Symposium 6th World Congress on Positive Psychology 2019

Building the Virtue of Patience through Mobile Technology (#235)

Sarah Schnitker 1 , Benjamin Houltberg 2
  1. Baylor University, WACO, TEXAS, United States
  2. Performance Institute, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA

Though technology is often accused of eroding the virtue of patience in society, might it be possible to use technology to build this character strength? Patience, defined as the ability to be calmly in the face of frustration, suffering, or adversity, facilitates well-being and goal pursuit (Schnitker, 2012; Thomas & Schnitker, 2017).  The CharacterMe mobile app was designed to build patience in adolescents through fun challenges that teach emotional awareness, cognitive reappraisal, mindfulness, and other emotion regulation strategies for users to employ as they resolve conflicts.  Data will be presented from a research study testing the effectiveness of the app and various framings of the activities in 598 ethnically and socioeconomically diverse high school students (mean age = 16.09, SD = 0.99; 56.8% female; 41.3% Asian/Asian Am., 29.5% Latino/a, 12.9% White, 4.8% Black).  We tested if app activities would be more effective when framed (a) as spiritual vs. moral vs. instrumental in their purpose and (b) as building strengths vs. fixing weaknesses. Measures include EMA data from 2 weeks of smartphone as well as self-, peer-, parent-, and coach/teacher-reports on questionnaires across four measurement occasions spanning six months. Framing effectiveness was dependent upon the outcome variable and personality moderators.