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Characterizing Emotional State Transitions During Prolonged Use of a Mindfulness and Meditation App: Observational Study

BACKGROUND: The increasing demand for mental health care, a lack of mental health care providers, and unequal access to mental health care services have created a need for innovative approaches to mental health care. Digital device apps, including digital therapeutics, that provide recommendations a...

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Autores principales: Athanas, Argus, McCorrison, Jamison, Campistron, Julie, Bender, Nick, Price, Jamie, Smalley, Susan, Schork, Nicholas J
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: JMIR Publications 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7967231/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33650986
http://dx.doi.org/10.2196/19832
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author Athanas, Argus
McCorrison, Jamison
Campistron, Julie
Bender, Nick
Price, Jamie
Smalley, Susan
Schork, Nicholas J
author_facet Athanas, Argus
McCorrison, Jamison
Campistron, Julie
Bender, Nick
Price, Jamie
Smalley, Susan
Schork, Nicholas J
author_sort Athanas, Argus
collection PubMed
description BACKGROUND: The increasing demand for mental health care, a lack of mental health care providers, and unequal access to mental health care services have created a need for innovative approaches to mental health care. Digital device apps, including digital therapeutics, that provide recommendations and feedback for dealing with stress, depression, and other mental health issues can be used to adjust mood and ultimately show promise to help meet this demand. In addition, the recommendations delivered through such apps can also be tailored to an individual’s needs (ie, personalized) and thereby potentially provide greater benefits than traditional “one-size-fits-all” recommendations. OBJECTIVE: This study aims to characterize individual transitions from one emotional state to another during the prolonged use of a digital app designed to provide a user with guided meditations based on their initial, potentially negative, emotional state. Understanding the factors that mediate such transitions can lead to improved recommendations for specific mindfulness and meditation interventions or activities (MMAs) provided in mental health apps. METHODS: We analyzed data collected during the use of the Stop, Breathe & Think (SBT) mindfulness app. The SBT app prompts users to input their emotional state before and immediately after engaging with MMAs recommended by the app. Data were collected from more than 650,000 SBT users engaging in nearly 5 million MMAs. We limited the scope of our analysis to users with 10 or more MMA sessions that included at least 6 basal emotional state evaluations. Using clustering techniques, we grouped emotions recorded by individual users and then applied longitudinal mixed effect models to assess the associations between individual recommended MMAs and transitions from one group of emotions to another. RESULTS: We found that basal emotional states have a strong influence on transitions from one emotional state to another after MMA engagement. We also found that different MMAs impact these transitions, and many were effective in eliciting a healthy transition but only under certain conditions. In addition, we observed gender and age effects on these transitions. CONCLUSIONS: We found that the initial emotional state of an SBT app user determines the type of SBT MMAs that will have a favorable effect on their transition from one emotional state to another. Our results have implications for the design and use of guided mental health recommendations for digital device apps.
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spelling pubmed-79672312021-03-24 Characterizing Emotional State Transitions During Prolonged Use of a Mindfulness and Meditation App: Observational Study Athanas, Argus McCorrison, Jamison Campistron, Julie Bender, Nick Price, Jamie Smalley, Susan Schork, Nicholas J JMIR Ment Health Original Paper BACKGROUND: The increasing demand for mental health care, a lack of mental health care providers, and unequal access to mental health care services have created a need for innovative approaches to mental health care. Digital device apps, including digital therapeutics, that provide recommendations and feedback for dealing with stress, depression, and other mental health issues can be used to adjust mood and ultimately show promise to help meet this demand. In addition, the recommendations delivered through such apps can also be tailored to an individual’s needs (ie, personalized) and thereby potentially provide greater benefits than traditional “one-size-fits-all” recommendations. OBJECTIVE: This study aims to characterize individual transitions from one emotional state to another during the prolonged use of a digital app designed to provide a user with guided meditations based on their initial, potentially negative, emotional state. Understanding the factors that mediate such transitions can lead to improved recommendations for specific mindfulness and meditation interventions or activities (MMAs) provided in mental health apps. METHODS: We analyzed data collected during the use of the Stop, Breathe & Think (SBT) mindfulness app. The SBT app prompts users to input their emotional state before and immediately after engaging with MMAs recommended by the app. Data were collected from more than 650,000 SBT users engaging in nearly 5 million MMAs. We limited the scope of our analysis to users with 10 or more MMA sessions that included at least 6 basal emotional state evaluations. Using clustering techniques, we grouped emotions recorded by individual users and then applied longitudinal mixed effect models to assess the associations between individual recommended MMAs and transitions from one group of emotions to another. RESULTS: We found that basal emotional states have a strong influence on transitions from one emotional state to another after MMA engagement. We also found that different MMAs impact these transitions, and many were effective in eliciting a healthy transition but only under certain conditions. In addition, we observed gender and age effects on these transitions. CONCLUSIONS: We found that the initial emotional state of an SBT app user determines the type of SBT MMAs that will have a favorable effect on their transition from one emotional state to another. Our results have implications for the design and use of guided mental health recommendations for digital device apps. JMIR Publications 2021-03-02 /pmc/articles/PMC7967231/ /pubmed/33650986 http://dx.doi.org/10.2196/19832 Text en ©Argus Athanas, Jamison McCorrison, Julie Campistron, Nick Bender, Jamie Price, Susan Smalley, Nicholas J Schork. Originally published in JMIR Mental Health (http://mental.jmir.org), 02.03.2021. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work, first published in JMIR Mental Health, is properly cited. The complete bibliographic information, a link to the original publication on http://mental.jmir.org/, as well as this copyright and license information must be included.
spellingShingle Original Paper
Athanas, Argus
McCorrison, Jamison
Campistron, Julie
Bender, Nick
Price, Jamie
Smalley, Susan
Schork, Nicholas J
Characterizing Emotional State Transitions During Prolonged Use of a Mindfulness and Meditation App: Observational Study
title Characterizing Emotional State Transitions During Prolonged Use of a Mindfulness and Meditation App: Observational Study
title_full Characterizing Emotional State Transitions During Prolonged Use of a Mindfulness and Meditation App: Observational Study
title_fullStr Characterizing Emotional State Transitions During Prolonged Use of a Mindfulness and Meditation App: Observational Study
title_full_unstemmed Characterizing Emotional State Transitions During Prolonged Use of a Mindfulness and Meditation App: Observational Study
title_short Characterizing Emotional State Transitions During Prolonged Use of a Mindfulness and Meditation App: Observational Study
title_sort characterizing emotional state transitions during prolonged use of a mindfulness and meditation app: observational study
topic Original Paper
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7967231/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33650986
http://dx.doi.org/10.2196/19832
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