“Monitoring,” make the patient record their own states (e.g. mood, pain, sleep) every day, is one of the clinical methods used for the purpose of 1) the therapist to gain further information of the change of state in daily context to assess the patient and  2) let the patient to externalize their situation and understand it objectively. The usage of this method has increased due to the spread of information and communication technology (ICT) in clinical settings. And experimental sampling method (ESM), a method of data correction to record the responders’ state several times a day as well as monitoring in clinical settings, has been gaining more attention these days.
Although the emotional effect of affect monitoring has been discussed, it has been unknown how affect monitoring affect the life style of the responder. The aim of this workshop was to know further about the effect of affect monitoring in a broader point of view.
This workshop was announced as a feedback meeting of the participants of ESM study (monitoring their affect five times a day for two weeks) conducted by the projector. Entries discussed about “What they felt during the affect monitoring” and “How the affect monitoring effected their life” in the meeting.
From the discussion, we first had a lot of suggestions for the better procedure of affect monitoring in the future, such as to choose the media (e.g. e-mail, SNS) most convenient for each responder, to choose the time of the monitoring according to their living hours (e.g. 9 am – 6 pm, 3 pm – 0 am) and to add a column to the form to let the responder to free write their thoughts if they want.
At the second discussion, there were some suggestions that the affect monitoring was functioning as a reward system: “recording itself led to some kind of sense of accomplish;” “it felt good to have the feedback of the number of answers.” Others suggested the affect monitoring helped to sort their chaotic emotions. Additionally, there were some opinions about the behavioral effect of monitoring (such as reducing the time of watching SNSs) and the behavioral changes led to another emotional change (such as the decrease of time watching Twitter helped to reduce the chance of getting depressed by being exposed to others information).
The behavioral effect and the subsequent emotional effect of affect monitoring has not been discussed so far. Further investigation could contribute to the broader understanding of the results of applying affect monitoring. These knowledge will help the more effective use of monitoring in both clinical and research settings.