Visualizing Emotions Perceived in Daily Activities for Self-Awareness Development.

The importance of developing self-awareness is increasing in the society because self-awareness helps individuals introspect to understand their own emotions and behaviors, and uncover aspects of their own personality that they had not recognized in the past. However, motivating individuals to work on developing self-awareness can be challenging because an increase in self-awareness cannot be visually tracked. Although many data visualization techniques for self-awareness development have been proposed in prior studies, they do not effectively maintain long-term engagement, and thus fail in their purpose of developing self-awareness. This study aims to: (1) improve self-awareness through data visualization of perceived happiness and stress from daily activities in the form of a house, which is treated as a metaphor for personal identity to facilitate higher engagement; and (2) investigate whether improved self-awareness through engagement with the house visualization affects individual’s perception of their own lifestyle. The results from two long-term experiments demonstrate that a house as a visualization subject is effective in building individuals’ self-awareness and positively influencing their intention to change their behavior.