Personality-Based Model-Driven Persuasive Application to Promote Mental Health and Well-Being

Abstract

Persuasive mental health applications (apps) are effective tools for promoting mental health and emotional well-being using various persuasive strategies. However, despite increasing interests, there is a lack of studies on how persuasive mental health and emotional well-being interventions can be tailored to individuals’ personality traits. To fill this gap, I developed a personality-based model-driven approach for tailoring persuasive mental and emotional well-being interventions to various personality traits. The personality-based model-driven approach was based on four major studies. In the first study, I conducted a comprehensive review of 69 technology-based mental health interventions from the literature to establish their effectiveness, and identify the persuasive strategies employed and their implementations. In the second study, I reviewed 103 mental health apps from app stores (App Store and Google Play Store) to identify various persuasive strategies/features employed in the design and their implementations. In the third study, I conducted six focus groups with 32 participants to uncover more insight regarding mental health app features. In the fourth study, I implemented 16 common strategies/features that emerged from studies 1, 2 and 3 in persuasive mental health app prototypes and conducted a large-scale study of 561 participants to evaluate their perceived effectiveness based on personality traits. The model revealed that some features/strategies were more effective for particular personality traits, thus, providing guidelines for tailoring persuasive mental health and emotional well-being interventions to various personality traits. To show the feasibility of the personality-based model-driven approach, I applied the model from the fourth study to design and develop three versions of a persuasive mental health and emotional well-being app called “Be Grateful” targeting two distinct personality traits. To demonstrate the importance of tailoring persuasive mental health apps, show that it may be better to employ more than one appropriate strategy in mental health apps to increase their effectiveness, and that the negative effect of inappropriate strategies may cancel the effectiveness of appropriate ones when strategies are randomly selected, I conducted an evaluation (N = 240) of the three versions of the app over 5 weeks and interviewed 56 participants to gain more insight of their experiences with the app. The results show that although the tailored single-strategy version was ineffective compared to the contra-tailored single-strategy, combining multiple preferred strategies (two strategies) emerged to be more effective at promoting desired behaviour change and improving mental health than using a single preferred strategy in persuasive intervention design. However, combining appropriate strategies and inappropriate strategies in an intervention resulted in an ineffective app, showing the danger of a one-size-fits-all approach that is usually based on a random selection of strategies. Finally, the interview data provides detailed insight into why the app was effective.