Search

Background: Affective dynamics have been identified as a correlate of a broad span of mental health issues, making them key candidate transdiagnostic factors. However, there remains a lack of knowledge about which aspects of affective dynamics - especially as they manifest in the course of daily life - relate to a general risk for mental health issues versus specific symptoms., Methods: We leverage an ecological momentary assessment (EMA) study design with four measures per day over a two-week period to explore how negative affect levels, inertia, lability, and reactivity to provocation and stress in the course of daily life relate to mental health symptoms in young adults (n = 256) in the domains of anxiety, depression, psychosis-like symptoms, behaviour problems, suicidality, and substance use., Results: Dynamic structural equation modelling (DSEM) suggested that negative affect levels in daily life were associated with depression, anxiety, indirect and proactive aggression, psychosis, anxiety, and self-injury; negative affective lability was associated with depression, physical aggression, reactive aggression, suicidal ideation, and ADHD symptoms; negative affective inertia was associated with depression, anxiety, physical aggression, and cannabis use; and emotional reactivity to provocation was related to physical aggression., Limitations: The cross-sectional design, the limited span of mental health issues included, and the convenience nature and small size of the sample are limitations., Conclusions: Findings suggest that a subset of mental health symptoms have shared negative affective dynamics patterns. Longitudinal research is needed to rigorously examine the directionality of the effects underlying the association between affective dynamics and mental health issues., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest None., (Copyright © 2024 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Objectives: Ecological momentary assessment (EMA) has seen an explosion in popularity in recent years; however, an improved understanding of how to minimise (selective) non-adherence is needed., Methods: We examined a range of respondent characteristics predictors of adherence (defined as the number of EMA surveys completed) in the D2M EMA study. Participants were a sample of n = 255 individuals drawn from the longitudinal z-proso cohort who completed up to 4 EMA surveys per day for a period of 2 weeks., Results: In unadjusted analyses, lower moral shame, lower self-control, lower levels of self-injury, and higher levels of aggression, tobacco use, psychopathy, and delinquency were associated with lower adherence. In fully adjusted analyses with predictors selected using lasso, only alcohol use was related to adherence: beer and alcopops to higher adherence and spirits to lower adherence., Conclusions: These findings provide potential insights into some of the psychological mechanisms that may underlie adherence in EMA. They also point to respondent characteristics for which additional or tailored efforts may be needed to promote adherence., (© 2023 The Authors. International Journal of Methods in Psychiatric Research published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.)

Ecological momentary assessment (EMA) methodologies are commonly used to illuminate the predictors and impacts of experiencing subjective stress in the course of daily life. The validity of inferences from this research is contingent on the availability of measures of perceived momentary stress that can provide valid and reliable momentary stress scores. However, studies of the development and validation of such measures have been lacking. In this study, we use an EMA data collection design to examine the within- and between- person reliability and criterion validity and between-person gender measurement invariance of a brief EMA-adapted measure of a widely used trait measure of stress: the Perceived Stress Scale (PSS). Scores showed high internal consistency reliability and significant correlations with a range of criterion validity measures at both the within- and between-person level. Gender measurement invariance up to the scalar level also held for scores. Findings support the use of the EMA-adapted PSS presented in the current study for use in community-ascertained samples to address research questions relating to the influences on and effects of momentary stress and their gender differences., (© 2023 The Authors. Stress and Health published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.)

Background: Ecological momentary assessment (EMA) is widely used in health research to capture individuals' experiences in the flow of daily life. The majority of EMA studies, however, rely on nonprobability sampling approaches, leaving open the possibility of nonrandom participation concerning the individual characteristics of interest in EMA research. Knowledge of the factors that predict participation in EMA research is required to evaluate this possibility and can also inform optimal recruitment strategies., Objective: This study aimed to examine the extent to which being willing to participate in EMA research is related to respondent characteristics and to identify the most critical predictors of participation., Methods: We leveraged the availability of comprehensive data on a general young adult population pool of potential EMA participants and used and compared logistic regression, classification and regression trees, and random forest approaches to evaluate respondents' characteristic predictors of willingness to participate in the Decades-to-Minutes EMA study., Results: In unadjusted logistic regression models, gender, migration background, anxiety, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder symptoms, stress, and prosociality were significant predictors of participation willingness; in logistic regression models, mutually adjusting for all predictors, migration background, tobacco use, and social exclusion were significant predictors. Tree-based approaches also identified migration status, tobacco use, and prosociality as prominent predictors. However, overall, willingness to participate in the Decades-to-Minutes EMA study was only weakly predictable from respondent characteristics. Cross-validation areas under the curve for the best models were only in the range of 0.56 to 0.57., Conclusions: Results suggest that migration background is the single most promising target for improving EMA participation and sample representativeness; however, more research is needed to improve prediction of participation in EMA studies in health., (©Aja Murray, Anastasia Ushakova, Xinxin Zhu, Yi Yang, Zhuoni Xiao, Ruth Brown, Lydia Speyer, Denis Ribeaud, Manuel Eisner. Originally published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research (https://www.jmir.org), 02.08.2023.)

Background: Ecological momentary assessment (EMA) has become a popular method of gathering information about participants as they go about their daily lives. However, participant non-compliance, especially non-random compliance, in EMA is a concern. Better knowledge of the moment-to-moment factors that predict prompt non-response can inform the design of strategies to mitigate it., Method: We used data from a general population young adult (n = 260) EMA study, 'decades-to-minutes' (D2M) and fitted dynamic structural equation models (DSEMs) to explore a range of candidate momentary predictors of missing the next prompt., Results: We found that higher levels of stress, overall negative affect, and the specific negative affective state of 'upset' at a given prompt predicted a greater likelihood of missing the next prompt. However, no other specific affective states, alcohol use, experiencing social provocations nor aggressive behaviour predicted missing the next prompt., Limitations: The primary limitation of the present study was a lack of information on predictors concurrent with missed prompts., Conclusions: Findings point to the potential value of gathering information on momentary negative affect (especially feeling upset) and stress to help inform strategies that intervene to prevent application disengagement at optimal moments and to feed into strategies to mitigate bias due to non-random non-response in EMA studies., Competing Interests: Conflict of interest The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article., (Copyright © 2022 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Ecological momentary assessment (EMA) methodologies are commonly used to illuminate the predictors and impacts of experiencing subjective stress in the course of daily life. The validity of inferences from this research is contingent on the availability of measures of perceived momentary stress that can provide valid and reliable momentary stress scores. However, studies of the development and validation of such measures have been lacking. In this study, we use an EMA data collection design to examine the within‐ and between‐ person reliability and criterion validity and between‐person gender measurement invariance of a brief EMA‐adapted measure of a widely used trait measure of stress: the Perceived Stress Scale (PSS). Scores showed high internal consistency reliability and significant correlations with a range of criterion validity measures at both the within‐ and between‐person level. Gender measurement invariance up to the scalar level also held for scores. Findings support the use of the EMA‐adapted PSS presented in the current study for use in community‐ascertained samples to address research questions relating to the influences on and effects of momentary stress and their gender differences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]