Picture This: Bringing Joy Into Focus and Developing Healthy Habits of Mind

Summary

The goal of this clinical trial is to test whether photography-based, smartphone exercises can increase well-being and reduce depressive symptoms in college and graduate students. The main questions it aims to answer are:

Can savoring and/or social sharing of positive experiences via smartphone photography improve emotional well-being? Does attentional retraining toward positive stimuli reduce depressive symptoms?

Researchers compared:

Picture This! (21 days of taking daily photos of things that elicited a positive emotion, savoring the moment, and reviewing the photos at the end of each day) Picture This! Plus Social Sharing (21 days taking daily photos of things that elicited a positive emotion, savoring the moment, and reviewing the photos at the end of each day + sharing photos each week with a friend/family member) Document This! (21 days of taking "day in the life" photos each day and reviewing them each evening) Passive control group (21 days without instructions to take photos)

To see if the positive emotion-focused intervention conditions (Picture This! and Picture This! Plus Social Sharing) outperformed neutral (Document This!0 or no-photo conditions in improving psychological health.

Participants were:

Randomly assigned to one of four groups. Asked to complete baseline and follow-up questionnaires and computer tasks.

Three active conditions:

Take 2+ photos daily for 3 weeks. Upload photos to a secure drive. Complete nightly savoring exercises and surveys. (Social Sharing group only) Share photos weekly with a friend/family member.

All participants completed weekly surveys and a final lab visit with follow-up assessments.

Conditions

• College Student Mental Health
• Mindfulness
• Positive Emotions
• Savoring
• Intervention Study

Interventions

BEHAVIORAL

Attentional focus on positive emotion via photography

The current project aims aim to test a set of exercises using Smartphones with college and graduate students designed to retrain attention toward moments/events/people that elicit positive emotions, encourage the savoring of such moments, increase social connectedness, and in turn, decrease depressive symptoms.

BEHAVIORAL

Social Sharing

For individuals in the social sharing condition, participants were instructed to share their photos for the study each week with a friend or family member of their choice. They were provided a script to help them with the social sharing, if needed.

BEHAVIORAL

Taking Photographs of daily life events and moments

The individuals in the Document This condition will take daily photographs of moments in their lives for 21 days. They are not directed to focus on taking photos that elicit positive affect as the individuals in PT and PTPSS are. They are asked to review their photos each evening and answer questions about them.

Sponsors & Collaborators

• Clark University

  collaborator OTHER

• John Templeton Foundation

  collaborator OTHER

• Georgia State University

  lead OTHER

Study Design

Allocation

RANDOMIZED

Purpose

OTHER

Masking

SINGLE

Model

PARALLEL

Eligibility

Min Age

18 Years

Sex

ALL

Healthy Volunteers

Yes

Timeline & Regulatory

Start

2013-10-31

Primary Completion

2015-05-15

Completion

2015-05-15