Emotion Map

Effective emotion regulation can benefit many aspects of our lives such as mental health and work performance. Informed by emotion regulation theories and in consultation with our university counseling center, we designed a novel location-based mobile social app, Emotion Map, to help improve people's awareness and regulations of their emotions. The app allows users to log their emotions with the associated time, location, and activity information. Users can keep these logged emotions to themselves or share them with others publicly or anonymously. We conducted a 4-week field trial of the app with 14 university students. Combining usage logs and in-person interviews, our analysis shows promising results of the app. Specifically, we found that the app improved some participants' self-knowledge of their emotions, supported their various emotion regulations, and enabled better awareness of the emotion statuses of their friends and communities.