Alena Oxenham

Health apps are designed for many different behavioral domains (e.g., eating, activity, symptom management), and these different types of apps provide different kinds of feedback. These forms of feedback may be helpful in different ways and users may interact with them differently. Preliminary data from another study in this program of research found that users experienced higher negative affect and lower positive affect from calorie-tracking apps (compared to feedback from activity-tracking apps). This study addresses whether these differences are a result of the type of evaluative feedback that these apps provide (i.e., the varied responses they give for success and failure) or whether it is simply that the domain of calorie feedback is inherently perceived more negatively. We conducted an online study to test whether the negative effects of calorie-tracking feedback were still prevalent once evaluative feedback was removed. Participants were randomly assigned to one of four app feedback scenarios. After being presented with the feedback, participants were asked to respond to positive and negative affect measures. Our findings replicated the findings from our previous study, and suggest that people experience feedback that comes from a calorie-tracking app as more negative than feedback that comes from an activity-tracking app. Moreover, we found some evidence that suggests that people experience evaluative feedback as particularly negative. Future research should investigate other strategies that lessen the “sting” of calorie-tracking feedback while maintaining apps’ effectiveness for behavior change.