Leveraging social media content to support engagement in positive interventions

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Leveraging social media content to support engagement in positive interventions

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.

Citation: 
The Journal of Positive Psychology , 2014 Vol. 9, No. 5, 428 – 434

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