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The purpose of this study is to gain deeper understanding of the experience of PSW and pathways to recover. Prolonged social withdrawal (PSW) among young people has been widely reported; however, the voice of those who withdraw is rarely heard. Illuminating these firsthand experiences is important as the phenomenon becomes widespread, calling for increased attention and creative solutions to promote recovery processes and re-inclusion in society.

This study conducted nine in-depth semi-structured interviews with young people who have been reclusive for 2–19 years and inquired about their perspectives and experiences around times of PSW and beyond. These data were analyzed and categorized according to three main areas: factors contributing to PSW, subjective experiences and general functioning during PSW and processes involved in coming out of PSW. This study presents the main findings and illustrates them using a case of a young man in PSW for 19 years.

The findings reveal that young people may turn to social withdrawal in response to varied personal and familial challenges, and often experience intense loneliness and psychic pain. Attempts to cope and recover from withdrawal involve inner motivation combined with support from significant others and a strong therapeutic alliance with professionals.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to report findings from in-depth interviews with people who spent very long periods in PSW, and accordingly it contributes to the growing body of knowledge on this phenomenon. Based on this unique firsthand perspective, the authors propose potential guidelines for caregivers and mental health professionals trying to help people in PSW to reintegrate into society.

The purpose of this study is to examine how the constructs of false self, preference for online social interaction (POSI), compulsive internet use (CIU), and online disinhibition affect social withdrawal in a social media context. The mediating effects of moral disengagement and cyber aggression are also tested.

Data were collected using an online survey (n = 533) from consumers in Japan. This study used structural equation modeling and PROCESS to examine the proposed relationships.

The study revealed that false self positively affects moral disengagement while online disinhibition positively affects cyber aggression and moral disengagement. Preference for online social interaction and compulsive internet use both positively impacts social withdrawal. Cyber aggression and moral disengagement were established mediators between false self/ Preference for online social interaction/ compulsive internet use/ online disinhibition and social withdrawal.

Although restricted to cyberaggression, owing to the reciprocal relationship between cyber victimization and cyberaggression, cyber victimization can be included for further study. This study expands the understanding of social withdrawal within the context of social media.

Based on the findings, policies and programs that address mental health that build self-esteem, self-confidence and reduce anxiety ought to be undertaken. Managing and formulating guidelines on anonymity should also be taken into consideration.

This research demonstrates the crucial constructs that affect social media users negatively from the aspects of cyberaggression, moral disengagement and social withdrawal. It also establishes the importance of mental health in reducing adverse effects from social media.

Reading represents a basic way by which humans understand the world and acquire knowledge; it is also central to learning and communicating. However, with the rapid development of mobile reading, an individual's cognition of objective facts may be affected by the reading environment and text genre, resulting in limited memorization and understanding of the reading material. Therefore, this study aimed to investigate the influence of the reading environment and text genre on individuals' cognitive activities from the perspective of motivational activation level using evidence from electroencephalography (EEG) signals.

The study employed a mixed design experiment with two reading environments (quiet and distracting) between subjects, two text genres (entertaining and scientific) within subjects and two reading tasks (memory recall and comprehension) within subjects. There were 50 participants in the experiment, and the data obtained from 44 participants while they read the materials and completed the reading tasks were analyzed.

The results showed that readers are more positively motivated to read in a quiet reading environment than in a distracting reading environment when facing the memory recall tasks of entertaining genre passages and comprehension tasks of scientific genre passages. Entertaining genres are more likely to arouse readers' reading interest but hinder the memory recall of the content details. While scientific genres are not easy to understand, they are helpful for working memory.

This study not only applies a new technology to mobile reading research in the field of library science and addresses the limitations of self-report data, but also provides suggestions for the further improvement of mobile reading service providers. Additionally, the results may provide useful information for learners with different learning demands.

The present study aims to investigate the psychometric properties of the picture story exercise (PSE), a tool for measuring implicit motivations in Iran.

The research method is descriptive correlation and was conducted in two studies. In the first study 24 psychology master’s students were selected by convenience sampling method and tested them to check retest and inter-coder reliability. The second study investigated the correlation between self-reports and the PSE test on a sample of managers. Its statistical population comprised all the managers of a refinery company, 50 people were selected by convenience sampling method. To check the concurrent validity of the PSE test, the participants of the second study, completing the PSE, also completed the needs questionnaire of Steers and Porter (1979).

The findings showed that the PSE test in the Iranian sample had high retest reliability (0.62 on mean) and inter-coder reliability (0.87 on mean), and, following previous research, it does not show a significant relationship with self-reported motives.

PSE can be used in future research as a tool that has demonstrated its reliability and validity in the Iranian sample.

Measurement of implicit motives is a practical factor for predicting people’s behavior, the necessity of using tools that can accurately evaluate implicit motives is strongly felt. Taking into account the fact that so far, in Iranian samples, implicit motivations have not been measured, therefore, the current research is trying to answer this question, whether one of the most important and prominent tools that were made for this purpose and used in various studies can also be used in Iranian samples.

This study considered the use of video conferencing virtual backgrounds with employees located in a large multinational corporate organisation in Ireland and the USA to discern if background images evoking gendered stereotypes of leadership can cue stereotype threat in female technology workers undertaking a leadership activity, thus negatively effecting performance. This study aims to contribute to the body of research on stereotype threat by establishing whether virtual backgrounds used in video conferencing software are inherently identity safe or whether their use could have a negative performance impact on marginalised groups.

Using a mixed methods research design with 22 participants in two countries working in the one large organisation, using two quantitative methods (an experiment and a survey) and one qualitative method (semi-structured interviews), the study examined the relationship between performance on the leadership activity and exposure to gendered backgrounds on a video conference call.

It found that female leaders undertaking a leadership test experienced more anxiety and achieved lower scores on average when exposed to a male-gendered virtual background compared to male colleagues or female leaders exposed to a female gendered background. It was also found that these leaders were aware of the stereotype of leadership being White and male, and showed symptoms of prolonged exposure to stereotype threat in the workplace. While the authors still are working through a post-pandemic environment, it may be judicious for organisations to restrict the use of virtual backgrounds to identity-safe ones, specifically chosen by the company.

The study makes several practical recommendations, indicating actions which can be taken at the individual, team and corporate levels. Re-running this experiment in a more controlled environment with a larger sample set could yield more definitive, statistically significant results and contribute more to the literature.

Some individual impacts were found via the interviews. Male leaders in the organisation need to do more to mentor and endorse their female colleagues. By doing this, they can counter the negative effects of solo status and the subsequent performance degradations of their female counterparts, while also setting an example for other leaders. Participation in the mentoring programme and initiatives such as Dare and value, inclusion, belonging, and equity should be encouraged and supported. Reverse mentoring should also be encouraged among the population of male leaders to aid in allyship and bias-awareness.

Teams should note that a democratic vote is not always the best way to decide on the names of teams, projects or meeting rooms. These may skew towards niche interests that can serve to alienate members of the team who do not associate themselves with that interest. Rather, the teams should strive to be fully inclusive and educated on the need for identity-safety. Team events may also serve to alienate members if teams are not mindful of the need to be inclusive. Activities, such as “go-kart” racing and physical or competitive team events have been highlighted as unsuitable for some team members, and should be avoided in favour of inclusivity.

A significant body of research has documented the effect to which stereotype threat can be triggered by both the physical environment and by the use of various technology media. However, there is a dearth of research exploring the relationship between stereotype threat, defined as “the concrete, real-time threat of being judged and treated poorly in settings where a negative stereotype about one’s group applies” (Steele et al., 2002, p. 385), and video conferencing software features, such as virtual backgrounds.

This paper aims to focus on the involvement of mental healthcare professionals in a co-design process of a digital healthcare platform. Many people with severe mental disorders need constant support and monitoring, and with long waiting lists and scarce resources in mental healthcare, there is a dire need for innovative digital solutions to counteract those issues. This paper elaborates on a co-design process of a digital platform and mobile app designed for people with mental disorders. The platform primarily considers two perspectives: i) the patients and ii) the healthcare professionals.

This paper is based on canonical action research, where the co-design involvement with 13 healthcare professionals is analyzed and their interactions with three primary scenarios are focused.

The main contribution of this paper is three co-design principles: i) clarity and information accessibility regarding the patient's side, ii) efficiency and flexibility when it comes to the healthcare professional's side and iii) a notification function in the mobile application.

The theoretical contribution is the conceptualization of the three co-design principles that others can use when designing digital platforms in healthcare in general and psychiatric care in particular. The practical contributions are firstly outlined through the co-design process itself, where scenarios to guide the work are used, and secondly, the improvements made in the digital platform derived from the results of the co-design process.

As convenience and anonymity, people with mental illness are increasingly willing to communicate and share information through social media platforms to receive emotional and spiritual support. The purpose of this paper is to identify the degree of depression based on people's behavioral patterns and discussion content on the Internet.

Based on the previous studies on depression, the severity of depression is divided into four categories: no significant depressive symptoms, mild MDD, moderate MDD and severe MDD, and defined each of them. Next, in order to automatically identify the severity, the authors proposed social media digital cues to identify the severity of depression, which include textual lexical features, depressive language features and social behavioral features. Finally, the authors evaluate a system that is developed based on social media digital cues in the experiment using social media data.

The social media digital cues including textual lexical features, depressive language features and social behavioral features (F1, F2 and F3) is the relatively best one to classify four different levels of depression.

This paper innovatively proposes a social media data-based framework (SMDF) to identify and predict different degrees of depression through social media digital cues and evaluates the accuracy of the detection through social media data, providing useful attempts for the identification and intervention of depression.

Healthcare workers are considered to be the most vulnerable to face mental health. Therefore, this paper aims to examine how negative leadership (despotic leadership) affects employees' psychological distress. Specifically, the authors investigated bullying behavior as mediating mechanism and hostile attribution bias as boundary condition that trigger psychological distress.

The authors collected data from 252 nurses and their immediate supervisors (as a coping strategy for common method bias) through “Google Forms” from various public and private hospitals.

The authors applied structural equation modeling and noted that despotic leadership positively affects employees' psychological distress through bullying behavior. In addition, hostile attribution bias is identified as an important factor in amplifying the effect of bullying behavior on psychological distress.

The authors collected data from high-power distance culture where negative leadership is more prevalent as compared to low-power distance culture. Their findings suggest management to discourage self-centered leaders (despotic) and employees with negative personality traits (hostile attribution bias) as these affect their mental health.

Drawing upon conservation of resources theory, this study is the first of its kind that has investigated how and when despotic leadership affects employees' psychological distress. In addition, the authors also highlighted the importance of negative personality traits (hostile attribution bias) that can amplify the association between bullying behavior and psychological distress.

This study investigates the role of personality disorders in the context of counterproductive knowledge behavior.

Data were collected through a survey administered to 120 full-time employees recruited from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Personality disorders were measured by means of the Millon Clinical Multiaxial Inventory-IV.

Personality disorders play an important role in the context of counterproductive knowledge behavior: employees suffering from various personality disorders are likely to hide knowledge from their fellow coworkers and engage in knowledge sabotage. Of particular importance are dependent, narcissistic and sadistic personality disorders as well as schizophrenic and delusional severe clinical syndromes. There is a need for a paradigm shift in terms of how the research community should portray those who engage in counterproductive knowledge behavior, reconsidering the underlying assumption that all of them act deliberately, consciously and rationally. Unexpectedly, most personality disorders do not facilitate knowledge hoarding.

Organizations should provide insurance coverage for the treatment of personality disorders, assist those seeking treatment, inform employees about the existence of personality disorders in the workplace and their impact on interemployee relationships, facilitate a stress-free work environment, remove social stigma that may be associated with personality disorders and, as a last resort, reassign workers suffering from extreme forms of personality disorders to tasks that require less interemployee interaction (instead of terminating them).

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this work represents one of the first attempts to empirically investigate the notion of personality disorders in the context of knowledge management.

Integrating person-job fit theory with the stressor-emotion model of counterproductive work behavior (CWB), the current study aims to examine which behavioral pattern (fight: CWB vs flight: withdrawal) employees are more likely to adopt when they experience perceived overqualification (POQ). We further investigate anger as the underlying emotional mechanism for these relations because anger can be expressed and thus reflected in CWB, or constrained and thus reflected in withdrawal behavior. Furthermore, different stressor-attenuating strategies including relaxation during work breaks and mastery experiences at work are examined as mitigating factors of these relations.

Time-lagged data were collected from 176 full-time employees in China using a field survey research design.

We found that employees who experience POQ are more likely to engage in withdrawal than in CWB. Anger mediated the relations of POQ with both CWB and withdrawal. Relaxation moderated the relation between POQ and anger, as well as the indirect relations of POQ with CWB and withdrawal through anger.

This study enhances understanding of employees’ affective and behavioral reactions to POQ. However, the survey design was not longitudinal and causality cannot be established.

POQ is associated with undesirable employee behaviors and should therefore be avoided by organizations. If POQ is unavoidable, organizations can use job design and offer training to foster relaxation in between tasks among employees.

In the framework of person-job fit theory, our study provides insight about employees’ “fight” or “flight” responses to POQ, and further illustrates the mechanism and the attenuating factors in this processes.