Major depressive disorder (MDD) is a debilitating disorder characterized by significant mood disturbance. In laboratory studies, MDD has been characterized by both blunted positive (PER) and negative emotional reactivity (NER). However, mood disordered persons' emotional reactivity has rarely been studied in naturalistic settings, and it is unknown how less severe forms of depression relate to emotional reactivity. To address these issues, the current study utilized two naturalistic sampling methods (the Day Reconstruction Method and the Experience Sampling Method) to examine PER and NER to daily life events in 35 individuals currently experiencing a major depressive episode (MDD), 26 individuals currently experiencing a minor depressive episode (mD), and 38 healthy controls. Both methods demonstrated that individuals with major and minor depression exhibited blunted PER relative to controls. In surprising contrast to previous laboratory findings, both individuals with MDD and mD showed increased NER relative to controls. Correlational analyses with severity measures indicated that depression and anxiety severity were positively related to NER and negatively related to PER. Findings suggest that NER in mood disorders may diverge as a function of assessment context and may be heightened in naturalistic environments. Despite the fact that mD is a milder mood disorder, findings suggest that mD results in similar emotional impairments as found in MDD.

Family conversation between homes is difficult to initiate at mutually agreeable times as neither participant has exact knowledge of the other's activities or intentions. Whether calling to plan an important family gathering or simply to connect with family members, the question is: Is now a good time to call? People expect friends and family to learn their activity patterns and to minimize interruptions when calling. Can technology provide awareness cues to the caller, even prior to the initiation of the call? This research focuses on sampling the everyday activities of home life to determine environmental factors, which may serve as an indicator for availability. These external factors may be effective for identifying household routines of availability and useful in determining when to initiate conversation across homes. Several workplace studies have shown a person's interruptibility can be reliably assessed and modeled from specific environmental cues; this work looks for similar predictive power in the home. Copresence, location, and activity in the home were investigated as correlates to availability and for their effectiveness within the social protocol of family conversation. These studies indicate there are activities that can be sensed, either in real-time or over some time span, that correlate to self-reported availability. However, the type and amount of information shared is dependent upon individual preferences, social accessibility, and patterns of activities. This research shows friends and family can improve their predictions of when to call if provided additional context, and suggests that abstract representations of either routines or explicit availability status is sufficient and may be preferred by providers. Availability prediction is feasible in the home and useful to those outside the home, but the level of detail to provide in particular situations needs further study. This work has implications for the development of groupware systems, the automatic sensing of activity to deal with interruption, and activity recognition in the home.

No description available.