Hi Everyone,

I wanted to share a link to a digital activity to help people reflect on stressful situations, and invite feedback on improving it, as part of ongoing research in my lab (approved by REB).

Below my signature I have more context about this research.

This is a 15-30 minute activity that asks you questions to help you reflect on a stressful situation. Please feel free to use it yourself, or to share with other people who might be interested.

I welcome any input, comments & suggestions for how to improve it, so we can make this more useful to anyone whenever they are in a stressful situation!

Here is the link to the consent form, which then redirects to the activity, if you want to try it now, or share with others!

http://rotman.az1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_aWb4VGITORGkaCp?source=c http://rotman.az1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_aWb4VGITORGkaCp?source=g1

Thank you,

Joseph

For more context on this research:

This is a research project for which we have REB approval, that builds on a range of my prior work with clinical psychologists (references below) as well as ongoing collaboration with colleagues like David Mohr at Northwestern, a leading expert in digital mental health. We've discussed this work with clinical psychologists.

We are always concerned about the sensitivity of issues around helping people manage stress, particularly as we are trying to help anyone in the world apply techniques developed for mental health, and recognize how widespread mental health issues are. This research is intended as a stress management activity, and not an attempt to provide professional counseling services.

We hope this is an area where our lab can do a lot of good in reaching out to people, and getting your help, but also one where we have to be careful about the ethical and practical issues that come up anytime you try to help people manage stress.

We welcome any feedback, suggestions, or input! Of course you would know my lab is not always able to act on them, as we've already received valuable (but sometimes conflicting) suggestions from many colleagues, students, clinical psychologists, and social workers! But every suggestion is more evidence of the importance of a particular approach, and can help us come up with novel solutions, so *please provide whatever criticisms, suggestions for improvement, opinions, thoughts, or ideas you have!*

-Gumport, N. B., Williams, J. J., & Harvey, A. G. (2015). Learning cognitive behavior therapy. Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry, 48, 164-169. [PDF https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-hY3HRV_efyaDBIWmpxb09HOGs/view]

-Harvey, A.G., Lee, J., Williams, J., Hollon, S. Walker, M.P., Thompson, M. & Smith, R. (2014). Improving Outcome of Psychosocial Treatments by Enhancing Memory and Learning. Perspectives in Psychological Science, 9, 161-179. [PDF https://docs.google.com/a/cognitivescience.co/viewer?a=v&pid=sites&srcid=am9zZXBoamF5d2lsbGlhbXMuY29tfGpvc2VwaGpheXdpbGxpYW1zfGd4OjUxNDM2OTdjOTUxMjBlMjE ]

-Bernecker, S. L., Williams, J. J., & Constantino, M. J. (2017, May). Enhancing mental health through scalable training for peer counselors. Extended abstract presented at the Computing and Mental Health symposium of the annual ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Denver, CO. [PDF http://www.josephjaywilliams.com/CMH_CHI_final.pdf?attredirects=0&d=1] Understanding User Perspectives on Prompts for Brief Reflection on Troubling Emotions (in progress)

Joseph Jay Williams www.josephjaywilliams.com Assistant Professor Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto Intelligent Adaptive Interventions (IAI) research group