Digital journaling enables privacy-preserving behavioral phenotyping and real-time risk monitoring at scale

Guided and unguided digital journaling produced small, uncertain anxiety effects in a randomized trial of 665 young adults, with the largest guided estimate at Cohen d=0.25.

• Why it matters: The study addresses whether digital journaling has clinically meaningful benefits and whether longitudinal, privacy-preserving journaling can reliably characterize mood and risk signals.
• What they did: In an 8-week RCT with 1-month follow-up, 423 participants contributed PROMIS outcomes to intention-to-treat models, alongside contamination-corrected analyses and exploratory time-series analyses of 12,000+ observations.
• The result: Anxiety estimates favored journaling (pooled d=0.16 at week 8; d=0.19 at week 12) but none survived multiple-comparison correction; depression and functional impairment showed no benefit, while high-risk signals were linked to younger age (odds ratio 0.81 per year; P=.013).

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