Erica Tanamachi

July 20, 2018

When talking about tracking mood and happiness at Quantified Self, we have to mention Jon Cousins, an active QS member and long-time mood tracker. In 2010, Jon created Moodscope to track is own mood, and left in 2013 to begin Moodnudges, where he writes short messages to help nudge one’s mood in a positive direction. He released a book on the topic called Nudge Your Way to Happiness.

Jon presented his more recent self-tracking project, Words for Mood Measurement, at the Bay Area Quantified Self meetup on April 19, 2016.  Jon shares his experiments with Word Stem Completion tasks to better understand his mood.

The tests work like this: You are given the first part of a word and asked to complete it. For instance, if the stem is “ang__”, you might complete the word as “angle”. But if you are feeling frustrated, “anger” is probably more likely to come to mind.

Watch the video at Jon’s project page to learn from his insightful project and perhaps grab some take-aways for trying this on your own.

Join us to share your learnings from a project, or simply be inspired at this year’s 2018 Quantified Self Conference in Portland, OR on September 22-23. Register here.