The joint influence of persons and situations on behavior has long been posited by personality and social psychological theory (Funder, 2006; Lewin, 1951). However, a lack of tools for real-time behavioral and situation assessment has left direct investigations of this sort immobilized. This study combines recent advances in situation assessment and experience sampling methodology to examine the simultaneous effects of personality traits and situation characteristics on real-time expressions of behavior and emotion in N = 210 participants. The results support an additive model such that both personality traits and situation characteristics independently predict real-time expressions of behavior and emotion. These results have implications for several prominent theoretical perspectives in personality, including both trait and cognitive theories.

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According to the Fundamental Motives Framework, basic goals such as protecting oneself, forming coalitions, and avoiding disease have emerged as a result of evolutionary processes to enhance reproductive fitness. This article introduces the Situational Affordances for Adaptive Problems (SAAP), a measure of situation characteristics that promotes or prevents the achievement of these evolutionarily important goals. In Study 1, participants rated a recent situation they encountered using a preliminary version of the SAAP. Using factor analysis, the measure was reduced to 28 items. In Study 2, the factor structure was confirmed. Studies 3 and 4 evaluated the psychometric properties of the measure including its predictive validity. Future studies can use the SAAP to investigate differences in the everyday experience of these fundamental motives.

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Recent advances in mobile sensing technology provide innovative methods for understanding how individuals think, feel, and behave in vivo. Despite the utility of these new methods, as of yet, researchers have not been able to see the environments people encounter in their daily lives. In this article, we introduce wearable cameras as a new tool for sampling from participants’ everyday situations. Wearable cameras are small devices that capture pictures on a fixed interval (e.g., 30 s). This article discusses the benefits and disadvantages of incorporating wearable cameras into personality and social psychological research. Drawing on our experiences using wearable cameras in research, we provide insights into ethical and legal considerations when designing studies using these devices. Lastly, we report data on situation change and perceived obtrusiveness from, to our knowledge, the first wearable camera study in personality and social psychology.