Leveraging social media content to support engagement in positive interventions

Abstract

A key challenge for positive psychology interventions is promoting sustained engagement to improve long-term outcomes. One way to increase engagement is to introduce variety to reduce hedonic adaptation. Here, we propose supplementing intervention prompts with items from a person’s social media archive to add variety. Through a one-week pilot study of six positive psychology activities via a Facebook application, we explore whether Facebook content is useful to keep people engaged in activities and what attributes of content make it most useful. A total of 260 participants used our application, and analysis of usage showed that displaying content is engaging. By looking at which content was marked as useful by participants, we find that useful content is in itself meaningful and engaging (photos, longer texts, and content about close friends). We also find that certain intervention activities are more engaging and better suited for making use of Facebook content than others.

Keywords:

• happiness interventions
• engagement
• intervention technologies
• social media

Funding

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation through a Graduate Research Fellowship [grant number 0845351].

Notes

1. Participants were notified of this data collection both in the experimental consent process and through Facebook’s permissions system for applications; this was approved by our IRB.