James Hamblin:

Every day you get a text from the Emojiary bot. It asks how you're doing. You write it back, texting out your most visceral feelings, and it accepts them without judgment.

This is all meant to conjure a daily moment of cathartic introspection, of candid self expression.

Reflective writing, particularly in a journal, has been shown to have health benefits both physical and emotional, like increasing control and creativity, decreasing anxiety, depression, and rage. But it's hard to do.

Liz Danzico:

At the end of each day, I write an "atomic sentence," a single statement that summarizes the most vital lesson about that day.

Matt Mullenweg:

So blog just for two people. First, write for yourself, both your present self whose thinking will be clarified by distilling an idea through writing and editing, and your future self who will be able to look back on these words and be reminded of the context in which they were written. Second, write for a single person who you have in mind as the perfect person to read what you write, almost like a letter, even if they never will, or a person who you're sure will read it because of a connection you have to them.

James Hamblin:

In the 1980s James Pennebaker, who is now chair of the department of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, asked people to write about feelings related to a stressful event for 20 minutes and saw improvements in physical health after just a few sessions.

Dan Jurafsy:

Authors of one-star reviews unconsciously use language much as people do in the wake of collective trauma.

Lauren McDevitt:

One thing we found is that feelings can be kind of abstract. When you first start to think about how you're feeling, you might not know how to describe that exactly in words. So the emojis are this first toe in the pool to sort of get a read on how you're feeling.

T.M. Luhrmann:

Abstract odor terms are common among people on the Malay Peninsula.