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Strategies for Identifying Careless EMA Responses with Regard to Emotion Differentiation Data
Location: 14
Mentor: Dr. Aaron Heller
Emotion differentiation is described as one’s ability to successfully identify and distinguish one’s own emotions. General procedure for collecting participant data on emotion differentiation includes administering EMA (ecological momentary assessment) surveys, which allow participants to report on their current emotional experience in real-time rather than trying to recall earlier emotional experiences at a later time. EMA surveys both encourage greater participant cooperation, as they are typically (as in this study) able to be completed quickly and through a participant’s own mobile phone, as well as mitigate the error in recalling one’s own emotional experience that may occur if reports are completed at a time not synchronized with participants’ current emotions.
However, one enduring issue brought about by the EMA strategy is the collection of data that may not accurately reflect a participant’s own self-scoring to their best ability, referred to in this research as “careless responses.” Furthermore, a consensus has not yet been reached regarding a paradigm for identifying careless responses in EMA data as applied to emotion differentiation. The present research seeks to explore different methods for identifying careless responses by investigating the relationships between emotion differentiation scores (quantified by ICC values) and the percent of responses flagged for a given carelessness-identifying criterion.
