SnapAppy: A positive psychology intervention using smartphone photography to improve emotional well-being

Momentary photography is enjoyed by many smartphone users, especially with the popularity of apps such as Snapchat and Instagram. Many traditional positive psychology interventions focus on lengthy writing tasks to express positive emotions experienced during past events, acts of kindness and gratuitous situations. In this work we developed SnapAppy, a smartphone application to integrate momentary photography with traditional intervention methodologies to conduct a month-long positive psychology intervention to improve emotional well-being. A study involving 74 participants aimed to assess whether photo-taking, photo viewing and image contents are correlated with improvements in certain aspects of the participant’s emotional well-being including their mood, affect and satisfaction with life. The results indicated that features including the number of photos, the variety of categories, the effort applied to annotating photos, the number of photos revisited and photos taken of people were positively correlated with an improvement in the participant’s mood and positive and negative affect (PANAS).