Exploring and Designing for Memory Impairments in Depression

Abstract

Depression is an affective disorder with distinctive autobiographical memory impairments, including negative bias, overgeneralization and reduced positivity. Several clinical therapies address these impairments, and there is an opportunity to develop new supports for treatment by considering depression-associated memory impairments within design. We report on interviews with ten experts in treating depression, with expertise in both neuropsychology and cognitive behavioral therapies. The interviews explore approaches for addressing each of these memory impairments. We found consistent use of positive memories for treating all memory impairments, the challenge of direct retrieval, and the need to support the experience of positive memories. Our contributions aim to sensitize HCI researchers to the limitations of memory technologies, broaden their awareness of memory impairments beyond episodic memory recall, and inspire them to engage with this less explored design space. Our findings open up new design opportunities for memory technologies for depression, including positive memory banks for active encoding and selective retrieval, novel cues for supporting generative retrieval, and novel interfaces to strengthen the reliving of positive memories. CCS CONCEPTS • Human-centered computing • Human-centered interaction (HCI) • Empirical studies in HCI

Towards Affective Chronometry

“…Future work will focus on building a DIY toolkit with modularized components [70] of different actuators that can be plugged and played with biosensors. Such kit may be used for codesigning with therapists to better tailor it to the needs of people living with affective disorders such as depression [60,68]. We now discuss four design implications of our findings including support for affective chronometry for both raise and decay time of emotional response, design for slowness, and for expressiveness.…”

HCI and Affective Health

“…Some opportunities for support may be straightforward, whereas others, particularly those with a more embodied element, will require more creative ideation and exploration of the design space [44,165]. As well as existing but unexplored interventions, such as those based on memory [129], there are concepts like the extended model of emotion regulation [67,68] that could spur new approaches. Only with greater cooperation between psychology, HCI researchers and patients can we realize the potential of technologies within affective health.…”

Taste Your Emotions

“…Despite the growing body of work on affective technologies [8,18,33,37,41,46], to date, applications of taste-emotion mappings have been limited within HCI. Landmark examples come from gaming applications, in which taste supports an immersive experience in combination with other stimuli.…”