arXiv subjects

Mai Elsherief

Publications and source records attributed to Mai Elsherief.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

"He gets to be the fun parent": Understanding and Supporting Burnt-Out Mothers in Online Communities

Maternal burnout is a psychological phenomena with documented harms to both mother and child, requiring prompt attention. Mothers experiencing burnout might choose to turn to online anonymous platforms, such as Reddit, to share their experience, due to feelings of shame and stigmatization of mental health issues. In this work, we study how mothers use Reddit to discuss their experiences of burnout. We first identify posts written by burnt out mothers by manually annotating Reddit posts and training machine learning models on them. Focusing on posts made by this population (N = 3,244), we then investigate the issues brought up by mothers, such as the need for help, career advice, and co-parenting issues. Additionally, we investigate how the Reddit community responds to these posts through the analysis of comments. We find that commenters frequently share personal lived experiences with the poster, and provide emotional support. Finally, considering co-parenting could be a mitigating factor for parental burnout, we explore co-pareting patterns experienced by burnt out mothers, finding evidence of lack of support for and unequal expectations from mothers.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2025

Are LLMs Empathetic to All? Investigating the Influence of Multi-Demographic Personas on a Model's Empathy

Large Language Models' (LLMs) ability to converse naturally is empowered by their ability to empathetically understand and respond to their users. However, emotional experiences are shaped by demographic and cultural contexts. This raises an important question: Can LLMs demonstrate equitable empathy across diverse user groups? We propose a framework to investigate how LLMs' cognitive and affective empathy vary across user personas defined by intersecting demographic attributes. Our study introduces a novel intersectional analysis spanning 315 unique personas, constructed from combinations of age, culture, and gender, across four LLMs. Results show that attributes profoundly shape a model's empathetic responses. Interestingly, we see that adding multiple attributes at once can attenuate and reverse expected empathy patterns. We show that they broadly reflect real-world empathetic trends, with notable misalignments for certain groups, such as those from Confucian culture. We complement our quantitative findings with qualitative insights to uncover model behaviour patterns across different demographic groups. Our findings highlight the importance of designing empathy-aware LLMs that account for demographic diversity to promote more inclusive and equitable model behaviour.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Posting Patterns of Members of Parental Subreddits

Online forums (e.g., Reddit) are used by many parents to discuss their challenges, needs, and receive support. While studies have investigated the contents of posts made to popular parental subreddits revealing the family health concerns being expressed, little is known about parents' posting patterns or other issues they engage in. In this study, we explore the posting activity of users of 55 parental subreddits. Exploring posts made by these users (667K) across Reddit (34M posts) reveals that over 85% of posters are not one-time users of Reddit and actively engage with the community. Studying cross-posting patterns also reveals the use of subreddits dedicated to other topics such as relationship and health advice (e.g., r/AskDocs, r/relationship_advice) by this population. As a result, for a comprehensive understanding of the type of information posters share and seek, future work should investigate sub-communities outside of parental-specific ones. Finally, we expand the list of parental subreddits, compiling a total of 115 subreddits that could be utilized in future studies of parental concerns.

cs.SI↗