Does Smartphone Use Drive our Emotions or vice versa? A Causal Analysis

Abstract

In this paper, we demonstrate the existence of a bidirectional causal relationship between smartphone application use and user emotions. In a two-week long in-the-wild study with 30 participants we captured 502,851 instances of smartphone application use in tandem with corresponding emotional data from facial expressions. Our analysis shows that while in most cases application use drives user emotions, multiple application categories exist for which the causal effect is in the opposite direction. Our findings shed light on the relationship between smartphone use and emotional states. We furthermore discuss the opportunities for research and practice that arise from our findings and their potential to support emotional well-being.

Digital Emotion Regulation

“…An extensive review of psychological research on emotion regulation, the process model of emotion regulation, the classification of emotion-regulation strategies, the health implications of emotion regulation, and areas for future research. Sarsenbayeva, Z., Marini, G., Berkel, N., van Luo, C., Jiang, W., Yang, K., . .…”

“…More recently, studies have examined ER in naturalistic settings using experience-sampling methods (e.g., Brans, Koval, Verduyn, Lim, & Kuppens, 2013), although the emphasis remains on detecting predefined forms of explicit ER rather than discovering the diverse ER tactics that people use in everyday life. Techniques from computing research offer ways to detect and study these everyday activities, such as measuring ER automatically using smartphones equipped with passive sensing apps (e.g., Sarsenbayeva et al, 2020). In principle, such smartphone-based tools are capable of recording multiple time series that represent a person’s physical and social context, their technology use, and some of the changing physiological, behavioral, and experiential components of emotion (Harari et al, 2016).…”

“…A notable feature of digital ER is the way that contemporary smartphones bring these different tools -audio, video, games, social connection, e-commerce --together in a single personal portable platform, making a highly tailorable array of tools for ER available at essentially all times and places. Indeed, emerging research suggests that, for some individuals in particular, emotions can drive phone use (Sarsenbayeva et al, 2020).…”

“…"Does Smartphone Use Drive our Emotions or vice versa? A Causal Analysis" (Sarsenbayeva et al, 2020) Explores methods for automatically detecting digital emotion regulation, using smartphonebased sensing to infer relationships between people's emotions and their use of smartphones and apps.…”

Using Video Games to Regulate Emotions

“…Moreover, recent research has shown that smartphone usage may influence users' emotional states as well as emotions might define users' smartphone usage [26,36,45]. Researchers also demonstrate that depending on the content of mobile applications and smartphone use behaviour [37], users may experience either positive or negative affect [36] and vice versa [42].…”