Crowdsourced Single-Session Positive Activity Interventions to Enhance Mood

Recognizing the importance of affect to well-being, a growing number of low-barrier online interventions aim to reduce negative affect and promote positive mood. This broad class of interventions, named positive activity interventions (PAIs), was developed with the intent to enhance positive emotions, meaning, and connectedness, among other positive states. Recent reviews of the PAI literature highlight that many studies are underpowered and lack pre-registration, raising concerns about the validity of their findings. Furthermore, existing research has focused primarily on self-focused PAIs and assumes treatment effect homogeneity, despite research on happiness and well-being highlighting the importance of social connection and person-activity fit. In the current study, we extend past research by conducting a pre-registered field experiment with a large sample (n = 6,411) to compare the mood-boosting effects of five social PAIs and an active control. We found that four of the five PAIs improved mood valence compared to the active control, but there were no differences between the five activities in terms of change to mood intensity or bearability. We found support for the person-fit hypothesis but not for the person-activity fit moderation hypothesis, suggesting that PAI delivery for mood improvement can be standardized and more cost-effective than previously assumed.