The SWE colloquium on Thursday 5 November (12:00-13:00) will be presented by Ulrich Ebner-Priemer, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. The talk will be totally virtual, streamed live through Zoom.

Monitoring the dynamics of real life using ambulatory assessment

Real-time mobile smartphone sampling of psychopathological symptoms and behaviour, sometimes also called Ambulatory Assessment [1], has become more and more popular in psychological research, offering three key advantages: (1) real-time assessment eliminates retrospective biases; (2) real-life assessment enables investigating symptomatology in the most important context: the everyday lives of our patients; (3) the within-subject perspective offers the possibility to elucidate psychopathological mechanisms in everyday life. According to current research, the dynamics of affective states and the intentional regulation of emotions are even more important to psychological health and maladjustment than the affective states itself. However, capturing the ebb and flow in everyday life is not trivial. Recent technical developments resulted in both fancy hardware to collect data in everyday life and powerful data-modelling techniques to analyse it. All three advantages come with the promise of increasing validity and reliability and therewith decreasing costs and sample size for future studies. In the talk, the speaker will focus on examples of ambulatory assessment to illustrate opportunities in psychological research: using high-frequency data assessment to model affective dynamics, using location-triggered e-diaries to investigate the relation between stress-reactivity and environmental components, monitoring physical activity and telecommunication behaviour to predict upcoming episodes in bipolar patients. The speaker will conclude by specifying disadvantages and pitfalls of ambulatory assessment. In conclusion, ambulatory assessment offers a wealth of methodological approaches to enhance the understanding of psychopathological symptoms in the most important context: the daily lives of our patients.

Reference

1. Trull, T. J., & Ebner-Preimer, U. (2913). Ambulatory assessment. Annual Review of Clinical Psychology, 9, 151–176.