Limitations
heterogenous, crashes, SE
While the consistent and extensive measurement of participants’ subjective states through daily pre-post practice assessments in the context of participants’ everyday lives is a strength of this work, it retains the weaknesses which are common to self-report measures. Since participants were asked immediately before and after practice, retrospective biasing of responses could be reduced to a minimum. However, self-report measures are only viable if participants are able to self-reflect. Although we tried to correct for self-selection bias through the randomized controlled study design, the final sample included a higher percentage of women than men and had a higher monthly household income than the general population in Berlin, which may limit the generalizability of findings. It is noteworthy, however, that participants were originally recruited to participate in a COVID-19-related mental health study and not an intervention study and were thus relatively naïve to the present training methods and formed a rather heterogenous sample.Occasionally, some participants of the socio-emotional training group in the first intervention phase encountered technical difficulties when trying to pair with their dyad partner, leading to disconnects and app-crashes. Although usually a stable connection could be established within a few tries, in rare cases participants were not able to resolve this issue for the day. This may have led to frustration and discouragement and thus may have diminished positive training effects. However, repeating the analyses using observations with only low counts of app crashes and aborts and high rates of compliance didn’t substantially change model estimates (see Supplement 4). While findings of change in thought patterns and affect valence and arousal were highly consistent for most outcome variables between the two socio-emotional interventions (SE and WSE) indicating the validity of the chosen approach, the statistical power to reliably detect changes over the 10 weeks intervention time may have been too low