Tangible Interaction for Emotional Reappraisal During Mindfulness

Determine whether tangible interaction can be intentionally designed to support emotional reappraisal during mindfulness practice and establish the efficacy of existing tangible systems intended to produce this outcome.

Background

The Embodied Sensory Anchoring model proposes that tangible devices may alter users’ relationships to emotional experiences through affective interaction, reflection, and externalization. Emotional reappraisal is one of the mechanisms through which mindfulness may regulate emotion, but it is comparatively underrepresented in the reviewed tangible-device literature.

The paper identifies a direct unresolved question about whether tangible interaction can be deliberately designed for emotional reappraisal. It also notes that proposed systems such as ReMiND and the Breathing Scarf have not yet been sufficiently tested, leaving their effectiveness unresolved.

References

This raises the question: can tangible interaction be intentionally designed to support emotional reappraisal during mindfulness practice? Several tangible systems have been proposed in this direction; however, their efficacy of these systems remains insufficiently explored through empirical evaluation.

— Grounding Mindfulness in Embodied Tangibles: A Scoping Review & Theoretical Framework for HCI Design  (2608.19673 - Ratnayake et al., 20 Aug 2026) in Section 5.1, paragraph “Research Gaps--Embodied Sensory Anchoring model”