Mood and personal information management: how we feel influences how we organize our information
- PDF / 740,423 Bytes
- 13 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 13 Downloads / 196 Views
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Mood and personal information management: how we feel influences how we organize our information Steve Whittaker 1
&
Charlotte Massey 2
Received: 19 August 2019 / Accepted: 4 May 2020 # Springer-Verlag London Ltd., part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Two studies explore whether people’s digital filing behaviors are affected by emotional factors when engaging in personal information management (PIM). Cognitive science research shows that people’s information categorization behaviors are mood-dependent, so that positive moods induce larger, more inclusive organizational categories, whereas negative moods elicit more fine-grained organization. However, such mood-dependent organization has not been directly studied in the context of PIM. Our first, naturalistic study examines relations between people’s overall filing habits and a personality trait, neuroticism, which is commonly associated with negative mood. Our results reveal the expected mood-dependency effects; participants who report more prevalent negative mood patterns when surveyed, also create different organizational structures. Overall, they make more folders that contain fewer files and store these in deeper folder structures. The second, experimental study directly manipulated mood and examined how this affects organization of a controlled file collection. Again as predicted, participants experiencing negative moods created significantly more folders containing fewer files, and there was a trending effect of negative mood on folder depth. We discuss theoretical and practical implications for PIM arising from these novel results. Keywords Personal information management . Files . Folders . Moods
1 Introduction Personal information management (PIM) is a fact of life; all of us spend time every day organizing personal information, both to facilitate its later retrieval and to manage our tasks [1–6]. A great deal of research has examined the different organizational strategies people adopt in PIM to ensure successful later retrieval [1–11]. Organization is a difficult activity, because it requires people to predict when and how their information will later be accessed. To create effective organization, users have to correctly anticipate the context in which they will be accessing their personal information [1–6].
* Steve Whittaker [email protected] Charlotte Massey [email protected] 1
Computational Media Dept., University of California at Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA 95064, USA
2
Google Corporation, 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043, USA
Successful retrieval depends on people actively imposing their own organization on personal information [1, 4, 5, 9]. For example, retrieval from shared repositories is more successful when participants actively organize that information themselves, compared with when they retrieve information that has been organized by others [10]. In addition, people have repeatedly been shown to prefer to actively manage and to navigate their personal information, rather than retrieving it us
Data Loading...
