And, how does it work? One hundred and thirteen participants (N = 113, 49 men) were randomly assigned to either a 10-minute LKM session or a 10-minute visualization control session. Findings showed that even just 10 minutes of LKM had an immediate relaxing effect as evidenced by increased respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA), an index of parasympathetic cardiac control, and decreased respiration rate. In addition, the brief LKM intervention led to greater implicit positivity towards the self relative to the control intervention (p = .052). The brief LKM intervention also protected against some of the negative physiological and psychological effects of social stress. The majority of these effects are moderated by trait social anxiety and pre-meditation mood states (or pre-meditation mood state alone). Contrary to expectation, trait social anxiety alone did not moderate any of the LKM effects. Importantly, receiving a brief session of LKM while not being in a positive mood or being in a negative mood led to iatrogenic physiological and psychological effects. Providing an explanation for one of LKM's effects, findings showed that change in RSA during LKM fully mediated the LKM Intervention x Positive Affect interaction effect on change in post-social-stress RSA. In conclusion, findings of the present study have extended our understanding of LKM and have specific implications for future research and practice.