Arthur A. Stone

University of Southern California | USC · Department of Psychology

Background The underdiagnosis of cognitive impairment hinders timely intervention of dementia. Health professionals working in the community play a critical role in the early detection of cognitive impairment, yet still face several challenges such as a lack of suitable tools, necessary training, and potential stigmatization. Objective This study...

BACKGROUND There are many concerns about repeated measurement with self-report methods that are discussed in this paper. These points deserve to be considered by those using intensive, repeated self-report designs. OBJECTIVE To outline the potential issues with repeated measures intensive measurement studies. METHODS This is primarily a discussio...

Background Emerging evidence suggests a positive association between relevant aspects of one’s psychological identity and physical activity engagement, but the current understanding of this relationship is primarily based on scales designed to assess identity as a person who exercises, leaving out essential aspects of physical activities (eg, incid...

BACKGROUND Emerging evidence suggests a positive association between relevant aspects of one’s psychological identity and physical activity engagement, but the current understanding of this relationship is primarily based on scales designed to assess identity as a person who exercises, leaving out essential aspects of physical activities (eg, incid...

Response times (RTs) to ecological momentary assessment (EMA) items often decrease after repeated EMA administration, but whether this is accompanied by lower response quality requires investigation. We examined the relationship between EMA item RTs and EMA response quality. In one data set, declining response quality was operationalized as decreas...

Questionnaires are ever present in survey research. In this study, we examined whether an indirect indicator of general cognitive ability could be developed based on response patterns in questionnaires. We drew on two established phenomena characterizing connections between cognitive ability and people’s performance on basic cognitive tasks, and ex...

Objectives Self-reported survey data is essential for monitoring the health and wellbeing of the population as it ages. For studies of aging to provide precise and unbiased results, it is necessary that the self-reported information meets high psychometric standards. In this study, we examined whether the quality of survey responses in panel studie...

Objectives This paper examined the magnitude of differences in performance across domains of cognitive functioning between participants who attrited from studies and those who did not, using data from longitudinal ageing studies where multiple cognitive tests were administered. Design Individual participant data meta-analysis. Participants Data a...

BACKGROUND The underdiagnosis of cognitive impairment hinders timely prevention and intervention of dementia. Health professionals working in communities play a critical role in the early detection of CI, yet still face several challenges such as a lack of suitable tools, necessary training, and potential stigmatization. OBJECTIVE This study explo...

Objective: Seminal advances in virtual human (VH) technology have introduced highly interactive, computer-animated VH interviewers. Their utility for aiding in chronic pain care is unknown. We developed three interactive telehealth VH interviews-a standard pain-focused, a psychosocial risk factor, and a pain psychology and neuroscience educational...

Mental processes underlying people’s responses to Ecological Momentary Assessments (EMA) have rarely been studied. In cognitive psychology, one of the most popular and successful mental process models is the drift diffusion model. It decomposes response time (RT) data to distinguish how fast information is accessed and processed (“drift rate”), and...

Although the potential for participant selection bias is readily acknowledged in the momentary data collection literature, very little is known about uptake rates in these studies or about differences in the people that participate versus those who do not. This study analyzed data from an existing Internet panel of older people (age 50 and greater)...

Participant selection bias is of concern to researchers conducting surveys of all types. For momentary data capture studies, such as Ecological Momentary Assessment, the level of burden associated with these techniques and the possibility of low uptake rates makes the concerns especially salient. This study invited 3,000 individuals to participate...

Objectives: With the increase in web-based data collection, response times (RTs) for survey items have become a readily available byproduct in most online studies. We examined whether RTs in online questionnaires can prospectively discriminate between cognitively normal respondents and those with cognitive impairment, no dementia (CIND). Method:...

Interest in just-in-time adaptive interventions (JITAI) has rapidly increased in recent years. One core challenge for JITAI is the efficient and precise measurement of tailoring variables that are used to inform the timing of momentary intervention delivery. Ecological momentary assessment (EMA) is often used for this purpose, even though EMA in it...

Monitoring of cognitive abilities in large-scale survey research is receiving increasing attention. Conventional cognitive testing, however, is often impractical on a population level highlighting the need for alternative means of cognitive assessment. We evaluated whether response times (RTs) to online survey items could be useful to infer cogniti...

The use of repeated, momentary, real-world assessment methods known as the Experience Sampling Method and Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) has been broadly embraced over the last few decades. These methods have extended our assessment reach beyond lengthy retrospective self-reports as they can capture everyday experiences in their immediate co...

Researchers have become increasingly interested in response times to survey items as a measure of cognitive effort. We used machine learning to develop a prediction model of response times based on 41 attributes of survey items (e.g., question length, response format, linguistic features) collected in a large, general population sample. The develop...

The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted many different facets of life. The infectious nature of the disease has led to significant changes in social interactions in everyday life. The present study examined how older adults’ patterns of everyday momentary social interactions (i.e., with no one, partner, family, and friends) and their affect varied acros...

Background and Objectives It is widely recognized that survey satisficing, inattentive, or careless responding in questionnaires reduces the quality of self-report data. In this study, we propose that such low-quality responding (LQR) can carry substantive meaning at older ages. Completing questionnaires is a cognitively demanding task and LQR amon...

Response bias characterized by decreases in self-reported subjective states when measured repeatedly over short time-frames is a potential concern in social science. Recent work suggests that this initial elevation bias (IEB) is pronounced among young adult students' self-reports of affect when using ambulatory methods, but it is unclear if such bi...

To ensure the accuracy of self-reported data, it is important to reduce potential sources of bias such as the unwanted influence of prior questions on subsequent questions, the so-called item context effect. This article attempts to replicate the finding that evaluative subjective well-being was affected by a preceding item, a question about the po...

Introduction: We investigate whether indices of subtle reporting mistakes derived from responses in self-report surveys are associated with dementia risk. Methods: We examined 13,831 participants without dementia from the prospective, population-based Health and Retirement Study (mean age 69 ± 10 years, 59% women). Participants' response pattern...

Objective: The Patient-Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System (PROMIS®) has invested much effort in the development of self-report tools to enable the measurement of individuals with high reliability. Measuring an individual’s health status and symptoms reliably does not necessarily mean that changes in these symptoms are equally captured...

Emotions and symptoms are often overestimated in retrospective ratings, a phenomenon referred to as the "memory-experience gap." Some research has shown that this gap is less pronounced among older compared to younger adults for self-reported negative affect, but it is not known whether these age differences are evident consistently across domains...

Introduction: Effective clinical care for chronic pain requires accurate, comprehensive, meaningful pain assessment. This study investigated healthcare providers' perspectives on seven pain measurement indices for capturing pain intensity. Methods: Semi-structured telephone interviews were conducted with a purposeful sample from four US regions of...

Objective: Intensive ambulatory assessment, such as ecological momentary assessment (EMA), is increasingly used to capture naturalistic patient-reported outcomes. EMA design features (eg, study duration, prompt frequency) vary widely between studies, but it is not known if such design decisions influence potential subjects' willingness to particip...

Perceiving life as meaningful can buffer against negative experiences, whereas searching for meaning in life is often associated with negative outcomes. We examined how these individual differences, along with religiosity and political orientation, are associated with feelings and health-related behaviors during the COVID-19 pandemic ( N = 7,220; U...

Recent evidence suggests that psychological health deteriorated during the COVID-19 pandemic but far less is known about changes in other measures of well-being. We examined changes in a broad set of measures of well-being among seniors just before and after the recognition of community spread of COVID-19 in the United States. We fielded two waves...

Background: Ecological momentary assessment (EMA) has the potential to minimize recall bias by having people report on their experiences in the moment (momentary model) or over short periods (coverage model). This potential hinges on the assumption that participants provide their ratings based on the reporting time frame instructions prescribed in...

Despite tremendous efforts to increase the reliability of pain measures and other self-report instruments, improving or even evaluating the reliability of change scores has been largely neglected. In this study, we investigate the ability of two instruments from the Patient-Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System (PROMIS®), pain interferen...

BACKGROUND Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) has the potential to minimize recall bias by having people report on their experiences in the moment (momentary model) or over short periods of time (coverage model). This potential hinges on the assumption that participants provide ratings based on the reporting timeframe instructions prescribed in...

Background Ecological momentary assessment (EMA) has the potential to minimize recall bias by having people report on their experiences in the moment (momentary model) or over short periods (coverage model). This potential hinges on the assumption that participants provide their ratings based on the reporting time frame instructions prescribed in t...

Comparison standards that people use when responding to survey questions, also called Frames of Reference (FoRs), can influence the validity of self-report responses. The effects of FoRs might be the strongest for items using vague quantifier (VQ) scales, which are particularly prominent in quality of life research, compared with numeric responses....

Subjective well-being has captured the interest of scientists and policy-makers as a way of knowing how individuals and groups evaluate and experience their lives: that is, their sense of meaning, their satisfaction with life, and their everyday moods. One of the more striking findings in this literature is a strong association between age and subj...

We provide an overview of ecological momentary assessment (EMA) methods for the psychosocial study of health. We first present historical underpinnings and key defining characteristics of EMA followed by a description of the most prominent advantages of EMA over traditional retrospective assessments, several measurement considerations, and a discus...

Pain intensity represents the primary outcome in most pain clinical trials. Identifying methods to measure aspects of pain that are most sensitive to treatment may facilitate discovery of effective interventions. In this third of 3 articles examining alternative indices of pain intensity derived from ecological momentary assessments (EMA), we compa...

Pain intensity is a complex and dynamic experience. A focus on assessing patients’ average pain levels may miss important aspects of pain that impact functioning in daily life. In this second of 3 articles investigating alternative indices of pain intensity derived from Ecological Momentary Assessments (EMA), we examine the indices’ associations wi...

Background: Interest in the measurement of the temporal dynamics of people's emotional lives has risen substantially in psychological and medical research. Emotions fluctuate and change over time, and measuring the ebb and flow of people's affective experiences promises enhanced insights into people's health and functioning. Researchers have used...

Significance The elderly in the United States report less pain than those in midlife—suggesting, perhaps, that once people move into old age, their morbidity will fall. Unfortunately, assessing pain by age at one point in time masks the fact that each successive birth cohort reports more pain at any given age than the cohorts that came before it. W...

Pain assessment that fully represents patients’ pain experiences is essential for chronic pain research and management. The traditional primary outcome measure has been a patient's average pain intensity over a time period. In this series of 3 articles, we examine whether pain assessment can be enhanced by considering additional outcome measures ca...

Many factors are known to affect assay sensitivity; however, limited attention has been devoted to understanding whether characteristics of patients' baseline pain impact assay sensitivity. In this study, we tested whether a combination of three baseline pain indices based on ecological momentary assessments (EMA) could detect patients with enhance...

Stress has been widely recognized as a key factor contributing to health outcomes and psychological well-being. While some growing evidence points to stress as having an effect on emotion dynamics characteristics, there has yet to be a test of how global perceptions of stress are associated with not only average levels of emotions but also the vari...

Background: The ability to discriminate between effective and ineffective treatments (assay sensitivity) remains a highly important issue in pain clinical trials. Although many factors are known to affect assay sensitivity (e.g., sample size or patient characteristics), limited attention has been devoted to understanding whether characteristics of...

BACKGROUND Interest in the measurement of the temporal dynamics of people’s emotional lives has risen substantially in psychological and medical research. Emotions fluctuate and change over time, and measuring the ebb and flow of people’s affective experiences promises enhanced insights into people’s health and functioning. Researchers have used a...

Background: Daily diaries are extensively used for examining participants’ daily experience in behavioral and medical science. However, little attention is paid to whether participants recall their experiences within the time frames prescribed by the task. Objective: This study aimed to describe survey respondents’ self-reported recall time frames...

Researchers can characterize people’s well-being by asking them to provide global evaluations of large parts of their life at one time or by obtaining repeated assessments during their daily lives. Global evaluations are reconstructions that are influenced by peak, recent, and frequently occurring states, whereas daily reports reflect naturally occ...

Objective Patient-reported outcomes are central for the assessment and treatment of people with chronic disease. The primary aim of this study was to determine if people with arthritis differed from healthy individuals in their use of internal comparison standards when answering questions about their health and symptomatology. A secondary aim was t...

BACKGROUND Daily diaries are extensively used for examining participants' daily experience in behavioral and medical science. Whether participants recall their experiences within the time frames prescribed by task has received little attention. OBJECTIVE The objectives of this study are to describe survey respondents' self-reported recall timefram...

Little is known about how retirement and the time use redistribution that comes with it relate to experiential wellbeing, especially in low- and middle-income countries (LAMICs). This study aims to determine whether there are differences in experiential wellbeing between retired and working older adults; whether time use accounts for a portion of t...

Free access to the article: https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1YMyK2f~UW4mJn Amazon's MTurk platform has become a popular site for obtaining relatively inexpensive and convenient adult samples for use in behavioral research. Concerns have been raised about selection issues, because MTurk workers chose to participate in the platform and select the tas...

Background: There is a need for valid self-report measures of core health-related quality of life (HRQoL) domains. Objective: To derive brief, reliable and valid health profile measures from the Patient Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System® (PROMIS®) item banks. Methods: Literature review, investigator consensus process, item respo...

Nostalgia is a mixed emotion. Recent empirical research, however, has highlighted positive effects of nostalgia, suggesting it is a predominantly positive emotion. When measured as an individual difference, nostalgia-prone individuals report greater meaning in life and approach temperament. When manipulated in an experimental paradigm, nostalgia in...

Rationale: Self-reports of health and well-being are central for population monitoring, so it is paramount that they are measured accurately. The goal of this study was to examine the impact of age on the use of the comparison standards or frames of reference (FoRs) in self-reports of health, life-satisfaction, fatigue, and pain, and to determine...

Objectives: Accurate representation of the association of health and well-being outcomes over age can inform us about how well the population is doing, where segments of the population may be in need, and allow hypothesis generation about correlates and causes of observed gradients. In this paper, we examine the possibility that response styles can...

Aim of Investigation When asked to retrospectively report on their pain in the past week, patients often recall it as being more intense than they experienced it based on the average of momentary ratings for the same period considered by the recall measure. Findings from general population samples show that this recall bias also appears for other...

Background The degree to which episodic and semantic memory processes contribute to retrospective self-reports have been shown to depend on the length of reporting period. Robinson and Clore (2002) argued that when the amount of accessible detail decreases due to longer reporting periods, an episodic retrieval strategy is abandoned in favor of a se...

Comparison of polynomial growth models for response levels data. (PDF)

Screenshots of the judgment task (instructions and an example of a trial) and an example of an attention check question. (PDF)

Correlation between symptoms (pain/stress) and emotions (sad/anxious/happy) for response levels across all time frames. (PDF)

Comparison of polynomial growth models for response times data. (PDF)

BACKGROUND Ecological momentary assessment (EMA) involves repeated sampling of people’s current experiences in real time in their natural environments, which offers a granular perspective on patients’ experience of pain and other symptoms. However, EMA can be burdensome to patients, and its benefits depend upon patients’ engagement in the assessmen...

Background: Ecological momentary assessment (EMA) involves repeated sampling of people's current experiences in real time in their natural environments, which offers a granular perspective on patients' experience of pain and other symptoms. However, EMA can be burdensome to patients, and its benefits depend upon patients' engagement in the assessm...

Conservatives report greater life satisfaction than liberals, but this relationship is relatively weak. To date, the evidence is limited to a narrow set of well-being measures that ask participants for a single assessment of their life in general. We address this shortcoming by examining the relationship between political orientation and well-being...

Retrospective self-report ratings rely on memory processes. Robinson and Clore (2002) proposed that the degree to which episodic and semantic retrieval contributes to retrospective ratings depends on the accessibility of episodic details, which changes with the length of the reporting period. Following the methods of Robinson and Clore (2002), the...

PurposeQuality of life (QoL) measurement relies upon participants providing meaningful responses, but not all respondents may pay sufficient attention when completing self-reported QoL measures. This study examined the impact of careless responding on the reliability and validity of Internet-based QoL assessments. Methods Internet panelists (n = 20...

Advances in pain measurement using ecological momentary assessments offer novel opportunities for understanding the temporal dynamics of pain. This study examined whether regime-switching models, which capture processes characterized by recurrent shifts between different states, provide clinically relevant information for characterizing individuals...

There has been a recent upsurge of interest in self-reported measures of wellbeing by official statisticians and by researchers in the social sciences. This paper considers data from a wellbeing supplement to the American Time Use Survey (ATUS), which parsed the previous day into episodes. Respondents provided ratings of five experiential wellbeing...

Self-reported pain intensity assessments are central to chronic pain research. Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) methodologies are uniquely positioned to collect these data, and are indeed being utilized in the field. However, EMA protocols are complex, and many decisions are necessary in the design of EMA research studies. A systematic literat...

The survey interview context typically occurs when respondents are at home. However, much of social life occurs outside of the home, meaning that there may be limits on the ecological validity of self-reports of things like experiences or emotional states throughout the day if these things are only reported when the respondent is at home and a subs...

This chapter is going to focus on ecological momentary assessment (EMA) and the experience sampling method (ESM) and I’ll refer to both as EMA. And I’m going to discuss about what they are, what the alternatives are to collect the same kind of information about a day, and then I’ll cover a little bit about how some folks are trying to incorporate t...

Measures of subjective wellbeing (SWB) are used to understand how people think and feel about their lives and experiences. But the measure used matters to conclusions about how well people’s lives are going. This research compares life evaluations and experienced SWB using nationally representative time use diaries, advancing previous research beca...

Objectives: Although there is evidence that evaluative subjective well-being (e.g., life satisfaction) shows a U-shaped pattern with highest satisfaction in the youngest and oldest years and lowest in the middle years of adulthood, much less is known about experiential well-being. We explore a negative indicator of experiential well-being (perceiv...

Objectives: Self-reports in survey research can be affected by internal comparison standards, or Frames of Reference (FoRs), that people apply when making their ratings. The goal of this study was to determine which FoRs people naturally use when rating their health, subjective well-being, fatigue, and pain. We further examined whether FoRs varied...