On Wednesday 21st of October Merel Leijse will defend her PhD thesis titled ‘“I Gotta Feeling”: Exploring the potential of a data-driven smartphone app to support emotional functioning and promote mental health in adolescents’ in the Auditorium of the VU Amsterdam at 15:45h.
In this thesis Merel explored whether and how smartphones can be used to better understand adolescents’ emotions and mental health in daily life. Emotions play a crucial role in the prevention and treatment of mental health problems during adolescence. No wonder that therapy sessions often start with the question: “How are you doing?” But how well can adolescents actually answer that question? Emotions can change throughout the day, while researchers often measure emotions at just one point in time. A smartphone, on the other hand, is always close at hand and apps and functionalities offer unique opportunities to gain insight into how adolescents are doing in their everyday lives.
Making emotions visible
The studies in this dissertation show that smartphones, both through dedicated apps and through passively collected data by the phone itself, can help make young people’s emotions and behaviour more visible in everyday life. Using the Feelee app, we found that young people can be supported in a low-threshold way to pause and reflect on their emotions, recognise them, and put them into words. This can give clinicians more insight into what happens outside treatment sessions and, importantly, provide valuable starting points for conversations about emotions during therapy. At the same time, smartphone data such as GPS, movement, and phone use showed potential for detecting signals related to young people’s mental health. Together, these findings suggest that smartphones could have promising applications in the prevention and treatment of mental health problems among young people.
Valuable addition to care and treatment
Smartphones can help us gain a faster and more complete picture of how young people are feeling and what may influence their emotions and behaviour. But simply recording and tracking emotions and behaviour is not enough. The value lies primarily in how young people and healthcare professionals discuss and use this information together. Smartphones can therefore be a valuable addition to care and treatment, but they are certainly not a replacement for professional support.
On Wednesday 21st of October Merel Leijse will defend her PhD thesis titled ‘“I Gotta Feeling”: Exploring the potential of a data-driven smartphone app to support emotional functioning and promote mental health in adolescents’ in the Auditorium of the VU Amsterdam at 15:45h. Merel’s thesis is supervised by Prof.Dr. A. Popma, Dr. L. van Dam and Dr. T. van der Pol. More information on this dissertation can be found on the website of VU Amsterdam.
Merel Leijse is currently working as project leader Digital Health & Innovation at Levvel. She combines this position with a postdoc at the department of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry and Psychosocial Care at Amsterdam UMC.
