Introducing Emotional Health Questions
Looking beyond the physical manifestations of the pandemic
More than 3.3 million Americans have contracted COVID-19, as we remain “knee-deep” in the first wave of the virus. Over the past few months, the coronavirus pandemic has touched virtually every American in ways that would have seemed inconceivable just a year ago, impacting lives, livelihoods, families, communities, and ways of life. In that sense, COVID-19 has created a crisis not just of physical health — but also of equity, social cohesion, and emotional well-being.
To date, data collected by the How We Feel app has provided valuable insights about the virus to researchers, public health officials, and other key decision-makers across the country. Now, we feel it is critical to look beyond the physical manifestations of the pandemic — and begin to explore the multiple dimensions of this crisis, starting with emotional well-being.
In partnership with top behavioral scientists like Marc Brackett, the How We Feel Project has created a new series of questions about the impact of the virus on the emotional well-being of individuals and their communities. According to a Kaiser Family Foundation poll, nearly 50% of Americans report that the coronavirus crisis has affected their emotional health. Our goal is to dig deeper to understand how emotional well-being is being affected by the virus, on both the individual and collective levels, across demographic categories like age, race, and geography. Among other applications of this data, we expect it will help us create a “living” national map of emotional well-being.
With this update, users can name and track their feelings over time, similar to how we measure our step counts and sleep patterns. Experts like Marc Brackett say the act of naming our feelings is a helpful step in managing overall emotional well-being. We eventually hope to build on that self-reported feedback — illustrated in the app through a multi-hued heart — by developing and providing resources to help users cope individually and collectively with this crisis of emotional health.
As with the data we are collecting on physical health, we hope that insights around emotional well-being will be helpful researchers, public health officials, and policymakers as they tackle the complex business of reopening during this once-in-a-lifetime public health crisis.
We’d love to know what you think of the new emotional health questions in the How We Feel app. Share your thoughts and ideas with us on Twitter. We can’t wait to learn with you.
