Perceived Symptoms of Depression, Anxiety and Stress amongst Staff in a Malaysian Public University: A Workers Survey

Mental health conditions are a major part of workers’ health that predisposes to poor self-motivation for sustaining productivity. This study was aimed to determine the prevalence of depression, anxiety, and stress among staff in a Malaysian public university and its associated factors. A cross-sectional study was conducted among 459 staff from the Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM) between April and June 2019. A questionnaire that consisted of items on socio-demographic and socioeconomic characteristics, employment description, lifestyle risk behaviors, personal medical history, and symptoms of depression, anxiety, and stress was administered to participants. Descriptive and inferential statistics were conducted using SPSS version 22.0. The prevalence of perceived symptoms of depression, anxiety, and stress among the respondents was 28.7%, 50.1%, and 14.8%, respectively. Over one-quarter (26.5%) of the participants presented symptoms of two or more mental disorders. Women, those aged less than 40 years old, and non-academic professionals were more likely to exhibit depressive symptoms, while those with medical conditions that required hospitalizations sustained anxiety symptoms. Perceived stress was more likely to be prevalent among staff with secondary education or less and smokers. Proactive support for staff needs to be offered in sustaining their emotional well-being.

When young children grieve: Supporting daycare children following bereavement—A parent’s perspective

Thirteen parents who lost the mother or father to their child were interviewed, using semi-structured interviews. Participants reflect on their young children’s (3–6) grief, support needs, and what they learned from this trying time. The event scarred all participants. While some moved on, others were still struggling years after. The study uncovers difficulties associated with informing a young child, with a limfited understanding of illness and loss, in a life-situation where parents themselves are clinging to hope. While support is available from daycare, it can be better organised and structured. Proactive support that assists the child through illness and death relieves the parental care burden.

Challenges of Human-Aware AI Systems

From its inception, artificial intelligence (AI) has had a rather ambivalent relationship to humans — swinging between their augmentation and their replacement. Now, as AI technologies enter our everyday lives at an ever-increasing pace, there is a greater need for AI systems to work synergistically with humans. To do this effectively, AI systems must pay more attention to aspects of intelligence that help humans work with each other — including social intelligence. I will discuss the research challenges in designing such human-aware AI systems, including modeling the mental states of humans-in-the-loop and recognizing their desires and intentions, providing proactive support, exhibiting explicable behavior, giving cogent explanations on demand, and engendering trust. I will survey the progress made so far on these challenges, and highlight some promising directions. I will also touch on the additional ethical quandaries that such systems pose. I will end by arguing that the quest for human-aware AI systems broadens the scope of AI enterprise; necessitates and facilitates true interdisciplinary collaborations; and can go a long way toward increasing public acceptance of AI technologies.

Dropping out and moving on: A qualitative study of autistic people’s experiences of university

Autistic people are at high risk of dropping out of university, but little research has examined this issue. Fourteen autistic people participated in semi-structured interviews examining their experiences at university and the reasons they had dropped out. Thematic analysis identified patterns in participants’ responses. Themes were categorised as systemic issues, challenges within university or life after dropping out. Systemic issues centred around accessing diagnosis, autism understanding, mental health and outsider status. Challenges at university included culture shock, becoming disengaged, lack of proactive support and perceived inevitability of dropping out. Finally, life after dropping out was characterised by processing of trauma and shame, and realisation of doing ‘what’s right for you’. Together, these themes suggest that many improvements could be made at universities, such as more proactive support and creating more accessible environments. Societal-level change is also needed to improve educational opportunities for autistic people. Lay abstract Many autistic people now go to university, but many of them also drop out of their studies. In fact, it is believed that autistic people are at higher risk of dropping out, but little research has been done to understand why this is happening. This research used interviews to take an in-depth look at 14 autistic people’s experiences of dropping out of university. All the things the participants talked about were examined closely by the researchers who identified common themes in what the participants discussed. The first set of themes captured some overarching issues faced by autistic people, such as difficulties with getting diagnosed, a lack of autism understanding, mental health challenges and feeling like an outsider. The next themes were organised within challenges faced at university, including a feeling of culture shock, becoming disengaged from one’s studies, a lack of proactive support from their university and a feeling that dropping out became inevitable. Finally, there were themes about life after dropping out, which involved a sense that the experience at university had been traumatic and shameful, but they believed people had to do what is right for them. All of these themes suggest that universities need to be better at supporting autistic people when they first come to university, and that they should actively offer clear support throughout and try and make the university environment more accessible for everyone, to ensure more autistic people have a positive university experience.

Proactive Support for Pre-Service Candidates Going Into the K-12 Teaching Profession

An overarching issue of preparing teachers for the K-12 teaching professions rests with a lack of specific, well planned, and effective support for preservice teachers going into the profession. The main focus of this chapter will be to focus on what can be done to strengthen teacher preparation programs for preservice teachers, especially in California, where student population is burgeoning.

Well Begun is Half Done: Using Online Orientation to Foster Online Students’ Academic Self-Efficacy

Past research suggests that the use of an online learning orientation is an effective proactive strategy to ease online students' transition into online learning. Based on a sample of 3888 online students from an urban public university, we used ordinal logistic regression to understand the influence of students' satisfaction with an online learning orientation (OLO), their prior level of online learning experience, and their demographics on their academic self-efficacy (ASE). Consistent with prior research, our findings confirmed the influence of students’ satisfaction with OLO, their prior online learning experience, and their gender on their ASE. In contrast, students’ age and enrollment status proved not to be significant. Overall, our findings provide strong evidence about how the use of an OLO as proactive support strategy can boost online students' academic self-efficacy.

Designing Self-Reflective Visualizations in Patient-Cantered Systems

Self-care applications are mostly featured with visuals that educate users to comprehend their health status in taking a proactive role in their healthcare. It is crucial to ensure that these visuals are adequate and meets the expectations of the users. In this study, healthcare visualisation design factors were reviewed from existing studies in identifying their relevance to self-care visuals. The study also conducted a focus group study (FGD) with a group of mobile application users to understand their perception and expectations towards healthcare visuals presented in self-care applications. Results indicate that existing guidelines for healthcare visuals are focused on a specific type of application and they mostly emphasise the usability aspects of the visual and neglect its functionality. The identified themes from the FGD are motivation & commitment, customizability, personalisation, accessibility, complex yet comprehensible graphs, alerts & proactive support, and trust & privacy. Users are expecting healthcare visuals that are self-reflecting, comprehensive and user-friendly in enabling them to better understand their health conditions. A combination of design factors is necessary to aid the development of self-care visuals in health support applications. Hence, the study proposed a conceptual model that lists a set of design principles for self-reflective visualisations in novel health support applications.

When to suspect dementia

Dementia is a syndrome in which there is deterioration in memory, thinking, behaviour and the ability to perform everyday activities. An accurate and timely diagnosis of dementia provides opportunity for early treatment, proactive support and advance care planning. However, there is evidence that GPs lack confidence in diagnosing dementia, in part because patients with dementia present in many different ways. Researchers believe that early detection of Alzheimer’s disease, the most common cause of dementia, is necessary if ways to prevent, slow and stop the disease are to be found. This article highlights the common presenting complaints in dementia and offers how GPs can work towards a diagnosis and refer to specialist services appropriately.