Cognitive bias modification for threat interpretations: using passive Mobile Sensing to detect intervention effects in daily life.

BACKGROUND

Social anxiety disorder is associated with distinct mobility patterns (e.g., increased time spent at home compared to non-anxious individuals), but we know little about if these patterns change following interventions. The ubiquity of GPS-enabled smartphones offers new opportunities to assess the benefits of mental health interventions beyond self-reported data.

OBJECTIVES

This pre-registered study (https://osf.io/em4vn/?view_only=b97da9ef22df41189f1302870fdc9dfe) assesses the impact of a brief, online cognitive training intervention for threat interpretations using passively-collected mobile sensing data.

DESIGN

Ninety-eight participants scoring high on a measure of trait social anxiety completed five weeks of mobile phone monitoring, with 49 participants randomly assigned to receive the intervention halfway through the monitoring period.

RESULTS

The brief intervention was not reliably associated with changes to participant mobility patterns.

CONCLUSIONS

Despite the lack of significant findings, this paper offers a framework within which to test future intervention effects using GPS data. We present a template for combining clinical theory and empirical GPS findings to derive testable hypotheses, outline data processing steps, and provide human-readable data processing scripts to guide future research. This manuscript illustrates how data processing steps common in engineering can be harnessed to extend our understanding of the impact of mental health interventions in daily life.