Many physical diseases have been reported to be associated with psychosocial factors. In these diseases, assessment relies mainly on subjective symptoms in natural settings. Therefore, it is important to assess symptoms and/or relationships between psychosocial factors and symptoms in natural settings. Symptoms are usually assessed by self-report when patients visit their doctors. However, self...

Ecological momentary assessment and/or experience sampling methods are increasingly used in health studies to study subjective experiences within changing environmental contexts. In these studies, up to 30 or 40 observations are often obtained for each subject. Because there are so many measurements per subject, one can characterize a subject's mean and variance and can specify models for both....

The current study used ecological momentary assessment to test several tenets of the reserve capacity model (L.C. Gallo & K. A. Matthews, 2003). Women (N = 108) with varying socioeconomic status (SES) monitored positive and negative psychosocial experiences and emotions across 2 days. Measures of intrapsychic and social resources were aggregated to represent the reserve capacity available to ma...

The ability to achieve ecological sustainability and the sustainable development of marine and estuarine ecosystems constitutes a complex major challenge and depends on many driving forces, often conflicting with each other. In particular, there are three major drivers: (a) the search for human well-being, health and safety, (b) the maintenance of ecological sustainability and environmental equ...

Prevention researchers have found that drinking in different contexts is related to different alcohol problems. Where and with whom people drink affects the types of alcohol-related problems they experience. Consequently, identifying those contexts that result in the greatest number of problems provides a novel opportunity to target new prevention efforts aimed at those contexts. However, ident...

The science of morality has drawn heavily on well-controlled but artificial laboratory settings. To study everyday morality, we repeatedly assessed moral or immoral acts and experiences in a large (N = 1252) sample using ecological momentary assessment. Moral experiences were surprisingly frequent and manifold. Liberals and conservatives emphasized somewhat different moral dimensions. Religious...

Ecological inference : new methodological strategies / edited

For longitudinal data, mixed models include random subject effects to indicate how subjects influence their responses over repeated assessments. The error variance and the variance of the random effects are usually considered to be homogeneous. These variance terms characterize the within-subjects (i.e., error variance) and between-subjects (i.e., random-effects variance) variation in the data....

Assessment in clinical psychology typically relies on global retrospective self-reports collected at research or clinic visits, which are limited by recall bias and are not well suited to address how behavior changes over time and across contexts. Ecological momentary assessment (EMA) involves repeated sampling of subjects' current behaviors and experiences in real time, in subjects' natural en...

Over the last years, health psychology has amounted impressive evidence that social factors play a critical role in primary and tertiary prevention. However, compared with other fields, it has somewhat lagged behind in implementing methodological advances that can considerably improve the sophistication of the assessment of such social factors. In essence, this article seeks to motivate readers...