Do People Gain Insight from Personalized Feedback about Distributions of their Affective Experiences?

In so-called personalized feedback procedures, people report on their experiences through Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) and receive a summary of their EMA data afterwards. Although the goal of such a procedure is to promote these peoples’ insight in their moment-to-moment experiences, the extent to which they gain insight from their personalized feedback has not yet been quantified. In this study, we quantified whether participants (N = 100) gained insight from their personalized feedback in a pre-post- design. We provided participants with a novel type of feedback about frequency distributions of their affective experiences as captured by EMA data. We compared this feedback to frequency distributions that participants estimated of all their affective experiences, both before before and after seeing their feedback. We found that participants’ initial estimates were often close to their personalized feedback. However, there were large interindividual differences in this difference score, as well as the extent to which participants changed their initial estimate in response to the personalized feedback. Overall, participants changed their estimates such that the means and standard deviations of the distributions were closer to those of their feedback. However, the means and standard deviations of participant’s estimated distributions - both before and after receiving feedback - were usually higher than those of the respective feedback. These latter findings can either be interpreted as a persistent retrospective bias towards salient experiences, or a shortcoming of EMA data to capture salient experiences.