Digital emotion regulation refers to the use of digital technologies to manage, modify, avoid, or cope with emotional states.

Our group studies forms of digital emotion regulation that people engage in spontaneously, and also designs digital interventions to support healthy emotion regulation.

Our research began formally in 2019 with funding from the Australian Research Council.

Project overview

This project aims to develop a theoretical framework and novel technologies to investigate how, where, when and why people engage in digital emotion regulation. Existing research shows that individuals often use digital technologies to shape their emotions in response to situations; yet social norms often cast such technology use as disrespectful or distracting. The discrepancy between the practice and perception of digital emotion regulation is due to the lack of a systematic understanding of these practices. This project aims to develop a novel framework for better understanding digital emotion regulation, ways to study it in everyday settings, and evidence-based recommendations for managing it in ways that benefit individuals and society. The evidence provided by this project will inform the societal debate about technology overuse and its impact on work, education and interpersonal relationships. The created knowledge will inform policy-makers, designers, and end-users about appropriate use of technology in everyday settings.

Funding source: ARC DP190102627.

Team

Investigators

• Prof Vassilis Kostakos
• Dr Greg Wadley
• Dr Jorge Goncalves
• Assoc Prof Wally Smith
• Dr Peter Koval
• Prof Mario Alvarez-Jimenez

Partner Investigators

• Prof Anna Cox, University College London
• Prof James Gross, Stanford University

Research Fellows

• Dr Sarah Webber
• Dr Benjamin Tag

PhD Students

• Xanthe Lowe-Brown
• Koko Nghiem
• Elahi Hossain (complete)
• Kangning Yang (complete)

Publications

Peer-reviewed publications

• Lowe-Brown, X., Glasser, S., Koval, P. & Wadley, G. (2026) Designing for Emotion Regulation in Popular Music Apps: Evaluation of MoodDJ, a Novel Spotify Plugin. Proceedings of ACM Designing Interactive Systems 2026. https://doi.org/10.1145/3800645.3812960
• Lowe-Brown, X., Glasser, S., Wadley, G., & Koval, P. (2026). Personalised affect-regulation playlists: A pre-registered experimental test of the iso principle in the general population. Musicae Scientiae.
• Lowe-Brown, X., Glasser, S., Koval, P., & Wadley, G. (2024). Would You Tell Spotify How You're Feeling? Exploring Acceptability and Ethics of Emotion-Regulation Plugins for Music Streaming Apps. In Proceedings of the 36th Australasian Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (pp. 351-367).
• Hossain, E., Wadley, G., Berthouze, N., & Cox, A. L. (2024). Social media breaks: An opportunity for recovery and procrastination. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 8 (CSCW1), 1-46.
• Hossain, E., Wadley, G., Berthouze, N., & Cox, A. (2022). Motivational and situational aspects of active and passive social media breaks may explain the difference between recovery and procrastination. In CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Extended Abstracts (pp. 1-8).
• Shi, Y., Koval, P., Kostakos, V., Goncalves, J., & Wadley, G. (2022). "Instant Happiness": Smartphones as Tools for Everyday Emotion Regulation. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhcs.2022.102958.
• Tag, B., Sarsenbayeva, Z., Cox, A. L., Wadley, G., Goncalves, J., & Kostakos, V. (2022). Emotion Trajectories in Smartphone Use: Towards recognizing emotion regulation in-the-wild. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhcs.2022.102872.
• Tag, B. van Berkel, N., Vargo, A., Sarsenbayeva, Z., Colasante, T., Wadley, G., Webber, S., Smith, W., Koval, P., Hollenstein, T., Goncalves, J., & Kostakos, V.  (2022) Impact of the Global Pandemic upon Young People's Use of Technology for Emotion Regulation. Computers in Human Behavior Reports
• Wadley, G., Kostakos, V., Koval, P., Smith, W., Webber, S., Cox, A., Gross, J., Höök, K., Mandryk, R. & Slovák, P. (2022) The Future of Emotion in Human-Computer Interaction . CHI '22 Extended Abstracts
• Smith, W., Wadley, G., Webber, S., Tag, B., Kostakos, V., Koval, P., & Gross, J. (2022) Digital Emotion Regulation in Everyday Life. Proceedings of CHI 2022
• Hossain, E., Wadley, G., Berthouze, N., & Cox, A. (2022) Motivational and Situational Aspects of Active and Passive Social Media Breaks May Explain the Difference Between Recovery and Procrastination . Proceedings of CHI 2022 Late-Breaking Work
• Tag, B., Goncalves, J., Webber, S., Koval, P., & V. Kostakos, (2021). A Retrospective and a Look Forward: Lessons Learned From Researching Emotions In-the-Wild IEEE Pervasive Computing, 1–9.
• Tag, B., Webber, S., Wadley, G., Bartlett, V., Goncalves, J., Koval, P., & V. Kostakos, (2021). Making Sense of Emotion-Sensing: Workshop on Quantifying Human Emotions. UbiComp: Ubiquitous Computing Conference '21
• Yang, K., Wang, C., Gu, Y., Sarsenbayeva, Z., Tag, B., Dingler, T., & Goncalves, J. (2021). Behavioral and Physiological Signals-Based Deep Multimodal Approach for Mobile Emotion Recognition. IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, 1–1.
• Yang, K., Wang, C., Sarsenbayeva, Z., Tag, B., Dingler, T., Wadley, G., & Goncalves, J. (2020). Benchmarking commercial emotion detection systems using realistic distortions of facial image datasets. The Visual Computer, 1–20.
• Sarsenbayeva, Z., Tag, B., Yan, S., Kostakos, V., & Goncalves, J. (2020). Using Video Games to Regulate Emotions. In 32nd Australian Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (pp. 755–759).
• Wadley, G., Smith, W., Koval, P., & Gross, J. (2020) Digital Emotion Regulation. Current Directions in Psychological Science
• Sarsenbayeva, Z., Marini, G., van Berkel, N., Luo, C., Jiang, W., Yang, K., Wadley, G., Dingler, T., Kostakos, V., Goncalves, J. (2020) Does Smartphone Use Drive our Emotions or vice versa? A Causal Analysis. CHI 2020.
• Wadley, G., Krause, A., Liang, J., Wang, Z. and Leong, T. (2019) Use of music streaming platforms for emotion regulation by international students. Proceedings of OzCHI 2019.
• Wadley, G. (2016). Mood-enhancing technology. In 28th Australian Conference on Computer-Human Interaction (pp. 326-332).

Media articles

Presentations

• Prof Peter Koval hosted the launch of Niraj Lal's new book, Behind the Screens: https://www.readings.com.au/events/behind-the-screens-by-dr-niraj-lal
• Presentation by Greg Wadley at Meltdowns to Mindfulness: Self-Regulation in a Digital World
• Keynote by Greg Wadley at the UbiComp 2024 workshop on Mental Health Sensing and Intervention: https://ubicomp-mental-health.github.io/workshop-2024.html
• Seminar by Greg Wadley at QUT Digital Wellbeing Lab: Why am I online? An emotion regulation perspective on technology use and over-use: https://research.qut.edu.au/digitalwellbeing/events/seminar-why-am-i-online-an-emotion-regulation-perspective-on-technology-use-and-over-use/
• A/Prof Wally Smith's presentation of our paper "Digital Emotion Regulation in Everyday Life" at ACM CHI 2022:

• Yaoxi Shi's presentation of her thesis on "Smartphones as Emotion Regulation Tools", part of the Master of Information Systems at the University of Melbourne:

Workshops

CHI 2022

Members of our team along with Kristina Höök, Regan Mandryk and Petr Slovák co-organized a workshop on The Future of Emotion in Human-Computer Interaction at ACM CHI 2022.

Details are in our published proposal paper.

UbiComp 2021

Members of our team along with Vanessa Bartlett, Petr Slovák and Tom Hollenstein co-organized a workshop on Making Sense of Emotion Sensing at UbiComp 2021.