Resonance: Drawing from Memories to Imagine Positive Futures through AI-Augmented Journaling
This addresses mental health improvement for individuals through an AI-augmented journaling approach, representing an incremental application of existing AI methods to a new domain.
The paper tackles the problem of enhancing mental health by developing Resonance, an AI-powered journaling tool that generates action-oriented future suggestions based on past memories, and finds in a two-week randomized controlled study (N=55) that it significantly reduces PHQ8 depression scores and increases daily positive affect, especially for personalized and novel suggestions.
People inherently use experiences of their past while imagining their future, a capability that plays a crucial role in mental health. Resonance is an AI-powered journaling tool designed to augment this ability by offering AI-generated, action-oriented suggestions for future activities based on the user's own past memories. Suggestions are offered when a new memory is logged and are followed by a prompt for the user to imagine carrying out the suggestion. In a two-week randomized controlled study (N=55), we found that using Resonance significantly improved mental health outcomes, reducing the users' PHQ8 scores, a measure of current depression, and increasing their daily positive affect, particularly when they would likely act on the suggestion. Notably, the effectiveness of the suggestions was higher when they were personal, novel, and referenced the user's logged memories. Finally, through open-ended feedback, we discuss the factors that encouraged or hindered the use of the tool.