Abstract
The primary goal of this study was to examine whether electronic diaries are a feasible method of monitoring transitory emotional states with a school-age, community sample of youth. A second goal was to examine preliminary relations between indices of emotional functioning captured via electronic diaries and other measures of child emotional and psychological functioning. Participants included 38 youth between the ages of 7 and 12 (51% males, M age = 9 [1.52] years and 49% females, M age = 9 [1.94] years) and their mothers (M age = 39 years) and fathers (M age = 42 years). Children were prompted to indicate the intensity of their current emotion four times a day for 1 week using Palm Tungsten E2s. Youth also completed self-report measures of emotion intensity, awareness, and dysregulation. Parents completed measures of child emotion regulation and symptoms of externalizing and internalizing psychopathology. Sixty percent of the prompts were answered as intended. Higher levels of positive emotion intensity based on electronic diary ratings were negatively related to parent reports of adaptive emotion regulation and were positively related to youths’ reports of emotion dysregulation and poor emotion awareness. Given that the electronic diary data offered unique information on youth emotional functioning, strategies to increase compliance with the diaries are suggested.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Gender differences were examined on each of the study variables (i.e., Emotion Regulation, Poor Emotion Awareness, Emotion Dysregulation, Externalizing Symptoms, Internalizing Symptoms, Electronic Diary Negative and Positive Intensity, PANAS-C Negative and Positive Intensity). Bonferroni corrections were conducted accordingly (for emotion functioning measures .05/3 = .016, for emotion intensity measures .05/4 = .012, for psychopathology measures .05/2 = .025). Results indicated non-significant differences among boys and girls for all study measures. It is unclear why no gender effects emerged. One explanation is a lack of power due to the small sample size. However, the means were quite comparable suggesting that there were simply no differences on the majority of the variables. It could also be that in this age group gender differences have yet to emerge. Perhaps as the children approach early adolescence such differences will become evident.
References
Achenbach, T. M. (1991). Manual for the child behavior checklist/4-18 and 1991 profile. Burlington: University of Vermont, Department of Psychiatry.
Achenbach, T. M., & Rescorla, L. A. (2001). Manual for the ASEBA school-age forms & profiles. Burlington: University of Vermont, Research Center for Children, Youth, and Families.
Barrett, D. J., & Feldman Barrett, L. (2000). The Experience-Sampling Program (ESP). Available: http://www2.bc.edu/~barrettli/esp/.
Bolger, N., Davis, A., & Rafaeli, E. (2003). Diary methods: capturing life as it is lived. Annual Review of Psychology, 54, 579–616.
Bower, G. H. (1981). Mood and memory. American Psychologist, 36, 129–148.
Bradley, S. (2000). Affect regulation and the development of psychopathology. New York: The Guilford.
Cicchetti, D., Ackerman, B. P., & Izard, C. E. (1995). Emotions and emotion regulation in developmental psychopathology. Development and Psychopathology, 7, 1–10.
Cole, P. M., Michel, M. K., & O’Donnell-Teti, L. O. (1994). The development of emotion regulation and dysregulation: a clinical perspective. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 59, 73–100.
Diener, E., Larsen, R. J., Levine, S., & Emmons, R. A. (1985). Intensity and frequency: dimensions underlying positive and negative affect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 48, 1253–1265.
Eisenberg, N., & Fabes, R. A. (1992). Emotion regulation and the development of social competence. In M. S. Clark (Ed.), Review of personality and social psychology: Vol. 14. Emotion and social behavior (pp. 119–150). Newbury Park: Sage.
Field, A. (2005). Discovering statistics using SPSS (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks: Sage.
Henker, B., Whalen, C. K., Jamner, L. D., & Delfino, R. J. (2002). Anxiety, affect, and activity in teenagers: monitoring, daily life with electronic diaries. Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 41, 660–670.
Jones, R. E., Olantunji, B. O., Reardon, L. E., & Hawks, E. (2009). Psychometric properties of the affect intensity and reactivity measure adapted for youth. Psychological Assessment, 21, 162–175.
Kusche, C. A., Greenberg, M. T., & Beilke, B. (1988). Kusche affective interview — revised. Great Britain: NFER-Nelson.
Ladouceur, C., Dahl, R., Williamson, D., Birmaher, B., Ryan, N., & Casey, B. (2005). Altered emotional processing in pediatric anxiety, depression, and comorbid anxiety-depression. Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology, 33, 165–177.
Larson, R. W., Raffaelli, M., Richards, M. H., Ham, M., & Jewell, L. (1990). Ecology of depression in late childhood and early adolescence: a profile of daily states and activities. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 99, 92–102.
Laurent, J., Catanzaro, S. J., Rudolph, K. D., Lambert, S., Osborne, L., Gathright, T., et al. (1999). A measure of positive and negative affect for children: scale development and preliminary validation. Psychological Assessment, 11, 326–338.
Palermo, T. M., Valenzuela, D., & Stork, P. P. (2004). A randomized trial of electronic versus paper pain diaries in children: impact on compliance, accuracy, and acceptability. Pain, 107, 213–219.
Penza-Clyve, S., & Zeman, J. (2002). Initial validation of the Emotion Expression Scale for Children (EESC). Journal of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology, 31, 540–547.
Piasecki, T. M., Hufford, M. R., Solhan, M., & Trull, T. J. (2007). Assessing clients in their natural environments with electronic diaries: rationale, benefits, limitations, and barriers. Psychological Assessment, 19, 25–43.
Reis, H. T. & Gable, S. L. (2000). Event-sampling and other methods for studying everyday experience. In Handbook of research methods in social and personality psychology. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Rydell, A., Berlin, L., & Bohlin, G. (2003). Emotionality, emotion regulation, and adaptation among 5- to 8-year old children. Emotion, 3, 30–47.
Saarni, C., Mumme, D. L., & Campos, J. J. (1998). Emotional development: Action, communication, and understanding. In W. Damon & N. Eisenberg (Eds.), Handbook of child psychology, Vol. 3, (5th Ed.), Social, emotional and personality development (pp. 237–309). New York: Wiley.
Sallquist, J. V., Eisenberg, N., Spinrad, T. L., Reiser, M., Hofer, C., Zhou, Q., et al. (2009). Positive and negative emotionality: trajectories across six years and relations with social competence. Emotion, 9, 15–28.
Shields, A., & Cicchetti, D. (1997). Emotion regulation among school-age children: the development and validation of a new criterion Q-sort scale. Developmental Psychology, 33, 906–916.
Silk, J., Steinberg, L., & Morris, A. (2003). Adolescents’ emotion regulation in daily life: links to depressive symptoms and problem behavior. Child Development, 74, 1869–1880.
Sim, L., & Zeman, J. (2004). Emotion awareness and identification skills in adolescent girls with Bulimia Nervosa. Journal of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology, 33, 760–771.
Southam-Gerow, M. A., & Kendall, P. C. (2000). A preliminary study of the emotion understanding of youth referred for treatment of anxiety disorders. Journal of Clinical Child Psychology, 29, 319–327.
Stone, A. A., & Shiffman, S. (2002). Capturing momentary, self-report data: a proposal for reporting guidelines. Annals of Behavioral Medicine, 24, 236–243.
Stone, A. A., Shiffman, S., Schwartz, J. E., Broderick, J. E., & Hufford, M. R. (2002). Patient non-compliance with paper diaries. British Medical Journal, 324, 1193–1194.
Suveg, C., & Zeman, J. (2004). Emotion regulation in children with anxiety disorders. Journal of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology, 33, 750–759.
Suveg, C., Sood, E., Barmish, A., Tiwari, S., Hudson, J., & Kendall, P. C. (2008). “I’d rather not talk about it:” emotion parenting in families of children with an anxiety disorder. Journal of Family Psychology, 22, 875–884.
Suveg, C., Hoffman, B., Zeman, J., & Thomassin, K. (2009). Common and specific emotion-related predictors of anxiety and depression in youth. Child Psychiatry and Human Development, 40, 223–239.
Takarangi, M. T. K., Garry, M., & Loftus, E. F. (2006). Dear diary, is plastic better than paper? I can’t remember: comment on Green, Rafaeli, Bolger, Shrout, and Reis (2006). Psychological Methods, 11, 119–122.
Wechsler, D. (1999). Wechsler abbreviated scale of intelligence. San Antonio: The Psychological Corporation.
Walcott, C. M., & Landau, S. (2004). The relation between disinhibition and emotion regulation in boys with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Journal of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology, 33, 772–782.
Walden, T. A., Harris, V. S., & Catron, T. F. (2003). How I feel: a self-report measure of emotional arousal and regulation for children. Psychological Assessment, 15, 399–412.
Whalen, C. K., Henker, B., King, P. S., Jamner, L. D., & Levine, L. (2004). Adolescents react to the events of September 11, 2001: focused versus ambient impact. Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology, 32, 1–11.
Whalen, C. K., Henker, B., Ishikawa, S. S., Jamner, L. D., Floro, J. N., Johnston, J. A., et al. (2006). An electronic diary study of contextual triggers and ADHD: get ready, get set, get mad. Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 45, 166–174.
Zeman, J., Shipman, K., & Penza-Clyve, S. (2001). Development and initial validation of the Children’s Sadness Management Scale. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 25, 187–205.
Zeman, J., Shipman, K., & Suveg, C. (2002). Anger and sadness regulation: predictions to internalizing and externalizing symptoms in children. Journal of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology, 31, 393–398.
Zeman, J., Cassano, M., Suveg, C., & Shipman, K. (in press). Initial validation of the Worry Management Scale for Children. Journal of Child and Family Studies.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Suveg, C., Payne, M., Thomassin, K. et al. Electronic Diaries: A Feasible Method of Assessing Emotional Experiences in Youth?. J Psychopathol Behav Assess 32, 57–67 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10862-009-9162-0
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10862-009-9162-0