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Reply to: Context matters for affective chronometry

Nature Human Behaviour volume 4, pages 690–693 (2020)Cite this article

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The Original Article was published on 27 April 2020

replying to R. C. Lapate & A. S. Heller Nature Human Behaviour https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-020-0860-7 (2020)

In Dejonckheere, Mestdagh and colleagues1, we demonstrate that many commonly studied affect dynamic measures in the experience sampling (ESM) literature essentially explain no additional variance in various psychological well-being outcomes once the explanatory power of basic mean levels of positive affect (PA) and negative affect (NA), and the variability in these affective states, is accounted for. In an attempt to foster cumulative science, we encourage researchers to control for these static covariates before attesting to the incremental value of more complex, time-dynamic measures in the prediction of psychological (mal)adjustment.

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Fig. 1: Evaluating how different study determinants impact the SNR.
Fig. 2: Comparing PA and NA SNRs in traditional versus event-related ESM studies.

Data availability

We rely on the original datasets reported in Dejonckheere, Mestdagh, et al.1, of which two are publicly available from the Open Science Framework (http://osf.io/zm6uw). Restrictions apply to the availability of the other datasets, as they were used under license for that particular study, and so are not publicly available. The data for Dejonckheere et al.25 can be found on the Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/yte2w/).

Code availability

All analyses reported in this reply were conducted in MATLAB (R2017a)24. The code for reproducing our results is provided in the Supplementary MATLAB Code, and is available from the Open Science Framework (http://osf.io/zm6uw).

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Author notes

  1. These authors contributed equally: Egon Dejonckheere, Merijn Mestdagh.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

    Egon Dejonckheere, Merijn Mestdagh, Peter Kuppens & Francis Tuerlinckx

Authors
  1. Egon Dejonckheere
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  2. Merijn Mestdagh
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  3. Peter Kuppens
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  4. Francis Tuerlinckx
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Contributions

E.D. and M.M. contributed equally to the manuscript, both drafting parts of this reply. P.K. and F.T. critically revised earlier versions of the manuscript. All authors approved the final version.

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Correspondence to Egon Dejonckheere.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Figs. 1 and 2, Supplementary Notes and Supplementary References.

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Computational Data

MATLAB code to reproduce the main results presented in this reply.

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Dejonckheere, E., Mestdagh, M., Kuppens, P. et al. Reply to: Context matters for affective chronometry. Nat Hum Behav 4, 690–693 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-020-0861-6

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