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Room
Tagungszentrum
Thursday, September 13  »  10:15 - 11:30
Symposium 2
Ambulatory assessment of emotion and affect in everyday life: new approaches – new evidence
Host
Michaël Reicherts (University of Fribourg)
Chair
Michaël Reicherts (University of Fribourg)
Discussant
Frank Wilhelm (University of Basel)
Since its first approaches and computer-based implementations in the 1980s, ambulatory assessment (also “field assessment”, “experience sampling”, “ecological momentary assessment”) has become an important psychological assessment paradigm (e.g. Fahrenberg & Myrtek, 1996; Eid & Diener, 2005). Ambulatory assessment facilitates gaining new evidence on psychological functioning, otherwise inaccessible or biased by other methods, and allows the revision of some existing evidence obtained, to a very large degree, via questionnaire or laboratory methods. It is now being applied to a great variety of daily life domains and to different levels of psychological functioning (cognitive, emotional, psychophysiological, etc.). The symposium presents new trends and research examples, putting special emphasis on emotion and affect in daily life: daily life activity logs and mood of couples in an intercultural context, testing of cognitive functions related to mood in the field, multichannel recording of metabolically related cardiorespiratory coupling in anxiety disorders, self-monitoring of affective states with a “learning” system, and a monitoring approach to interpersonal emotion regulation. The symposium also discusses criteria (e.g. reliability, validity, and usability aspects; see also Fahrenberg et al., Psychologische Rundschau, 2007) to critically evaluate the potentials and pitfalls of ambulatory assessment strategies and their relevance to psychological research and practice.
Speakers
Andrea B. Horn
Capturing Intra- and Interpersonal Emotion regulation in everyday life: an ambulatory assessment study
Authors
Andrea B. Horn (University of Fribourg)
Peter Wilhelm (University of Fribourg)
Louella Molina (University of Fribourg)
Stephan Rieder (University of Fribourg)
Michael Reicherts (University of Fribourg)
Meinrad Perrez (University of Fribourg)
Emotion regulation has drawn rising interest in the research of clinical, developmental, social and biological psychology as it has been shown to be highly relevant in psychosocial adjustment and health.
The diversity of this field is partly due to methodological issues: behavioural observation, self –report and experimental data are covering limited aspects of emotion regulation which have been important for the progress in this field but often hard to generalize to every day life emotion regulation. Ambulatory assessment allows capturing less intrusively and closer to everyday life’s situations processes of emotion regulation in the individual. Besides, interpersonal aspects of emotion regulation have been neglected and lack to be conceptually integrated. Parallel ambulatory assessment of dyads offers the possibility to address also interpersonal processes.
In this study an integrative model of intra- and interpersonal emotion regulation and an ambulatory assessment instrument measuring couple’s everyday intra- and interpersonal emotion regulation was developed.
Diary data show reliably that affective states fluctuate over the day and are associated with own activities and partner’s behaviour. Especially in stressful situations mood repair is triggered by positive behaviours of the partner.
Ambulatory assessment offers unique possibilities in the research of emotion regulation as it has proved to capture fluctuations of affect and interpersonal processes in daily life.
Michaël Reicherts
Assessment of affective states in daily life: the “Learning Affect Monitor” (LAM)
Authors
Michaël Reicherts (University of Fribourg)
Christian Maggiori (University of Fribourg)
Virginie Salamin (University of Fribourg)
Karl Pauls (University of Fribourg)
A particular challenge for the daily life assessment of affectivity is given by the diversity of quantitative and qualitative aspects of emotional experiences, as suggested by the basic dimensions (e.g. Russel et al., 1989) and the discrete basic emotions conceptions (e.g. Izard, 1991). Therefore we tried to integrate both approaches in a self-monitoring system on PDA.
Subjects evaluate their affective state according to a 3-dimensional space (valence, perceived activation, intensity) and then qualify them (using a list of 30 descriptors). Over time, the system adapts to the subject by an adaptive algorithm and presents affect descriptors according to their likelihood, so that the user’s processing time and mental load can decrease noticeably. In this study, N=51 adults entered n=2813 recordings during one week time-sampling (8-10 randomized signals per day).
Results indicate high psychometric quality (e.g. response rate of 88.8%, mean split-half reliabilities of about .90) and “usability” of the instrument. Validity analyses reveal plausible links between the qualitative descriptors with the 3-dimensional affect space, and the system’s capacity to “learn” the users’ preferences in qualifying their affective states.
Results underline the LAMs rapid (mean RT under 1 min.) and meaningful data collection, preserving complex but inter-individually comparable data in the domain of emotion and affect. Examples for clinical and health applications will be given.
Stephan Rieder
Ambulatory assessment of mood and cognitive performance in daily life: Results from a cross-cultural study in Germany and Brazil
Authors
Stephan Rieder (University of Fribourg)
Christoph Käppler (University of Education Ludwigsburg)
Hand-held PCs and multi-channel-recorders are increasingly used for ambulatory assessment of psychological and physiological parameters in daily life. This approach is especially suitable for research on fluctuating states and behavior. However, the psychological data collected in such studies are mainly self-reports of emotions, stress, symptoms, and coping. Possible applications of psychometric tests in field remain unused by most researchers who favor ambulatory assessment.
The present study aimed to examine within-person fluctuations of mood, their possible impact on selective attention and working memory performance, and their moderation by individual differences. Altogether 101 university students in both Germany and Brazil used hand-held PCs five times a day during two consecutive days in order to assess momentary subjective state and to complete two cognitive tests.
Within both samples, diurnal changes in mood and cognitive performance could be observed. Within-subject correlations between subjective state and scores of both cognitive tests yielded low to moderate coefficients. Extraversion and neuroticism only correlated with subjective state averaged across all protocols. Cross-cultural comparisons yielded some differences concerning mood ratings and scores of cognitive performance tests.
Findings indicate that ambulatory assessment combining self-reports of mood and in-field tests offers new insights into important issues of differential and clinical psychology.
Frank H. Wilhelm
Attenuated metabolic-cardiorespiratory coupling during daily life in patients with anxiety disorders
Authors
Frank H. Wilhelm (University of Basel)
Monique C. Pfaltz (University of Basel)
Tanja Michael (University of Basel)
Jens Blechert (University of Basel)
Vitaliy Kolodyazhniy (University of Basel)
Jürgen Margraf (University of Basel)
Paul Grossman (University Hospital Basel)
In healthy individuals, the coupling between heart rate (HR) and minute ventilation (Vmin) is substantial because both serve metabolic functions. We hypothesize that clinical anxiety interferes with efficient regulation of cardiovascular and respiratory adjustments to physical activity during daily life resulting in attenuation of coupling. Patients with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD, N=16), panic disorder (PD, N=21) and healthy controls (HC, N=29) were assessed for 24h with the LifeShirt. For each individual, the R-squared (R2) index relating HR to Vmin was calculated as a measure of cardiorespiratory coupling. Self-reported anxiety (0=none, 10=extreme) was assessed 5 times a day with an electronic diary. Anxiety was equally elevated in PTSD (2.5+/-1.4) and PD (2.4+/-1.4) compared to HC (0.3+/-0.8). An ANOVA indicated significant R2 differences between groups (p=.029). Post-hoc tests showed that R2 was significantly attenuated in PTSD (0.56+/-0.03) vs. HC (0.65+/-0.02). R2 in PD (0.57+/-0.03) was attenuated on a trend level (p<.10). This is the first study demonstrating that anxiety may interfere with efficient metabolically related cardiorespiratory coupling during daily life. Poorer coupling is likely due to repeated episodes of additional HR related to emotional activation (Wilhelm and Roth, 1998). Degree of metabolic coupling may be an important index of allostatic load that deserves further study in research on the health consequences of psychological stress.
Véronique Eicher
How are measures of everyday issues affected by the method of data collection
Authors
Véronique Eicher (University of Fribourg)
Peter Wilhelm (University of Fribourg)
Meinrad Perrez (University of Fribourg)
Dominik Schöbi (University of California Los Angeles)
How is the assessment of everyday issues affected by the method of data collection? Is the division of household tasks or their evaluation of pleasantness assessed differently with questionnaires than with diary studies?
In many areas of psychology, the most frequently used method of data collection has been the questionnaire representing a “global” report of a given issue. A newer method of data collection, the diary study, allows to “measure life as it is lived”. These diary studies have become very important as mundane events or changes in evaluations of various events may not be remembered correctly after a longer period of time. We therefore believe that the computer assisted diary is a more appropriate way to assess everyday activities and duties which are performed spontaneously.
These claims were analysed in a huge European study, in which more than 500 couples living in 7 European countries participated. The participants completed a questionnaire (asking about an average week) and took part in a computer assisted diary assessment, in which they answered similar questions 3 times a day over the course of a week. This multi-method approach allows a direct comparison of the method of data collection. In addition in both methods, the self- and other-perception was asked, which allows further comparisons and analyses of accuracy.
Preliminary results show that accuracy measures differ depending on which method is used. At the conference further results will be discussed.
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