4 - (SYM 40) the Benefits of Daily Connection: Exploring Mechanisms Underlying the Benefits of the Agapé App

Background: Although romantic relationships can enhance lives and even prevent disease and death, rates of relationship discord and dissolution remain extremely high among couples in the United States. The current project evaluated Agapé, a relationship wellness smartphone app that sparks moments of connection between partners with daily prompts. Agapé was designed as an app and was developed with 4 years of intensive, user-driven, persuasive system design to optimize its usability and the customer experience (i.e., intrinsic enjoyment).

AGAPÉ: Agapé sends daily prompts (e.g., If you were going to give your partner an award, what would it be for and why?) to couples and allows them to see each other’s answers once they have both responded. The prompts were developed with the goal of creating positive moments of connection (injecting moments of fun and joy into relationships) while spanning a wide range content domains of relationship interventions (conflict, responsiveness, support, gratitude, investment, sex). With over 1 million downloads and over half a million unique monthly users, Agapé has been disseminated to hundreds of thousands of couples with reasonably high levels of sustained use and customer retention.

Methods: A total of 405 couples (n = 810 partners; 68% white; 50% female; Mage = 29; 50% cohabiting; 31% married; 33% dissatisfied/distressed; 8% in couples therapy) were followed across their first month of using Agapé. Both partners completed well-validated measures of relationship functioning (e.g., CSI, PN-RQ) individual functioning (e.g., MASQ, PHQ-9, QoLI, SVS), and relationship processes at baseline and after 1 month of app use (88% of couples provided follow-up data).

Results: Agapé had high engagement (99% of couples completing M=27 daily prompts) and couples found the app easy (74%) and enjoyable (93%) to use. Repeated measures ANOVAs revealed significant within-person improvement on relationship and individual functioning with corresponding dosage effects linking stronger benefits to greater usage. Network analyses examining unique linkages between change scores highlighted that increases in quality time spent together, felt gratitude, and perceived partner responsiveness were most proximally linked to corresponding increases in relationship quality for both men and women.




Conclusions: Agapé use was linked to improved individual and relationship functioning over the first month of use via corresponding improvements on a set of joy-promoting processes, highlighting the power of positives in relationships.