Every exercise in the app comes from somewhere. In the app you find the research behind each exercise, with the source.
- Social and emotional loneliness
- Sociologist Robert Weiss distinguished social loneliness (too few people around you) from emotional loneliness (nobody who is really close). The Dutch De Jong Gierveld scale measures the two separately.
- Circles of closeness
- The circles come from Toni Antonucci's hierarchical mapping technique: you place people yourself, in rings around you, by how close they feel. It asks about felt closeness rather than numbers.
- Reaching out
- Across a series of experiments, people kept underestimating how much others appreciate an unexpected message. The more surprising the contact, the bigger the underestimate. That misjudgement is what keeps many messages unsent.
- Saying thank you
- In a controlled study, writing and delivering a thank-you letter gave people the biggest boost in happiness of all the exercises. It lasted a month. Other experiments show that people keep underestimating how glad the other person is with it.