Emotion Regulation in the Wild : The WEHAB Approach

Emotion regulation is crucial for living with others. However, it is also difficult, and everyone, at some point, fails to effectively regulate his or her emotions. Can technology help? Several startups have sought to answer this question by developing wearable technologies designed to support emotion regulation. However, they typically lack a grounding in appropriate foundational theories and research. In this paper, we present a multidisciplinary approach for designing wearables for emotion regulation in everyday life. We call this the WEHAB approach (WEHAB comes from the first letters of the four disciplines: wearables, emotion regulation, haptics, and biofeedback). Using the WEHAB approach opens up new ways to facilitate emotion regulation and to develop novel affordances for emotion regulation in everyday life ("the wild"). ACM Classification