“Kind and Grateful”: A Context-Sensitive Smartphone App Utilizing Inspirational Content to Promote Gratitude

Background Previous research has shown that gratitude positively influences psychological wellbeing and physical health. Grateful people are reported to feel more optimistic and happy, to better mitigate aversive experiences, and to have stronger interpersonal bonds. Gratitude interventions have been shown to result in improved sleep, more frequent exercise and stronger cardiovascular and immune systems. These findings call for the development of technologies that would inspire gratitude. This paper presents a novel system designed toward this end. Methods We leverage pervasive technologies to naturally embed inspiration to express gratitude in everyday life. Novel to this work, mobile sensor data is utilized to infer optimal moments for stimulating contextually relevant thankfulness and appreciation. Sporadic mood measurements are inventively obtained through the smartphone lock screen, investigating their interplay with grateful expressions. Both momentary thankful emotion and dispositional gratitude are measured. To evaluate our system, we ran two rounds of randomized control trials (RCT), including a pilot study (N = 15, 2 weeks) and a main study (N = 27, 5 weeks). Studies’ participants were provided with a newly developed smartphone app through which they were asked to express gratitude; the app displayed inspirational content to only the intervention group, while measuring contextual cues for all users. Results In both rounds of the RCT, the intervention was associated with improved thankful behavior. Significant increase was observed in multiple facets of practicing gratitude in the intervention groups. The average frequency of practicing thankfulness increased by more than 120 %, comparing the baseline weeks with the intervention weeks of the main study. In contrast, the control group of the same study exhibited a decrease of 90 % in the frequency of thankful expressions. In the course of the study’s 5 weeks, increases in dispositional gratitude and in psychological wellbeing were also apparent. Analyzing the relation between mood and gratitude expressions, our data suggest that practicing gratitude increases the probability of going up in terms of emotional valence and down in terms of emotional arousal. The influences of inspirational content and contextual cues on promoting thankful behavior were also analyzed: We present data suggesting that the more successful times for eliciting expressions of gratitude tend to be shortly after a social experience, shortly after location change, and shortly after physical activity. Conclusions The results support our intervention as an impactful method to promote grateful affect and behavior. Moreover, they provide insights into design and evaluation of general behavioral intervention technologies.Robert Wood Johnson FoundationMIT Media Lab Consortiu

Diary studies : capturing real-time experiences in the workplace

Although diary studies have become popular in organizational health research in recent years, this advanced quantitative methodology is rarely used in workplace research. This chapter introduces this methodology, helping workplace researchers to get access to the required knowledge, and presents an overview of how diary methods can increase the rigour in studying workplace phenomena. The chapter describes and demonstrates the application of diary-style methods for quantitative workplace research. It describes different types of study designs and their practical and methodological considerations. Several studies exemplify the application of this method. This chapter concludes with recommendations for the implementation of diary studies

The Elaborated Intrusion Theory of Desire: A 10-year retrospective and implications for addiction treatments

Ten years after the publication of Elaborated Intrusion (EI) Theory, there is now substantial research into its key predictions. The distinction between intrusive thoughts, which are driven by automatic processes, and their elaboration, involving controlled processing, is well established. Desires for both addictive substances and other desired targets are typically marked by imagery, especially when they are intense. Attention training strategies such as body scanning reduce intrusive thoughts, while concurrent tasks that introduce competing sensory information interfere with elaboration, especially if they compete for the same limited-capacity working memory resources. EI Theory has spawned new assessment instruments that are performing strongly and offer the ability to more clearly delineate craving from correlated processes. It has also inspired new approaches to treatment. In particular, training people to use vivid sensory imagery for functional goals holds promise as an intervention for substance misuse, since it is likely to both sustain motivation and moderate craving

MEASuRing symptoms in Irritable Bowel Syndrome:towards an individualized and daily life approach

Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) is a common disorder of the brain-gut axis, characterized by abdominal pain and altered bowel habits. IBS diagnosis is symptom-based and therefore, accurate symptom registration is important for scientific research and clinical practice. In this thesis, the use of the most recent diagnostic criteria is evaluated and the (natural) course of symptoms over time is described. Subsequently, a new method for symptom registration in IBS, the experience sampling method (ESM), is developed and validated, and its applications are described. In summary, this thesis describes the challenges of capturing the full picture of IBS symptoms, including heterogeneity between subjects, within-subject changes over time, and co-morbid psychological and environmental factors that may interfere with gastrointestinal symptoms. The research presented serves as a basis for the use of the ESM in IBS scientific research, and further implementation in clinical care will be future steps

From grumpy to cheerful (and back): How power impacts mood in and across different contexts

Although lay intuition and some academic theories suggest that power increases variability in mood, the prevailing view in the literature is that power elevates mood—a view that is not consistently borne out in empirical data. To rectify these discrepancies, we conducted five studies examining the impact of high and low power on mood in, and across, contexts of differing valence (negative vs. neutral vs. positive). Drawing on 19,710 observations from 1,042 participants, we found that high (vs. medium/control) power elevated, and low (vs. medium/control) power dampened, individuals' mood at baseline/in neutral contexts and in positive contexts. However, neither high (vs. medium/control) power nor low (vs. medium/control) power modulated individuals' mood in negative contexts. Overall, high (vs. medium/control) power tended to increase, and low (vs. medium/control) power decreased variability in mood across contexts (the former effect was marginally significant). We discuss how these findings corroborate, but also qualify, lay intuition and social psychological theories of power

Exploring the Use of Online Social Network Activity and Smartphone Photography as an Intervention to Track and Influence Emotional Well-Being

The proliferation of internet and mobile technologies has expanded the means of detecting and influencing mental health, with this thesis focusing on the affective phenomena associated with emotional well-being including mood, affect and emotion. Traditional detection techniques including surveys and self-reports are grounded in the psychological literature; however, they introduce an inhibiting burden on the participants. The ability to passively detect psychological state using technologies including online behavioural tracking and mobile sensors is a prevalent focus of the current literature. Traditional positive psychology interventions commonly involve emotionally expressive writing tasks which can also be tedious for participants. Augmenting traditional intervention techniques with technologies such as smartphone applications can be one method to modernise interventions. The first research study in this thesis aimed to utilise online social network (OSN) activity to detect mood changes. The study involved collecting the participants' behavioural activities such as likes, comments and tweets from their Facebook and Twitter profiles. Machine learning was used to create an algorithm to classify participants according to their online activity and their self-reported mood as ground truth. The findings indicated that participants can be grouped into those who displayed positive, negative or weak correlations with their online activity. Following the classification, the system used a sliding window of 7 days to track the participant's mood changes for those in the positive and negative groups. The second research study introduced a positive psychology intervention in the form of a smartphone application called SnapAppy which promotes positive thinking by integrating momentary smartphone photography with traditional intervention methodologies. Participants were required to take photos and write about positive moments, past events, acts of kindness and gratuitous situations, encouraging them to think more positively. The results indicated that features such as the number of photos taken, the effort applied to annotating the photos, the number of photos revisited and the photos containing people were positively correlated with an improvement in mood and affect. The product of this thesis is a novel method of passively tracking mood changes using online social network activity and an innovative smartphone intervention utilising photography to influence emotional well-being

Quantifying Quality of Life

Describes technological methods and tools for objective and quantitative assessment of QoL Appraises technology-enabled methods for incorporating QoL measurements in medicine Highlights the success factors for adoption and scaling of technology-enabled methods This open access book presents the rise of technology-enabled methods and tools for objective, quantitative assessment of Quality of Life (QoL), while following the WHOQOL model. It is an in-depth resource describing and examining state-of-the-art, minimally obtrusive, ubiquitous technologies. Highlighting the required factors for adoption and scaling of technology-enabled methods and tools for QoL assessment, it also describes how these technologies can be leveraged for behavior change, disease prevention, health management and long-term QoL enhancement in populations at large. Quantifying Quality of Life: Incorporating Daily Life into Medicine fills a gap in the field of QoL by providing assessment methods, techniques and tools. These assessments differ from the current methods that are now mostly infrequent, subjective, qualitative, memory-based, context-poor and sparse. Therefore, it is an ideal resource for physicians, physicians in training, software and hardware developers, computer scientists, data scientists, behavioural scientists, entrepreneurs, healthcare leaders and administrators who are seeking an up-to-date resource on this subject