Understanding User Perspectives on Prompts for Brief Reflection on Troubling Emotions
This work addresses the problem of providing accessible emotional self-reflection tools for users, though it is incremental in applying existing psychological principles to an online format.
The study investigated an online reflective question activity (RQA) based on cognitive behavioral therapy principles, finding that users perceived benefits such as reduced worry and structured awareness, with quantitative evidence showing it was worth the time investment.
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.