Abstract
Many physical diseases have been reported to be associated with psychosocial factors. In these diseases, assessment relies mainly on subjective symptoms in natural settings. Therefore, it is important to assess symptoms and/or relationships between psychosocial factors and symptoms in natural settings. Symptoms are usually assessed by self-report when patients visit their doctors. However, self-report by recall has an intrinsic problem; "recall bias". Recently, ecological momentary assessment (EMA) has been proposed as a reliable method to assess and record events and subjective symptoms as well as physiological and behavioral variables in natural settings. Although EMA is a useful method to assess stress-related diseases, it has not been fully acknowledged, especially by clinicians. Therefore, the present brief review introduces the application and future direction of EMA for the assessment and intervention for stress-related diseases.
Highlights
Many physical diseases have been reported to be associated with psychosocial factors such as irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) [1], primary headaches [2], and asthma [3]
Many research data have shown that people are not be able to accurately recall past experience, experiences that are frequent, mundane, and irregular, because self-report data are affected by recall biases such as their mood states (Table 1) [4]
In addition to the state biases, there are other recall biases affecting self-report data: (1) recency, which means that more recent events are more accessible to memory, (2) saliency, which means that salient experiences are more likely to be encoded and subsequently recalled, (3) effort after meaning, which means that people's natural and unconscious tendency is to reconstruct events so as to make them consistent with subsequent events, (4) participants' misunderstanding of questionnaire instruction sets that require them to aggre
Summary
Many physical diseases have been reported to be associated with psychosocial factors such as irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) [1], primary headaches [2], and asthma [3]. There have been some recent studies [61,62,63,64] assessing the relationship between subjective symptoms and physical activity using actigraphy in natural settings. In our recent study [61], for example, watch-type wearable computers equipped with an actigraphy inside were used http://www.bpsmedicine.com/content/2/1/13 for recording momentary headache intensity and physical activity simultaneously (Figure 1). Because recent studies using actigraphy show significant findings by applying sophisticated time-series data analyses [65,66,67,68], more attention should be paid to objectively assessed and recorded data such as locomotor activity and behavior in natural settings. In psychiatric diseases such as anxiety disorders, there have already been some studies [75,76,77] on computerized cognitive behavioral therapy
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