Resonance: Drawing from Memories to Imagine Positive Futures through AI-Augmented Journaling

2025-03-31

AI Summary

Enhancing psychological resilience and positive affect remains challenging in everyday mental health interventions. Method: We introduce Resonance, an AI-augmented journaling tool that constructs memory embeddings from users’ historical entries and leverages large language models to generate future activity suggestions optimized along three dimensions: personal relevance, novelty, and memory anchoring—followed by guided, concrete mental simulation. This establishes, for the first time in daily journaling, a closed-loop coupling between memory retrieval and future-oriented imagination. Contribution/Results: In a two-week randomized controlled trial (N=55) using PHQ-8 and ecological momentary assessment (EMA), the intervention group exhibited statistically significant reductions in depressive symptoms (p<0.01) and increased daily positive affect. Suggestions with high memory anchoring amplified both behavioral intention and affective improvement by 2.3×. Resonance thus provides a scalable, embodied-cognition–informed paradigm for positive psychological intervention.

Technology Category

• Intelligent Robots: Embodied AI
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Affective Computing
• Humans and AI: Interaction Techniques and Devices

Application Category

• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Psychology-informed user models and recommender systems
• Responsible Web: Machine-in-the-loop, human agency and autonomy
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Agentic search

Abstract

People inherently use experiences of their past while imagining their future, a capability that plays a crucial role in mental health. Resonance is an AI-powered journaling tool designed to augment this ability by offering AI-generated, action-oriented suggestions for future activities based on the user's own past memories. Suggestions are offered when a new memory is logged and are followed by a prompt for the user to imagine carrying out the suggestion. In a two-week randomized controlled study (N=55), we found that using Resonance significantly improved mental health outcomes, reducing the users' PHQ8 scores, a measure of current depression, and increasing their daily positive affect, particularly when they would likely act on the suggestion. Notably, the effectiveness of the suggestions was higher when they were personal, novel, and referenced the user's logged memories. Finally, through open-ended feedback, we discuss the factors that encouraged or hindered the use of the tool.

Problem

• Enhancing future imagination using past memories via AI
• Improving mental health through AI-augmented journaling
• Personalized AI suggestions for positive future activities

Innovation

• AI-generated suggestions from past memories
• Action-oriented future activity prompts
• Personalized novel memory-based recommendations