Ecological momentary assessment of affect in depression-prone and control samples: Survey compliance and affective yield

Ecological momentary assessment (EMA) is a high-frequency ambulatory data collection approach that has come to be widely used in emotion research. It therefore is timely to examine two features of EMA needed for a successful study: compliance with survey prompts and high affective yield (survey prompts that capture affect experience). We posit that compliance may be subject to temporal variation (time-of-day, days in study) and individual differences (depression history), and that affective yield may also differ by social context. We examined these issues in a sample of 318 young adults (Mage = 24.7 years, SD = 2.7), including those with current depression (n = 28), remitted depression (n = 168) and never-depressed controls (n = 122) who participated in a 7-day EMA protocol of negative and positive affect (NA and PA, respectively). The overall compliance rate was 91% and remained stable across the survey week. However, subjects were significantly less likely to respond to the first daily prompt compared to those that followed. The likelihood of capturing NA and PA decreased with each EMA protocol day, and affective yield across social contexts differed by participants' depression status. The sample was largely comprised of White young adults. Relative to the remitted and control groups, the sample size for the currently depressed was unbalanced. Researchers can optimize compliance and affective yield within EMA by considering depression, time-of-day, study duration, and social context. Clinicians using EMA to monitor affect may benefit from considering these parameters. •We examined survey compliance and reporting of emotions in daily life research.•Compliance was lowest among currently depressed adults (vs. remitted and controls).•Regardless of group, the first morning prompt was most likely to be missed.•Self-reporting of negative or positive affect (NA, PA) decreased with days in study.•Across groups, NA and PA reporting differed by social context.•Findings can guide studies of emotion within daily life in research and practice.