Understanding User Perspectives on Prompts for Brief Reflection on Troubling Emotions

TL;DR

This study explores an online reflective activity inspired by cognitive behavioral therapy that helps users externalize emotions, providing benefits like emotional awareness and worry reduction, with evidence from experiments and real-world deployment.

Contribution

It introduces a brief, psychology-informed reflection activity for emotional self-awareness, validated through user studies and deployment, demonstrating its potential benefits.

Findings

Participants felt less worried after the activity

Users gained structured awareness of their thoughts

Repeated use showed sustained benefits but potential monotony

Abstract

We investigate users' perspectives on an online reflective question activity (RQA) that prompts people to externalize their underlying emotions on a troubling situation. Inspired by principles of cognitive behavioral therapy, our 15-minute activity encourages self-reflection without a human or automated conversational partner. A deployment of our RQA on Amazon Mechanical Turk suggests that people perceive several benefits from our RQA, including structured awareness of their thoughts and problem-solving around managing their emotions. Quantitative evidence from a randomized experiment suggests people find that our RQA makes them feel less worried by their selected situation and worth the minimal time investment. A further two-week technology probe deployment with 11 participants indicates that people see benefits to doing this activity repeatedly, although the activity may get monotonous over time. In summary, this work demonstrates the promise of online reflection activities that carefully leverage principles of psychology in their design.