research-article

Kindness is Contagious: Study into Exploring Engagement and Adapting Persuasive Games for Wellbeing

Authors:

Judith Masthoff,

Nir OrenAuthors Info & Claims

UMAP '18: Proceedings of the 26th Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization

Pages 311 - 319

https://doi.org/10.1145/3209219.3209233

Published: 03 July 2018 Publication History

Abstract

Intentional engagement in positive activities, such as practicing kindness, showing generosity or expressing gratitude, can help people increase their happiness levels and improve their wellbeing. In this paper we explore how a gamified digital behaviour change intervention can be adapted to encourage people of different personality types to engage in simple acts of kindness. Participants were assigned 5 daily activities for 7 days, and asked to complete as many as possible by the end of each day. Participants received different persuasive notifications every day to encourage them to complete a higher number of activities. We investigated how participation levels are influenced by different personality types, different persuasive message types and different categories of activities. Furthermore, we analysed the influence of the intervention on participant behaviour and the effect on behavioural intention, by comparing pre-intention and post-intention to perform different kinds of positive activities. The findings from this study have implications for future work on personalising persuasive interventions to improve wellbeing and prevent mental health problems.

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Cited By

Ciocarlan AMasthoff JOren N(2023)Kindness Makes You Happy and Happiness Makes You Healthy: Actual Persuasiveness and Personalisation of Persuasive Messages in a Behaviour Change Intervention for WellbeingPersuasive Technology10.1007/978-3-031-30933-5_13(198-214)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-031-30933-5_13
Ford KBellis MHill RHughes K(2022)An evaluation of a short film promoting kindness in Wales during COVID-19 restrictions #TimeToBeKindBMC Public Health10.1186/s12889-022-12876-922:1Online publication date: 24-Mar-2022
https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-022-12876-9
Mulchandani DAlslaity AOrji R(2022)Exploring the effectiveness of persuasive games for disease prevention and awareness and the impact of tailoring to the stages of changeHuman–Computer Interaction10.1080/07370024.2022.205785838:5-6(459-494)Online publication date: 8-Apr-2022
https://doi.org/10.1080/07370024.2022.2057858
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Kindness is Contagious: Study into Exploring Engagement and Adapting Persuasive Games for Wellbeing
1. Applied computing
  1. Computers in other domains
    1. Personal computers and PC applications
      1. Computer games
2. Human-centered computing
  1. Human computer interaction (HCI)
    1. HCI design and evaluation methods
      1. User studies

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Participating in kindness activities, being generous and showing gratitude, can help people increase their overall happiness levels and improve their levels of wellbeing. This paper describes an installation which will run during the UMAP 2018 ...
Kindness Makes You Happy and Happiness Makes You Healthy: Actual Persuasiveness and Personalisation of Persuasive Messages in a Behaviour Change Intervention for Wellbeing
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Abstract
Happiness, or subjective wellbeing, brings lasting positive effects to individuals, communities, and societies. Intentional engagement in kind behaviours can have a significant effect on increasing and sustaining subjective wellbeing in humans. In ...

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cover image ACM Conferences

UMAP '18: Proceedings of the 26th Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization

July 2018

393 pages

ISBN:9781450355896

DOI:10.1145/3209219

General Chairs:
Tanja Mitrovic
University of Canterbury, New Zealand
,
Jie Zhang
Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
,
Program Chairs:
Li Chen
Hong Kong Baptist University, China
,
David Chin
University of Hawaii, USA

Copyright © 2018 ACM.

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Published: 03 July 2018

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UMAP '18

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UMAP '18: 26th Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization

July 8 - 11, 2018

Singapore, Singapore

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UMAP '18 Paper Acceptance Rate 26 of 93 submissions, 28%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 162 of 633 submissions, 26%

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UMAP '25

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33rd ACM Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization

June 16 - 19, 2025

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Cited By

Ciocarlan AMasthoff JOren N(2023)Kindness Makes You Happy and Happiness Makes You Healthy: Actual Persuasiveness and Personalisation of Persuasive Messages in a Behaviour Change Intervention for WellbeingPersuasive Technology10.1007/978-3-031-30933-5_13(198-214)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-031-30933-5_13
Ford KBellis MHill RHughes K(2022)An evaluation of a short film promoting kindness in Wales during COVID-19 restrictions #TimeToBeKindBMC Public Health10.1186/s12889-022-12876-922:1Online publication date: 24-Mar-2022
https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-022-12876-9
Mulchandani DAlslaity AOrji R(2022)Exploring the effectiveness of persuasive games for disease prevention and awareness and the impact of tailoring to the stages of changeHuman–Computer Interaction10.1080/07370024.2022.205785838:5-6(459-494)Online publication date: 8-Apr-2022
https://doi.org/10.1080/07370024.2022.2057858
Vargheese JCollinson MMasthoff J(2022)A Quantitative Field Study of a Persuasive Security Technology in the WildSocial Informatics10.1007/978-3-031-19097-1_13(211-232)Online publication date: 12-Oct-2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-19097-1_13
Lim MQualter PHennessey ASmith BArgent THolt-Lunstad J(2021)A randomised controlled trial of the Nextdoor Kind Challenge: a study protocolBMC Public Health10.1186/s12889-021-11489-y21:1Online publication date: 5-Aug-2021
https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-021-11489-y
Mulchandani DOrji R(2021)Persuasiveness of a Game to Promote the Adoption of COVID-19 Precautionary Measures and the Moderating Effect of GenderAdjunct Proceedings of the 29th ACM Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization10.1145/3450614.3464623(303-308)Online publication date: 21-Jun-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3450614.3464623
Mulchandani DOrji R(2021)Age and the persuasiveness of a game to promote the adoption of COVID-19 precautionary measures2021 IEEE 9th International Conference on Serious Games and Applications for Health(SeGAH)10.1109/SEGAH52098.2021.9551909(1-9)Online publication date: 4-Aug-2021
https://doi.org/10.1109/SEGAH52098.2021.9551909
Trinidad MRuiz MCalderon A(2021)A Bibliometric Analysis of Gamification ResearchIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2021.30639869(46505-46544)Online publication date: 2021
https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2021.3063986
Lipa-Urbina ECondori-Fernandez NSuni-Lopez F(2021)Towards an Automatic Generation of Persuasive MessagesPersuasive Technology10.1007/978-3-030-79460-6_5(55-62)Online publication date: 23-Jun-2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79460-6_5
Li BSano A(2020)Extraction and Interpretation of Deep Autoencoder-based Temporal Features from Wearables for Forecasting Personalized Mood, Health, and StressProceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies10.1145/33973184:2(1-26)Online publication date: 15-Jun-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3397318
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