About Observing Emotions
Observing Emotions is a personal diary for noticing, naming and understanding your emotional states. It helps you look back at your experiences and discover patterns in how emotions change over time.
Why this idea has a scientific foundation
The app is not based only on a personal invention. Its approach is inspired by established research in emotional intelligence, emotion regulation, affective neuroscience and affect labeling. At the same time, the app itself is not presented as a clinically validated treatment or diagnostic instrument.
- The ability model of emotional intelligence describes skills related to perceiving, using, understanding and managing emotions. Mayer, Salovey & Caruso (2004)
- Research on emotion regulation examines how people influence which emotions they have, when they have them, and how they experience or express them. Gross (1998)
- Affective neuroscience studies individual differences in emotional responses, their recovery over time and the brain systems involved. Davidson (1998); Davidson (2000)
- An fMRI study of affect labeling found that putting feelings into words was associated with changes in responses to negative images. This is one research finding, not a promise that the app will produce the same effect for every person. Lieberman et al. (2007)
The connection between these research areas and the app is an informed design rationale, not proof of the effectiveness of this particular application.
A simple reflective model
Each entry can include an emotional value from −100 to +100, an emotion, a comment and tags. This scale is Observing Emotions' own convenient notation for personal reflection; it is not a universally accepted psychological or medical measurement. The value does not diagnose a condition and does not define what a person “should” feel.
What you can do
- record daily emotional states with a date, time, value, emotion, comment and tags;
- use built-in emotion pairs or create your own emotions with descriptions and colors;
- save quotes and expressions that are meaningful to you;
- filter entries by date, search them, select several entries and delete them when needed;
- review graphs and statistics, including averages, positive/negative/neutral counts, frequent emotions and tags;
- export data to Excel or PDF, and import Excel data with validation;
- create a password-protected encrypted
.oebkbackup; - set local reminders, choose a light, dark or system theme, and use English, Russian or Latvian.
Privacy by design
Your diary is stored locally on the device. The app does not require an account, does not contain advertising or behavioral analytics, and does not send diary entries to our servers. Exported files and backups are under your control, so keep them in a secure place. Observing Emotions is a self-observation tool and does not replace professional medical or psychological care.
Questions or feedback: info@ipieeja.org