2018 – PhD Research Study

SnapAppy

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About the Study

SnapAppy is a positive psychology intervention promoting positive thinking by integrating momentary smartphone photography with traditional intervention methodologies to improve emotional well-being.

Over a month-long study, participants were required to take photos and write about positive moments, past events, acts of kindness and gratuitous situations whilst also logging their mood and affect using established psychological measures.

The results indicated that features such as the number of photos taken, the effort applied to annotating the photos, the number of photos revisited and the photos containing people were positively correlated with an improvement in mood and affect.

Participants can log in to the app using either Facebook, Google or an email and password. During onboarding, participants are instructed to take or choose photos of positive moments. Participants are introduced to the five photo categories. Participants are advised that they will need to annotate photos with an emotional description. Finally, the participation instructions for the study are listed. Entry photos, categories and descriptions can be viewed on the timeline screen. When taking a photo for a new entry, it must be assigned to a category corresponding to its type of positive experience. After assigning the photo to a category, one can write a description describing how the event made them feel. This screen shows the participant's progress through the study and the number of entries per day. The progress screen also shows the number of entries per category and the participant's mood reports. Participants could change the time of their mood notification in order to suit their sleep schedule. Mood is reported using a 7-point Likert slider ranging from -3 (bad) to +3 (good). The survey screen showing one affective state and the various answers from the PANAS survey. Logo design by <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/james-rowe-b892b965/" target="_blank">James Rowe</a>. Promoting SnapAppy at the University of Kent Wellbeing Festival to attract study participants.