Awe Versus Aww: The Effectiveness of Two Kinds of Positive Emotional Stimulation on Stress Reduction for Online Content Moderators

“…participant made a decision about the final post (ok or unacceptable), participants were asked to provide their age and gender and expand upon their previous content moderation experience (if any), as well as fill out pre-validated measures of stress [17], fatigue [90], and emotional distress [45].”

“After the participant made a decision about the final post (ok or unacceptable), participants were asked to provide their age and gender and expand upon their previous content moderation experience (if any), as well as fill out pre-validated measures of stress [17], fatigue [90], and emotional distress [45].”

“A major portion of the literature on cuteness actually focuses on cuteness’ effect on compassion and care, particularly in relation to mothers and their infants (e.g., [30, 49]).”

“If effective at reducing stress and increasing positive emotions in users, this presents a simple, automated intervention that can be used to supplement existing traditional stress relief techniques, such as mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) meditations (e.g., [85, 86]).”

“In terms of the specific variables addressed in the present study, Janssen and colleagues [40] found MBSR to be an effective way to reduce stress and emotional exhaustion, a concept similar to emotional distress and related to burnout.”

“While health professionals go through extensive training and years of university to prepare for their jobs, content moderators especially volunteer content moderators - receive little to no training before they begin work [81].”

“, [63]), and so we would expect the same effect of compassion fatigue to occur with cute stimuli.”

“Thepurported mechanism behind awe’s stress reduction properties lies in awe’s effect on our self-perception and perception of our stressors [41, 50].”

“In addtion, mindfulness is based on the core principle of just being in the moment — in other words, doing nothing but focusing in silence on what the experience of existence [70].”

“In terms of fatigue, cuteness shares the same effect as awe – an increase in the motivation to engage in prosocial behavior (e.g., [49, 96])—in addition to a general desire to care (e.g., [63]), and so we would expect the same effect of compassion fatigue to occur with cute stimuli.”

“Recent research suggests that positive emotional stimuli may have the potential to reduce the negative effects of the job if moderators are exposed at regular intervals [41, 47, 50, 95].”

“Essentially, if something is cute, we want to nurture it and protect it from harm [30, 44, 83].”

“Both cuteness and awe have been shown to be connected to increased levels of prosociality (e.g., [32, 84]) and a sense of connectedness to others (e.g., [6, 82]), but they also have their own distinct benefits that could impact content moderators differently.”

“Both awe and cuteness however, have the potential to contribute to an upward spiral in positive affect through repeated exposure (e.g., [10, 18, 34]).”

“…content moderators [61, 75, 89] and have examined the effectiveness of current methods to ease the burden on content moderators (e.g., [13, 15, 79, 80]), referring to both moderators in volunteer and commercial content moderation, as they both experience exposure to harmful content and suffer…”

“In addition, while MBSR seems to take a minimum of 10 minutes of continuous practice to achieve effects [37, 88], no such time restrictions have been, to our knowledge, reported for the positive benefits of awe or cuteness, meaning they could theoretically be deployed throughout the workday with minimal disruption to…”

“, [3]), or exposure via images or video (e.”

“As either an employee or a volunteer, content moderators sift through everything people have posted or have reported as being inappropriate for hours on end [81], seeing the worst content people on the internet have to offer: sexism, racism, and more, with varying degrees of intensity [97].”

“Myrick [59], on the other hand, focused on exposure to animals online – cats, specifically – and found that her participants had a reduced perception of stress.”

“In addition, while several programs have been developed to help reduce the stress and fatigue of other professionals at risk of compassion fatigue (e.g., [39, 92]), the same is not true of content moderators, who receive only inadequate support from the platform [24, 25, 75].”

“[89] to provide the necessary programmatic and technological interventions to offer resources and assistance for mental health, we provide several design interventions that have the potential to protect content moderators or at least mitigate the position’s ill effects.”

“…future studies will need to employ a longitudinal design and will also have to test baseline attitudes toward technology and media use (see [72]), as well as pessimism and optimism [28], in order to tease apart the effects of compassion fatigue, affective contrasts, and simple individual…”

“…of content moderators [61, 75, 89] and have examined the effectiveness of current methods to ease the burden on content moderators (e.g., [13, 15, 79, 80]), referring to both moderators in volunteer and commercial content moderation, as they both experience exposure to harmful content and…”

“This literature stresses that the cuter something is, the more that people – usually mothers (see [55, 84]) – will be careful around it, and pay attention to it [63].”

“…on literature (e.g., [63, 68]) and were pre-tested by a voluntary sample of personal connections to ensure that they were equally cute or awe-inspiring, depending on the image, and elicited approximately the same levels of positive affect (as tested using Karim et al.’s short-form PANAS [43]).”

“This effect is not relegated to infant humans, though; it has also been shown in animals [10, 12, 54], and even objects [62, 93].”

“Although it is called “fatigue”, compassion fatigue is also heavily associated with stress and burnout [46, 56, 58, 60, 65, 92], which could help explain why it may have affected all of our outcome variables in the present study.”

“In fact, the job is so stressful that it shares common symptomatology with law enforcement workers tasked with finding and capturing child pornographers [48].”

“Both cuteness and awe have been shown to be connected to increased levels of prosociality (e.g., [32, 84]) and a sense of connectedness to others (e.g., [6, 82]), but they also have their own distinct benefits that could impact content moderators differently.”

“…a longitudinal design and will also have to test baseline attitudes toward technology and media use (see [72]), as well as pessimism and optimism [28], in order to tease apart the effects of compassion fatigue, affective contrasts, and simple individual differences to see what is ultimately best…”

“…of content moderators [61, 75, 89] and have examined the effectiveness of current methods to ease the burden on content moderators (e.g., [13, 15, 79, 80]), referring to both moderators in volunteer and commercial content moderation, as they both experience exposure to harmful content and suffer…”

“Throughout the moderation exercise, after every 20 posts (five questions), participants will be given the opportunity to take a 30-second break (as suggested by [11], as well as [53]), and depending on their condition, the screen is occupied by either the words “Take a break!””

“, [9]), not due to how breaks currently work for content moderators in the field.”

“This is because the experience of positive awe has been consistently linked to prosociality in study participants [6, 21, 32, 51, 68, 69, 78].”

“This effect is not relegated to infant humans, though; it has also been shown in animals [10, 12, 54], and even objects [62, 93].”

“In their study comparing active recovery via a digital game to active recovery via mindfulness practice, Collins et al. [19] found that although essentially equally effective in the short term, the fun stimulation of a game was more effective than the mindfulness program in the long run when it…”

“Traditionally it is associated with the medical profession (e.g., [46, 60, 64, 65, 92]), but any job that involves caring for others could theoretically lead to it (e.g., [56, 91]).”

“From an emotional perspective, cuteness has been linked to stress reduction [94] and, when paired over time with another stimulus, has also been shown to increase the quality of positive experience with paired stimuli [57].”

“This is because the experience of positive awe has been consistently linked to prosociality in study participants [6, 21, 32, 51, 68, 69, 78].”

“Content moderation literature is clear about the high degree of stress, fatigue, and emotional distress content moderators experience through their work, with many researchers reporting post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) among their content moderator participants [7, 20, 29, 74, 97].”

“Awe is not, however, the only emotional stimuli that has the potential to reduce the negative effects of content moderation work: the relatively under-studied effect of cuteness has also been shown to have potential when it comes to making difficult situations more bearable [36, 73].”

“In the first of these studies, the measure of cuteness has a significant negative relationship with personal distress [2], but in the second study, there was no relationship at all between the two variables [93].”

“Both awe and cuteness however, have the potential to contribute to an upward spiral in positive affect through repeated exposure (e.g., [10, 18, 34]).”

“To help combat these effects in a low-cost, simple way, we have decided to test the power of awe and cuteness—two positive emotional stimuli—to see if their power to reduce the negative side-effects associated with repeated exposure to negative images [48, 66].”

“…wellbeing of content moderators [61, 75, 89] and have examined the effectiveness of current methods to ease the burden on content moderators (e.g., [13, 15, 79, 80]), referring to both moderators in volunteer and commercial content moderation, as they both experience exposure to harmful content…”

“The first possible explanation, also the simplest, is that the addition of any new stimuli during a break disrupts the relaxation that simply ‘being’ can bring (e.g., [67, 98]).”

“This is partially because there are only two that we were able to find: The Compassion Fatigue-Short Scale [99] and the Nurses’ Compassion Fatigue Inventory [77], both of which are highly tailored to the medical professions.”

“This is because the experience of positive awe has been consistently linked to prosociality in study participants [6, 21, 32, 51, 68, 69, 78].”

“Sabbaticals have been shown to work to reduce the effects of burnout - which mirror the negative, cumulative effects of content moderation work - in the case of crisis workers, who also traditionally suffer from compassion fatigue [42].”

“Some articles discussing affective contrast would suggest that presenting positive stimuli in the midst of negative ones should have actually stabilized or reversed the effects of the negative stimuli (e.g., [16]).”

“However, psychological studies would suggest that we still need interventions that target the moderator themselves, helping them to cope with the emotions and distress that accompanies their work (e.g., [8]).”

“Awe elicited from a tornado though, does pose a threat, one that we can feel helpless to face [52].”

“For instance, cuteness has been repeatedly connected to carefulness, attentional control, and caretaking behaviours [30, 44, 63].”

“The first possible explanation, also the simplest, is that the addition of any new stimuli during a break disrupts the relaxation that simply ‘being’ can bring (e.g., [67, 98]).”

“Similarly, academic research highlights high stress levels and fatigue (Cook et al., 2022) and symptoms of insomnia, anxiety, low mood and experiencing intrusive images (Benjelloun & Otheman, 2020) and work by Roberts (2019) found that although CMs would report not being negatively impacted by the…”

“Moreover, past research has developed and tested routes to undertaking human-led content moderation in more efficient [61, 67] and less damaging ways [10, 35], again providing T&S professionals with evidence to argue for resources.”

“Prior length of tenure [16], and showing how diferent dimensions afect work shows that community members with strong normative com- mods’ confict management styles.”

“Moderators using reactive methods are also constantly exposed to offensive behavior, often overloaded with work, and provided no compensation [56, 57], all while sifting through content damaging to their mental health [20, 80, 87].”

“Moderators who rely on semi-automated crowdsourcing [58, 70, 95] or AI-led moderation [87, 89] experience less cognitive burden, stress, and reduced symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) [31, 34, 132] compared to those who do not [135].”

“Ofensive comments without proper moderation may have negative impacts on players, other community users, or even community moderators [16].”

“Beyond obfuscation, Cook et al. [5] investigate the use of positive emotional stimuli between moderation sessions, finding that an important factor in negative emotions is the prolonged exposure to harmful content, and that inserting positive stimuli, may induce compassion fatigue due to its…”

“Academic research has highlighted that content reviewers experience high-stress levels, fatigue, insomnia, anxiety, low mood, increased apathy, guilt, and intrusive images as part of their everyday work [18, 39, 45, 112, 168].”

“Moreover, there is a notable absence of standardized frameworks to govern human AI collaboration, giving rise to ethical dilemmas and operational inefficiencies [8].”

“MTurk workers with no moderation experience could resemble new or prospective moderators, but our find - ings may not extend to experienced moderators, who may respond differently to image modification (e.g., Cook et al., 2022).”

“…increased stress and emotional distress, which the authors suggest may be because the positive stimulation images triggered compassion fatigue (i.e., the cumulative negative effect on well-being due to an increased susceptibility to taking on other people’s hardships; Cook et al., 2022).”