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MyTraces: Investigating Correlation and Causation between Users’ Emotional States and Mobile Phone Interaction

Published: 11 September 2017 Publication History

Abstract

Most of the existing work concerning the analysis of emotional states and mobile phone interaction has been based on correlation analysis. In this paper, for the first time, we carry out a causality study to investigate the causal links between users’ emotional states and their interaction with mobile phones, which could provide valuable information to practitioners and researchers. The analysis is based on a dataset collected in-the-wild. We recorded 5,118 mood reports from 28 users over a period of 20 days.
Our results show that users’ emotions have a causal impact on different aspects of mobile phone interaction. On the other hand, we can observe a causal impact of the use of specific applications, reflecting the external users’ context, such as socializing and traveling, on happiness and stress level. This study has profound implications for the design of interactive mobile systems since it identifies the dimensions that have causal effects on users’ interaction with mobile phones and vice versa. These findings might lead to the design of more effective computing systems and services that rely on the analysis of the emotional state of users, for example for marketing and digital health applications.

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cover image Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies
Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies  Volume 1, Issue 3
September 2017
2023 pages
EISSN:2474-9567
DOI:10.1145/3139486
Issue’s Table of Contents
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 11 September 2017
Accepted: 01 July 2017
Revised: 01 May 2017
Received: 01 February 2017
Published in IMWUT Volume 1, Issue 3

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  1. Causality Analysis
  2. Mobile Sensing

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  • (2024)Investigating User-perceived Impacts of Contextual Factors on Opportune MomentsProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36765148:MHCI(1-28)Online publication date: 24-Sep-2024
  • (2024)"I Want Lower Tone for Work-Related Notifications": Exploring the Effectiveness of User-Assigned Notification Alerts in Improving User Speculation of and Attendance to Mobile NotificationsProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36765128:MHCI(1-25)Online publication date: 24-Sep-2024
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