(PS3-A8) Concordance Between Retrospective and Ecological Momentary Reports of Affect

Typical assessment of emotions requires individuals to provide a single, aggregated report of their experiences over the prior days, weeks, or months. However, these retrospective responses may be subject to various biases that degrade their accurate representation of one’s actual emotional experiences, posing a problem for researchers and clinicians. In the current study, we sought to examine the concordance between individual affect items collected via Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) and their retrospective counterparts collected at the end of two weeks in a sample of 254 racially diverse undergraduates (34.6% white). Participants completed 5 daily surveys for 14 days and reported the degree to which they experienced a wide array of thoughts and feelings in the previous two hours (e.g., depressed, hopeless, worried, positive, energetic, etc.). We summarized the EMA measures in multiple ways: the average of all EMA observations, the average of the maximum value of each day, the peak value overall, and correlated these summaries with the retrospective reports of the same items. Across affect items, the EMA summary index that exhibited strongest correlations with retrospective reports was daily max (Pearson rs .53 - .76), closely followed by the mean (rs .45 - .78), though there was variation between items. We will discuss the implications for both clinicians and researchers who use retrospective measures and measures derived from momentary assessments.