Online Depression Therapy: Outsourcing Self-assessment 

An increasing number of treatments for depression are being made available online, in a variety of courses. Internet-administered self-help courses are based on the principles of cognitive behavioural therapy. An example of an Internet therapy for depression is 'Grip op je dip'1. This course consists of weekly chat sessions with an expert, homework assignments and 'take home' exercises. Participants are being monitored, by keeping track of their emotional state, through administering a questionnaire; the Edinburgh Depression Scale (EDS), adjusted for online administration by Spek, Nyklicek, Cuijpers and Pop (2008). The EDS asks participants to assess their mood and the feelings they had experienced, in certain situations, over a past week. 
Self-assessments are known to be plagued by cognitive bias, which distorts perception and decreases accuracy of the self-assessment test. One of the most common biases, in this context, is the negativity bias; the tendency to overestimate negative feelings, experiences or other kinds of information, compared to their positive counterparts. Biases are facilitated by implicit (e.g. unconscious) information processing. Revealing implicit information, by making an effort to make the thought process explicit, reduces the distorting effect of biases on perception; moreover it creates opportunity for artificial intervention of the self-assessment process. Unlike the human mind, software, by definition, cannot reason with implicit knowledge. This characteristic could be put to use to avoid biases in current self-assessment methods. 
An artificial way to obtain explicit information about a person's emotional state, is a specific form of pattern recognition; emotion detection from facial expressions (Picard, 2000). eMotion is such a software tool. It monitors a person's facial expression real time and recognizes, with considerate accuracy, the six universal facial expressions in human beings; happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust and surprise; in addition, it can distinguish between positive and negative moods. 
Integrating eMotion software into an Internet therapy such as 'Grip op je dip' could not merely assist the self-assessment process but outsource it, to an artificial agent, all together.





References
Picard, R.W. (2000). Affective Computing. MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 
p166.

Spek, V.R.M., Nyklicek, I., Cuijpers, P., & Pop, V.J.M. (2008). Internet administration 
of the Edinburgh Depression Scale. Journal of Affective Disorders, 106(3), 301-305.

1 www.gripopjedip.nl