A Systematic Review of Momentary Assessment Designs for Mood and Anxiety Symptoms

Abstract

Background: Altering components of ecological momentary assessment (EMA) measures to better suit the purposes of individual studies is a common and oftentimes necessary step. Though the inherent flexibility in EMA has its benefits, no resource exists to provide an overview of the variability in how convergent constructs and symptoms have been assessed in the past. The present study fills that gap by examining EMA measurement design for mood and anxiety symptomatology.Methods: Various search engines were used to identify 234 relevant studies. Items administered, data collection schedules (i.e., beeps per day), response scales (i.e., Likert), data collection platforms (i.e., apps), and psychometric properties (i.e., reliability) were extracted.Results: Study designs varied greatly in all aspects across the identified papers. Over 4,600 extracted items were qualitatively analyzed, resulting in the identification of 12 themes. The most EMA items focused on affect, with categories such as “happiness” and “tension” appearing most frequently. We provide all of our data extraction in the format of an open-source database.Limitations: Despite our best attempts to include as much of the relevant literature as possible, this review and the accompanying database are not exhaustive, but can easily be built upon to include other, newer studies.Conclusions: The fact that the affect theme featured both positive and negative emotional constructs highlights the dichotomous focus on valence and affect within the literature surrounding anxious and depressive symptomatology. We hope that our database will act as a helpful design decision-making resource for researchers studying this kind of symptomatology in the future.Systematic Review Registration: PROSPERO (CRD42019139409).

The Experience Sampling Method in Monitoring Social Interactions Among Children and Adolescents in School: A Systematic Literature Review

“…In summary, due to high methodological heterogeneity in ESM studies, and to reduce potential threats of ecological/external validity (and to promote high-quality ESM research), we, in accordance with findings in previous ESM publications (e.g., Zirkel et al, 2015 ; Himmelstein et al, 2019 ; van Roekel et al, 2019 ; Hall et al, 2021 ), emphasize the importance of a complete and transparent reporting of study design choices and results, such as in use of items, training of participants, response latency, and study limitations, not least when it comes to compliance rates and attrition. Moreover, study design characteristics such as training of participants on ESM protocol, use and type of incentives may be relevant for the association with attrition and compliance.…”

“…In the last decade, momentary assessment studies have become increasingly popular, not least due to the widespread adoption of smartphones and other wearables, which provide convenient and cost-effective data collection, as well as the advances in statistical software and computational processing power (van Berkel et al, 2017 ). Recently, a number of reviews on ESM studies have been published across disciplines related to mental health research, such as within-person assessment of social comparison (Arigo et al, 2020 ), quantitative and qualitative aspects of social interactions predicting within-person variance in affect (Liu et al, 2019 ), mood and anxiety disorders (Hall et al, 2021 ), and health-related behavior and psychological constructs (Williams et al, 2021 ). Similarly, there are best practice guidelines for conducting ESM studies (e.g., Stone and Shiffman, 2002 ; Trull and Ebner-Priemer, 2020 ; Kirtley et al, 2021 ).…”

A Data-Driven Clustering Method for Discovering Profiles in the Dynamics of Major Depressive Disorder Using a Smartphone-Based Ecological Momentary Assessment of Mood

“…A second limitation lies in the lack of available psychometric qualities of our EMA measure of mood ( 36 , 62 ). Investigating psychometric qualities of various EMA measures of mood is an important issue, yet in need of more research ( 63 ). Fortunately, available results are potentially positive.…”

Emotion Regulation Flexibility and Electronic Patient-Reported Outcomes: A Framework for Understanding Symptoms and Affect Dynamics in Pediatric Psycho-Oncology

“…ePRO can be exploited for symptom diagnostics, treatment process monitoring and forecasting models [ 83 , 84 , 85 , 86 ]. However, research methods and an overarching frame of reference are needed to identify and model early warning signals, tipping points and patterns of changes in various psychological and QoL-related variables, such as ER, mood and affect, distress, physiological and psychological symptoms, HCP–patient relationship and communication, therapy motivation, contentment and compliance [ 14 , 16 , 87 ].…”