mirrorU: Scaffolding Emotional Reflection via In-Situ Assessment and Interactive Feedback

We present mirrorU, a mobile system that supports users to reflect on and write about their daily emotional experience. While prior work has focused primarily on providing memory triggers or affective cues, mirrorU provides in-situ assessment and interactive feedback to scaffold reflective writing. It automatically and continuously monitors the composition process in three dimensions (i.e., level of detail, overall valence, and cognitive engagement) and provides relevant feedback to support reflection. In a 24-subject pilot deployment, we found that such scaffolding and feedback could help users compose longer reflections with more positive emotion words as well as more insight and causal words. We discuss how the literature on emotional writing informed mirrorU's design, and highlight the major findings as well as the lessons learned from the pilot study.