A Pre-Post Design for Testing Insight from Personalized Feedback about Positive Affect in Contexts

Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) data about people’s self-reported experiences can be summarized and reported back to them as a so-called personalized feedback report. A popular form of personalized feedback concerns people’s positive affect in different environments and activities. The goal of this type of feedback is to provide participants insight into contexts that are associated with particularly high or low positive affect. Then, they may seek these contexts out more or less often respectively. However, the extent to which participants gain insight from this type of personalized feedback has not yet been quantified. In this study, we tested whether participants indeed gained insight from personalized feedback about their average positive affect in different contexts. We did this using a pre-post design, in which we compared estimates that participants made of their average positive affect in different contexts before and after receiving their personalized feedback to their respective personalized feedback (N = 133). For a subsample of participants (n = 77), we mistakenly provided feedback that was consistently higher than the actual average of their EMA data. We found that participants generally changed their estimates in the direction of both the ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’ personalized feedback. These findings suggest that people may be inclined to adjust their perception towards their personalized feedback, even when the feedback is flawed.