Abstract:

Emotongue is an application created for Android Smartphones, designed to help people to manage their emotions in their daily lives. In the current study nineteen people were asked to use Emotongue to promote the management of their emotions once in a daily natural situation. Our main purpose was to determine whether or not participants’ emotional management would benefit through their use of the app five times per day, during two weeks in a natural context. There were three main objectives associated with the use of the app: to evaluate the extent to which participants improved in managing their emotions, to verify whether or not their emotional granularity improved due to the emotional wheels proportioned by the app and to examine the influence of the software in the participant’s perception of the intensity of their emotions.

The results of both qualitative and quantitative analysis showed that the use of the app helped participants to better manage their emotions. Participants improved their emotional granularity, widened their vocabulary and started to label their emotional experiences more specifically. Furthermore, in the period between answering the first and last questions of each notification, participants were able either to move from unpleasant emotions to pleasant ones, or to change the intensity of the aforementioned emotion.

The effectiveness of the app was proven, thus suggesting the importance of promoting readily available tools like this in the educational field, and also within society at large where more people could benefit from it.

Keywords:

Application, vocational training, emotional management, smartphones, natural context.