Crowdsourced tool for depression

Cognitive reappraisal

Many day-to-day situations can influence negative emotions in us. For example, an individual who has failed a test or lost a job might feel overwhelmed with negative emotions. But by reevaluating the very same situation and its associated emotion, the person can stimulate positive thoughts and see the "silver lining". Such a coping strategy is referred to as cognitive reappraisal. Subjects with depression exhibit what are called as ‘maladaptive thought patterns’, which influence extremely negative core beliefs, and are unable to use cognitive reappraisal. The networking platform, Panoply, developed by researchers from MIT and Northwestern University aims at helping sufferers of anxiety and depression practice cognitive reappraisal with the help of strangers.

Therapy through networking

On Panoply, a user records an event and the corresponding emotional response it elicited; this entry is then analyzed by other members who vote on the type of thought pattern that they think is associated with the emotion and propose ways of reinterpreting it. In order to test the tool on their 166 subjects with depressive symptoms, the researchers made use of the services of ‘Amazon Mechanical Turk’ (MTurk), a crowdsourcing marketplace which allows employment of a large group of people to perform ‘Human Intelligence Tasks’ – tasks that cannot be executed by computers. After being briefly trained on cognitive reappraisal, the MTurk workers formed a large part of the user network.

With the a functional platform established, the researchers also built a parallel system which allows users to practice ‘expressive-writing’ – a common self-guided therapeutic technique. By comparing the two systems, the researchers found the socially-engaging Panoply platform to be effective in alleviating the moods of subjects with severe symptoms and more consistently used – signifying a preference for Panoply.

The original article reporting the new peer-to-peer networking tool was published on JMIR and is available here. Panoply is now in the process of being commercialized by the lead author of the study, Rob Morris, to join an array of mobile apps that offer therapeutic support without the physical presence of a therapist.