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EmotionCheck: leveraging bodily signals and false feedback to regulate our emotions

Published:12 September 2016Publication History

ABSTRACT

In this paper we demonstrate that it is possible to help individuals regulate their emotions with mobile interventions that leverage the way we naturally react to our bodily signals. Previous studies demonstrate that the awareness of our bodily signals, such as our heart rate, directly influences the way we feel. By leveraging these findings we designed a wearable device to regulate user's anxiety by providing a false feedback of a slow heart rate. The results of an experiment with 67 participants show that the device kept the anxiety of the individuals in low levels when compared to the control group and the other conditions. We discuss the implications of our findings and present some promising directions for designing and developing this type of intervention for emotion regulation.

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      UbiComp '16: Proceedings of the 2016 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing
      September 2016
      1288 pages
      ISBN:9781450344616
      DOI:10.1145/2971648

      Copyright © 2016 ACM

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      • Published: 12 September 2016

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