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Echoes From the Past: How Technology Mediated Reflection Improves Well-Being
Abstract and Figures
As people document more of their lives online, some recent
systems are encouraging people to later revisit those recordings, a practice we’re calling technology-mediated
reflection (TMR). Since we know that unmediated reflection benefits psychological well-being, we explored whether and how TMR affects well-being. We built Echo, a smartphone application for recording everyday experiences
and reflecting on them later. We conducted three system deployments with 44 users who generated over 12,000 recordings and reflections. We found that TMR improves
well-being as assessed by four psychological metrics. By analyzing the content of these entries we discovered two mechanisms that explain this improvement. We also report
benefits of very long-term TMR.
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... Data stored on social media can function as "a personal archive and repository for meaningful memories" [121]. These data and the memories or feelings they elicit when people return to them can have positive or negative impacts on well-being [53,56,63], as the past does not always evoke positive affect. Social media platforms' affordances can facilitate memory processes (e.g. ...
... Viewing photos and other digital artifacts can cue memories for users [115] and prompt reminiscence [116,120], potentially impacting viewers' well-being in positive and negative ways [53,56,63]. For example, young adult Facebook users returning to past content experienced mixtures of nostalgia as well as embarrassment [104]. ...
... Social media memory features involve algorithms that aim to promote reminiscence and have positive impacts on users' well-being [56,63], but lack the nuance to handle emotionally sensitive contexts such as relationship break-ups [51,93,102] or gender transitions [44,45] to name a few. For instance, Facebook's seemingly positive 'On This Day' memory feature leads to upsetting experiences after a romantic relationship breakup [93]. ...
Documenting weight-related journeys (e.g., weight loss, weight gain) is prevalent on social media, as is weight stigma, resulting in easily accessible personal archives filled with emotional, and potentially stigmatizing content. Through semi-structured interviews with 17 U.S.-based social media users sharing weight-related journeys, we investigate the motivations for and impacts of returning to previously posted weight-related social media content. We show how these personal archives foster a contested relationship between one's past and current self, where returning to past content facilitates dynamic interpretations of the self. We argue these interpretations' impacts cannot be understood without acknowledging and addressing the socio-technical context in which they exist: one filled with weight stigma, fatphobia, and narrow body ideals. We introduce the novel concepts of Transtemporal Support and Transtemporal Harm to describe the support and harms that one experiences in the present from returning to their past social media content. We posit that designs accounting for transtemporal support 1) can facilitate reflective sense-making for users who create repositories of digital artifacts about sensitive, potentially stigmatizing experiences on social media, and 2) should not perpetuate transtemporal harm.
... With the ubiquity of smartphones and data storage becoming cheaper, people can record anything at any time, a practice called lifelogging [51,52]. These technologies support reminiscence and reflection [26,57], which improves well-being [16,57]. The rich contextual information of images facilitates autobiographical recollection [9,110]. ...
... With the ubiquity of smartphones and data storage becoming cheaper, people can record anything at any time, a practice called lifelogging [51,52]. These technologies support reminiscence and reflection [26,57], which improves well-being [16,57]. The rich contextual information of images facilitates autobiographical recollection [9,110]. ...
... While reflecting on positive events increases the ability to enjoy life and helps to perceive things more positively [16], reflecting on negative events (e.g., being confronted to traumatic events) can help to cope with them on the long-term [91]. Reflection can be done without employing technology by mentally reviewing memories of past personal experiences, or using technologies support, by reviewing rich digital records of past events (e.g., text, images or videos) [57,65]. ...
Human memory has notable limitations (e.g., forgetting) which have necessitated a variety of memory aids (e.g., calendars). As we grow closer to mass adoption of everyday Extended Reality (XR), which is frequently leveraging perceptual limitations (e.g., redirected walking), it becomes pertinent to consider how XR could leverage memory limitations (forgetting, distorting, persistence) to induce memory manipulations. As memories highly impact our self-perception, social interactions, and behaviors, there is a pressing need to understand XR Memory Manipulations (XRMMs). We ran three speculative design workshops (n=12), with XR and memory researchers creating 48 XRMM scenarios. Through thematic analysis, we define XRMMs, present a framework of their core components and reveal three classes (at encoding, pre-retrieval, at retrieval). Each class differs in terms of technology (AR, VR) and impact on memory (influencing quality of memories, inducing forgetting, distorting memories). We raise ethical concerns and discuss opportunities of perceptual and memory manipulations in XR.
... Moreover, research has already demonstrated that technologymediated reflection can improve well-being [33]. However, there is a lack of conceptual agreement within the HCI field regarding reflection, with a variety of definitions currently in use [11], for instance "reflection-in-action" and "reflection-on-action" by Schön [61] or transformative reflection in the context of social-emotional learning which cannot be simply triggered by data and requires careful scaffolding [65]. ...
... Their use of the term reflection refers to interpreting behaviour based on collected data. In the context of this work, we employ Schön [61]'s notion of reflection-on-action and reflection-in-action, as well as the aspects of reflection on past events and reminiscing with the goal of well-being discussed by Isaacs et al. [33]. We also build on Marcu et al. [41]'s work, exploring collaborative reflection in the context of collaborative collection and sharing of data in the form of logging and sharing posts about experiences. ...
... An increasing number of systems designed by HCI researchers aim to support reflection, e.g. for symptom tracking for multiple sclerosis [4], stress management [59], and reflection on everyday experiences [33]. The concept of reflection for children has also been explored within HCI research in varying contexts. ...
Designing for children with ADHD has been of increasing interest to the HCI community. However, current approaches do not adequately involve all relevant stakeholders, and primarily focus on addressing symptoms, following a medical model of disability that is extrinsic to neurodivergent interests.
To address this, we employed a multi-step, multi-stakeholder approach (N=31).
First, we conducted 1) interviews with children with ADHD and their care ecosystem followed by 2) a co-design pilot with one child with ADHD and his therapists and an interview with a UX designer and an occupational therapist.
We then employed 3) co-design sessions with neurotypical children and children with ADHD, and 4) a focus group with their therapists.
We identified communication and reflection as key concepts for empowering and promoting the well-being of children with ADHD and their care ecosystem. We contribute design implications for future systems aiming to promote the overall well-being of this population.
... Another way in which reflection improves the capacity for resilience is that the negative event can be interpreted as less negative once time has passed, and individuals know the outcome of the stressor, which is often less severe than expected. This can lead to the situation being reframed into something more positive and unnecessary to worry about [12]. ...
... In addition to the coaching program Working on Resilience, results from earlier studies on self-tracking and e-coaching for resilience training were also used during the design of the BringBalance app [26,27,34]. Other sources for creating the design of the BringBalance app were provided by the literature on reflection [10,12,15,24,[35][36][37], coaching techniques [38][39][40][41][42][43], and persuasive design elements that can support the reflection process, such as visualization and personalization [17,22,44,45]. ...
... These steps seemed to trigger participants to rethink their situations, which led to the observation of trends and a deeper understanding of their indicators of stress and resilience. The same process was observed in a study by Isaacs et al [12], who found that participants defined as recorders (those who reported the event once) and those defined as reflectors (those who reflected on the event multiple times), both benefitted from their reflections, although reflectors were more likely to observe patterns and learn from these events to improve future performance. ...
Background:
An eHealth tool that coaches employees through the process of reflection has the potential to support employees with moderate levels of stress to increase their capacity for resilience. Most eHealth tools that include self-tracking summarize the collected data for the users. However, users need to gain a deeper understanding of the data and decide upon the next step to take through self-reflection.
Objective:
In this study, we aimed to examine the perceived effectiveness of the guidance offered by an automated e-Coach during employees' self-reflection process in gaining insights into their situation and on their perceived stress and resilience capacities and the usefulness of the design elements of the e-Coach during this process.
Methods:
Of the 28 participants, 14 (50%) completed the 6-week BringBalance program that allowed participants to perform reflection via four phases: identification, strategy generation, experimentation, and evaluation. Data collection consisted of log data, ecological momentary assessment (EMA) questionnaires for reflection provided by the e-Coach, in-depth interviews, and a pre- and posttest survey (including the Brief Resilience Scale and the Perceived Stress Scale). The posttest survey also asked about the utility of the elements of the e-Coach for reflection. A mixed methods approach was followed.
Results:
Pre- and posttest scores on perceived stress and resilience were not much different among completers (no statistical test performed). The automated e-Coach did enable users to gain an understanding of factors that influenced their stress levels and capacity for resilience (identification phase) and to learn the principles of useful strategies to improve their capacity for resilience (strategy generation phase). Design elements of the e-Coach reduced the reflection process into smaller steps to re-evaluate situations and helped them to observe a trend (identification phase). However, users experienced difficulties integrating the chosen strategies into their daily life (experimentation phase). Moreover, the identified events related to stress and resilience were too specific through the guidance offered by the e-Coach (identification phase), and the events did not recur, which consequently left users unable to sufficiently practice (strategy generation phase), experiment (experimentation phase), and evaluate (evaluation phase) the techniques during meaningful events.
Conclusions:
Participants were able to perform self-reflection under the guidance of the automated e-Coach, which often led toward gaining new insights. To improve the reflection process, more guidance should be offered by the e-Coach that would aid employees to identify events that recur in daily life. Future research could study the effects of the suggested improvements on the quality of reflection via an automated e-Coach.
... A number of studies have tried to overcome the challenges of conducting longitudinal studies in the use of self-tracking experience data for well-being research. For example, Isaacs et al. demonstrate a smartphone application called Echo which supports technology-mediated reflection, studying usage for durations of both one month and four years [20]. Using the data from the initial one month, Issac et al. showed that reflections improved actions and lessons learnt for future behaviour. ...
While self-report studies are common in Human-Computer Interaction research, few evaluations have assessed their long term use. We present a longitudinal analysis of a web-based workplace application that collects well-being assessments and offers suggestions to improve individual, team, and organisational performance. Our dataset covers 219 users. We assess their first year of application use, focusing on their usage patterns, well-being evaluations, and behaviour towards notifications. Our results highlight that the drop-off in use was the steepest in the first week (-24.2%). However, substantial breaks in usage were common and did not necessarily result in dropout. We found that latency periods of eight days or more predicted a stronger intention to drop out than stay engaged and that reminder notifications did not result in more completed self-reports but significantly prolonged the usage period. Our work strengthens findings related to high drop out rates, but also provides counter-evidence by showing that despite individuals appearing to drop-off in short-term studies, individuals can and do return to self-report applications after extensive breaks. We contribute an analysis of usage behaviour drivers in the area of technology-enabled well-being measurement, responding to the call for longer-term research to extend the growing literature on self-report studies.KeywordsSelf-reportwell-beinglongitudinaldiary studyexperience sampling
... Multiple systems that intend to facilitate reflection have been designed in HCI for various application contexts [3,4,12,41]. For instance, the web-based application MoodAdaptor prompts participants to reflect on positive and negative memories depending on one's current mood [49]. ...
Reflecting on personal challenges can be difficult. Without encouragement, the reflection process often remains superficial, thus inhibiting deeper understanding and learning from past experiences. To allow people to immerse themselves in and deeply reflect on past challenges, we developed SelVReflect, a VR experience which offers active voice-based guidance and a space to freely express oneself. SelVReflect was developed in an iterative design process (N=5) and evaluated in a user study with N=20 participants. We found that SelVReflect enabled participants to approach their challenge and its (emotional) components from different perspectives and to discover new relationships between these components. By making use of the spatial possibilities in VR, participants developed a better understanding of the situation and of themselves. We contribute empirical evidence of how a guided VR experience can support reflection. We discuss opportunities and design requirements for guided VR experiences that aim to foster deeper reflection.
... Furthermore, disclosing an autobiographical memory to a listener, or recalling an event collaboratively, can reduce the negative valence associated with that memory (Maswood, Rasmussen, & Rajaram, 2019;Skowronski, Gibbons, Vogl, & Walker, 2004). It should be noted, however, that the app used by Konrad and colleagues (2016) was designed specifically to encourage reflection and ultimately improve well-being (Isaacs et al., 2013). Thus, future work should address the effects of technology-mediated recollection and social media use in the context of the types of apps and websites that people use more frequently in their everyday lives. ...
Digital technologies have changed the everyday use of human memory. When information is saved or made readily available online, there is less need to encode or maintain access to that information within the biological structures of memory. People increasingly depend on the Internet and various digital devices to learn and remember, but the implications and consequences of this dependence remain largely unknown. The present chapter provides an overview of research to date on memory in the digital age. It focuses in particular on issues related to transactive memory, cognitive offloading, photo taking, social media use, and learning in the classroom.
... Ståhl et al. [2009] introduced the Affective Diary, which combined data from body sensors and activities on the mobile phone like text messages and photographs, to provide cues of emotional expressivity and reminiscence of bodily experiences. Isaacs et al. Isaacs et al. [2013] built a smartphone application named Echo and showed that the technology-mediated reflection (TMR) could improve well-being. The application recorded users' everyday experiences, including their writing of a subject line, rating of the happiness, photos, videos, etc., and then created reflection posts on smartphones for users to re-rate. ...
Self-tracking has been long discussed, which can monitor daily activities and help users to recall previous experiences. Such data-capturing technique is no longer limited to photos, text messages, or personal diaries in recent years. With the development of wearable EEG devices, we introduce a novel modality of logging EEG data while listening to music, and bring up the idea of the neural-centric way of life with the designed data analysis application named EEGLog. Four consumer-grade wearable EEG devices are explored by collecting EEG data from 24 participants. Three modules are introduced in EEGLog, including the summary module of EEG data, emotion reports, music listening activities, and memorial moments, the emotion detection module, and the music recommendation module. Feedback from interviews about using EEG devices and EEGLog were obtained and analyzed for future EEG logging development.
We present AffectAura, an emotional prosthetic that allows users to reflect on their emotional states over long periods of time. We designed a multimodal sensor set-up for continuous logging of audio, visual, physiological and contextual data, a classification scheme for predicting user affective state and an interface for user reflection. The system continuously predicts a user's valence, arousal and engage-ment, and correlates this with information on events, communications and data interactions. We evaluate the interface through a user study consisting of six users and over 240 hours of data, and demonstrate the utility of such a reflection tool. We show that users could reason forward and backward in time about their emotional experiences using the interface, and found this useful.
People's recollections of the past are often positively biased. This bias has 2 causes. The 1st cause lies in people's perceptions of events. The authors review the results of several studies and present several new comparative analyses of these studies, all of which indicate that people perceive events in their lives to more often be pleasant than unpleasant. A 2nd cause is the fading affect bias: The affect associated with unpleasant events fades faster than the affect associated with pleasant events. The authors review the results of several studies documenting this bias and present evidence indicating that dysphoria (mild depression) disrupts such bias. Taken together, this evidence suggests that autobiographical memory represents an important exception to the theoretical claim that bad is stronger than good.
There is an ongoing search for theoretical foundations and design principles for interactive systems that support healthy behavior change. In this work-in-progress, we present several behavior change strategies that are currently used in effective health self-management interventions. We then discuss how these strategies can be used in applications that support behavior change in the health/wellness domain.
This paper presents a broad overview of the expressive writing paradigm. Since its first use in the 1980s, dozens of studies have explored the parameters and boundary conditions of its effectiveness. In the laboratory, consistent and significant health improvements are found when individuals write or talk about personally upsetting experiences. The effects include both subjective and objective markers of health and well-being. The disclosure phenomenon appears to generalize across settings, many individual difference factors, and several Western cultures, and is independent of social feedback.
The Living Memory Box project examines how to research and design user-centered system to support the collection, archiving and sharing of moments from a child's life. This research has provided us with details of key features to enhance our user-centered design and encompass all aspects of the system. We plan to use these findings to influence the development of ubiquitous capture and access methods. It is our contention that this method of desing can yield a strong foundation for the development of user-centered design throughout all aspects of the system.
Describes the Experience Sampling Method (ESM), a research procedure that consists of asking individuals to provide systematic self-reports at random occasions during the waking hours of a normal week. Files created from sets of these self-reports from a sample of individuals become an archival file of daily experience. The ESM obtains information about the private as well as the public aspects of individuals' lives, secures data about behavioral and intrapsychic aspects of daily activity, and obtains reports about people's experiences as they occur, thereby minimizing the effects of reliance on memory and reconstruction. (51 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
The pursuit of happiness is an important goal for many people. However, surprisingly little scientific research has focused on the question of how happiness can be increased and then sustained, probably because of pessimism engendered by the concepts of genetic determinism and hedonic adaptation. Nevertheless, emerging sources of optimism exist regarding the possibility of permanent increases in happiness. Drawing on the past well-being literature, the authors propose that a person's chronic happiness level is governed by 3 major factors: a genetically determined set point for happiness, happiness-relevant circumstantial factors, and happiness-relevant activities and practices. The authors then consider adaptation and dynamic processes to show why the activity category offers the best opportunities for sustainably increasing happiness. Finally, existing research is discussed in support of the model, including 2 preliminary happiness-increasing interventions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)