WHETHER FEAR OR BOREDOM:
APPS LIKE YOUPER CAN HELP YOU COPE WITH STRONG EMOTIONS IN TIMES OF CRISIS
The health app Youper uses science-based techniques to help its users manage their emotions. In over 80 percent of cases, the app was able to reduce feelings of worries and anxiety.
In times of crisis, people’s worries and fears increase. This is also shown by an evaluation of interactions with the American health app Youper.
Jana Lasser, Hannah Metzler and David Garcia from the Complexity Science Hub Vienna, together with Andrea Niles from Youper, took a look at the feelings that have dominated among the users of the app in recent months. For this purpose, the scientists evaluated 460,000 interactions of 72,000 users of the app.
PEOPLE FEEL A LOT OF ANXIETY
For each interaction with Youper, the users choose from 25 emotions those that are currently predominant in their lives, such as happiness, fear or gratitude. In a further step, the app asks what could have evoked the respective emotion.
The data analysis shows that expressions of anxiety have risen sharply since the second week of March—a trend that the researchers also found in Twitter data.
As the most important reasons for their feelings, the app users named
- Worries about the outside world,
- Interactions on social media
- Health
A closer look reveils: It is predominantly women who are worried and anxious.
Men and children under 18 deviate from this trend.
In fact, men are now claiming to feel “okay” even more often than before the epidemic.
Children on the other hand are increasingly bored and tired. This is not surprising. For example, teenagers (13 to 18 years) who cannot go to school and meet their friends suffer most from being “alone with themselves”. The kids most often reported being bored, but also increasingly felt tired, irritated or worried.
After querying the emotions, the app suggests activities, derived from psychotherapy, to help you deal better with the emotions. For example, exercises in mindfulness, goal setting and other proven problem-solving techniques are used.
At the end of the interaction with the app, the users are asked again about the intensity of their emotions. “We see that Youper helps people reduce feelings of anxiety in more than 80 percent of cases,” explains CSH-researcher Jana Lasser.
The scientists therefore see well-designed science-based apps as a valuable aid in providing psychological support to people in times of crisis. “Apps are inexpensive, and their use is not tied to place, time or therapists,” says the data scientist. “We therefore see good apps as a low-threshold way of coping better with the psychological consequences of the corona crisis”.
The analysed data originate from Youper users who have explicitly agreed to the scientific processing of their data.
