Psychological identity in a digital world: Detecting and understanding digital traces of our psychological self

Boundaries between digital technologies and ourselves become blurred as technology is integrated into our work, home and even our bodies. Interdisciplinary research is needed to understand how our sense of self - our psychological identity - affects and is affected by technology use. During this fellowship, I will lead an interdisciplinary team of psychologists and computer scientists to explore how our identity shapes and is shaped by technology in the fields of security and healthcare. This work will be underpinned by a programme of collaboration with industry partners, Polaris Consulting, the National Crime Agency (NCA), Dstl, Milton Keynes University Hospital (MKUH) and EDP Drugs and Alcohol Services to explore applications that support rather than replace human analysts and consultants.

Sophisticated technologies are rapidly becoming part of our lives. Research on digital technology needs to urgently address concerns about privacy, trust, and ethical implications. I will extend current research in this area by considering how our different psychological identities shape what we find acceptable in different situations. For instance, a person might be less concerned about the tracking of personal information when thinking of themselves as a patient rather than as a parent. Throughout the fellowship, I will work closely with user groups (e.g., patients in the Lived Experience Group Exeter), industry partners and the general public to understand privacy concerns and privacy behaviour.

I will also continue to develop the capacity to detect psychological identities from naturally occurring digital data (e.g., forum posts, blogs, e-mails). This research will allow us to understand which psychological identity (e.g., parent, addict, criminal network identity) is relevant in a particular situation. I will extend my current work to test whether it is possible to distinguish between several identities by analysing text data, whether detecting identities in text is robust to deception, and whether it is possible to tell how committed an individual is to their group from the way in which they communicate online. I will work closely with my industry partners, Polaris, NCA and Dstl, to explore how findings can enhance current machine learning capabilities and analytic approaches in defence and security.

Finally, building on the identity detection work, I will examine how individuals develop new psychological identities (e.g., becoming a parent) and leave identities behind (e.g., leaving behind an addict identity during therapy), and the consequences of such transitions for mental health (e.g., post-natal depression, addiction recovery). I will work closely with industry partners MKUH and EDP to explore how these findings can be translated into diagnostic and monitoring solutions of the future that augment the work of therapists and medical consultants.

The project will be integrated with research on software engineering through the EPSRC SAUSE platform grant. It will be conducted at the psychology department of the University of Exeter, which has a long and successful history of high-impact research. The project will draw on the strengths of the Social, Environmental and Organisational Psychology Research Group (SEORG), which is world-leading in research on social identity, privacy, and well-being, and the Clinical and Cognitive Research Groups, which are world-leading on depression and addiction. The University of Exeter also fosters interdisciplinary work, for instance through the co-supervision of EPSRC students across colleges, access to world-leading experts on machine learning and data science at the Alan Turing Institute and experts in healthcare at the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health and the EPSRC Centre for Predicitive Modelling in Healthcare. Taken together this project will establish Exeter as a key centre for EPSRC work on psychological identity and digital technologies.

The main impact aim of this fellowship is to create social and economic benefits to the UK in healthcare and security by combining social psychology with computational linguistics and machine learning.

In particular, the proposed research will contribute to the development and application of AI by understanding how psychological identities shape privacy and, in turn, are shaped by technology use. Importantly, the proposed research will ultimately provide human analysts in security and healthcare with additional information on the psychological identities of target populations, thus augmenting rather than replacing humans. The research therefore addresses the EPSRC/NPIF industrial strategy area "High productivity services through artificial intelligence, data and digital technologies".

Psychological identities are closely related with several mental health problems. The proposed research aims to contribute to digital technology that transforms the delivery of healthcare by anticipating and preventing specific mental health problems (e.g., post-natal depression) and providing opportunities for monitoring patients outside clinical settings (e.g., during addiction therapy), thereby enabling independent living. Poor mental health has effects well beyond the individual: A recent government report estimates the costs to employers between £33-42 billion per year and annual costs to the UK economy at around 4.5% of GDP. The fellowship research addresses the EPSRC/NPIF area "Leading edge healthcare and medicines".

In the security and defence sector, I will work closely with Polaris Consulting to provide UK defence and security analysts with additional information based on the proposed psychological identity detection work to enable them to prioritise and act on relevant information. Outputs generated within this fellowship are anticipated to form part of future software packages. Work with Polaris as well as Dstl serve as a potential route to market for some of the project outputs - with potential to licence IP to Polaris for exploitation of my work through their software. The project will extend current work with the NCA on criminal identities as part of an EPSRC-NPIF studentship that started in September 2017. Working closely with the NCA from the start of the project will ensure that the findings can be translated into appropriate support for their operational and preventative work.

In the healthcare sector, I will work closely with Milton Keynes University Hospital (MKUH), EDP Drugs and Alcohol Services and the Lived Experience Group in Exeter to work towards detecting psychological identities relevant to the healthcare context (e.g., addiction identity) from written text. This research ultimately aims to help healthcare providers to achieve cost savings through early detection of (mental) health issues and cost-effective ways to identify and monitor patients remotely.

The planned research will impact on a variety of stakeholders including industry, professional communities of practice and the general public. Throughout the research I will engage with these stakeholders through:
- Patient and public involvement including focus groups, e.g., MKUH, Lived Experience Group
- Steering groups of stakeholders and academic experts in the field
- Research exchange visits with industry partners Polaris and MKUH
- Joint funding applications with industry partners Polaris and MKUH
- Exploration of different routes to market with industry partners, including IP licencing
- Development of proof of concept solutions with software engineering contacts from EPSRC platform SAUSE
- Public engagement, e.g., Soapbox Science, Pint of Science, @Bristol etc. and social and mainstream media
Additional impact will arise through career development for early career researchers (i.e. the fellow and her team of a PDRA and PhDs) including training and visits to leading industry and academic research labs (e.g., University of Queensland.