Generalizing Across People or Capturing Unique Personal Experiences? Nomothetic to Idiographic Ways of Assessing Self-Reported Emotions in Daily Life

In this article, we take an in-depth look at different ways of assessing emotions in daily lifethrough experience sampling, ranging from more generalizable, nomothetic approaches (e.g.,asking all participants to rate their degree of sadness) to more specialized, idiographicapproaches (e.g., asking participants to describe their emotions in their own words). Wehighlight the benefits of these procedures and discuss ways of combining nomothetic andidiographic approaches to measuring emotions in daily life. We argue that integrative approachescan be beneficial for gaining both generalizable insights into the antecedents and consequencesof emotions across individuals as well as for predicting and intervening on person-specificemotional experiences. We then discuss implications for clinical interventions and treatments,sensitivity to cultural variations in emotion, as well as practical considerations for incorporatingnomothetic and idiographic approaches into experience sampling surveys. We also highlightfuture research questions that can be addressed when using a combined nomothetic andidiographic approach to measuring emotions.