Exploring emotions beyond the laboratory: A review of emotional and physiological ecological momentary assessment methods in children and youth

Recent advancements in methodologies such as ecological momentary assessment (EMA) and ambulatory physiology devices have enhanced our ability to measure emotions experienced in daily life. Despite the feasibility of EMA for assessing children's and youth's emotional self-reports, the feasibility of combining it with physiological measurements in a real-life context has yet to be established. Our scoping review evaluates the feasibility and usability of implementing emotional and physiological EMA in children and youth. Due to the complexities of physiological EMA data, this review also synthesized existing methodological and statistical practices of existing studies. Following the PRISMA-ScR guidelines, we searched and screened PsycINFO, PubMed, and Web of Science electronic databases for studies that assessed children's and youth's subjective emotions and cardiac or electrodermal physiological responses outside the laboratory. Our initial search resulted in 4174 studies, 13 of which were included in our review. Findings showed significant variability in the feasibility of physiological EMA, with physiology device wear-time averaging 58.77% of study periods and data loss due to quality issues ranging from 0.2% to 77% across signals. Compliance for emotional EMA was approximately 60% of study periods when combined with physiological EMA. The review points to a lack of standardized procedures in physiological EMA and suggests a need for guidelines in designing, processing, and analyzing such data collected in real-life contexts. We offer recommendations to enhance participant engagement and develop standard practices for employing physiological EMA with children and youth for emotion, developmental, and psychophysiology researchers. This is the first review to examine the feasibility and synthesize methodological aspects of studies employing emotional and physiological ecological momentary assessment (EMA) with children and youth. We provide insights into the compliance and usability of such data. We also offer recommendations for improving participant engagement and refining study protocols for designing, processing, and analyzing physiological EMA studies, which will enable researchers to better capture and understand children's emotional experiences in real-life contexts.