Conversations With The Stressed Body: Facilitating Stress Self-Disclosure Among Adolescent Girls Through An Embodied Approach

TL;DR

This paper explores how embodied methods and technologies can facilitate stress self-disclosure among adolescent girls, revealing insights into somatic symptoms and coping strategies, and providing design implications for mental health support.

Contribution

It introduces a co-design workshop using Embodied Probes to understand and support stress self-disclosure in adolescent girls through embodied approaches.

Findings

Insights into somatic stress symptoms and sources

Embodied methods support stress self-disclosure

Design implications for embodied mental health technologies

Abstract

Adolescent girls face significant mental health challenges during their transition to adulthood, often experiencing heightened stress from various sources. While various interactive technologies for self-disclosure had been explored to support stress relief, little is known about how to encourage stress-related self-disclosure through an embodied approach. This study presents a co-design workshop centred on Embodied Probes, a series of artefacts and activities incorporating embodied methods and technologies. During the workshop, nine participants aged 15 to 18 engaged with their bodies, expressed bodily sensations through tangible means, and designed embodied prototypes tailored to their personal needs for stress perception and relief. The workshop revealed insights into somatic symptoms, sources, and coping strategies for stress among adolescent girls, as well as how embodied methods can support their stress self-disclosure. This paper contributes to the HCI community by offering design implications on leveraging embodied technologies to support self-disclosure for young women's mental well-being.