Echoes from the past: how technology mediated reflection improves well-being

Authors:
Ellen Isaacs;Artie Konrad;Alan Walendowski;Thomas Lennig;Victoria Hollis;Steve Whittaker
Affiliations:
Palo Alto Research Center, Palo Alto, California, USA;University of California, Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, California, Santa Cruz;Samsung Research America, San Jose, California, USA;University of California, Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, California, USA;University of California, Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, California, USA;University of California, Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, California, USA
Venue:
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Year:
2013

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Abstract

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.