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Bridging the Support Gap: Emotional Awareness Development with Neury®
ABSTRACT
Background:
Emotional Awareness (EA) plays a critical role in regulating stress, particularly among individuals who are experiencing low persistent stress and often delay seeking professional help due to financial barriers, stigma, long wait times, or restricted access to services.
Objective:
The current study examined whether self-help app use could improve EA within a low stress population using Neury®, a personal development app grounded in cognitive and emotional regulation frameworks.
Methods:
The Perth Alexithymia Questionnaire (PAQ) was used to assess EA, comprising three key subscales: Difficulty Identifying Feelings (DIF), which measures the ability to recognise emotions; Difficulty Describing Feelings (DDF), which evaluates one’s capacity to express emotions verbally; and Externally Oriented Thinking (EOT), which reflects a focus on external events rather than inner experiences. Lower scores on these subscales indicate higher EA. Lower PAQ scores indicate higher EA, reflecting greater capacity for recognising and understanding one’s own emotions. Accordingly, it was hypothesised that use of Neury ® for 30 days would correlate with EA as measured by PAQ scores. To investigate the hypothesis, 35 participants completed a PAQ before and after using Neury® for 30 days. The Wilcoxon Signed-Ranks Tests were used to evaluate pre–post differences in PAQ subscale scores.
Results:
The results revealed a significant reduction in DIF scores, suggesting enhanced ability to recognise emotions following Neury® use. Although other subscales did not show significant change, the results indicate short-term engagement with Neury® can facilitate early-stage EA gains, particularly in emotion recognition.
Conclusions:
This study suggests using the Neury® for 30 days can improve emotional awareness, particularly by enhancing the ability to recognise emotions, as shown by reduced DIF scores. While other PAQ subscales did not change significantly, the findings indicate that brief app-based interventions such as Neury® may offer an accessible way to support emotional development to manage low stress.
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Copyright
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