What is it about?
Emotions are unique, personal, and internal experiences. Methods that meet participants where they are at by allowing participants to write-in responses (i.e. idiographic), have been suggested to improve researchers abilities to capture person-specific emotion experiences. However, traditional self-report measures of emotions that ask everyone the same questions and provide a rating scale (i.e., nomothetic measures) help researchers pick up generalizable patterns across many individuals. We suggest combining nomothetic and idiographic approaches to assess daily emotions, by for example, providing the same emotion questions to all participants but leaving space for participants to further describe their emotions in their own words. Combined approaches have unique advantages for clinicians and emotion research in diverse populations. In both instances, being able to center the voices of the people being assessed will allow for more personalized treatments or survey items. We review the above approaches, discuss their pros and cons, and consider practical steps to combining approaches to be able to collect a richer, more complete picture of people’s emotional lives.
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Why is it important?
This article highlights significant advances in how we study emotions in the real world. Rather than relying solely on top-down (i.e., nomothetic) measures, using more bottom-up (i.e. idiographic) measures or integrated approaches to measuring emotions can allow researchers to capture additional nuance and variation in daily emotional experiences. This not only more accurately reflects how emotions work in people’s day to day lives, but could improve our ability to predict important outcomes, like long-term physical health or well-being. Ultimately, employing diverse methods will reveal more information about emotion processing that was previously unknown.
Perspectives
I thoroughly enjoyed writing this article with my co-author and I hope this work inspires other researchers to think outside of the box when studying emotions and to utilize the exciting new methods that are emerging in the field. We are looking forward to designing studies in the future that let people describe their own emotions in their own words, embracing the natural and beautiful complexity of emotional experience. We hope that this will not only lead to richer insights for researchers but also more meaningful experiences for participants.
Macey K. Grisso
University of California Riverside
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Generalizing across people or capturing unique personal experiences? Nomothetic to idiographic ways of assessing self-reported emotions in daily life., Translational Issues in Psychological Science, September 2025, American Psychological Association (APA),
DOI: 10.1037/tps0000484.
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