Beliefs about relationships between symptoms and experiences in daily life: Evidence from experience sampling and self-report in individuals with or without major depression or social phobia.

In clinical research and practice, individuals are frequently asked to evaluate how their experiences are related (e.g., "Does feeling down affect your interactions with others?"). These estimations are often used to inform diagnostic and therapeutic decisions. To avoid faulty clinical inferences, it is therefore important to understand whether such self-reported relationships correspond to associations observed in real-time data, and whether any discrepancies are particularly pronounced in specific clinical populations. In this study, 118 individuals with major depressive disorder, 47 with social phobia, and 115 controls reported their daily experiences (stress, mood, symptoms, health behavior, psychological processes) 6x/day for one week using experience-sampling methods (ESM). At week's end, the participants retrospectively estimated how strongly pairs of these experiences had been correlated, using a Correlation scale (CS; -100 to +100) and a Likert scale (LS; 1 to 7). These retrospectively estimated correlations (REC) were significantly stronger than correlations derived from ESM data (experience-based correlations; EBC), particularly on the Likert scale. The discrepancy was most pronounced for symptom-related correlations in the clinical groups. Overall, REC and EBC showed only moderate convergence (rs = .31/.30). Taken together, the findings indicate that individuals' beliefs about how their experiences co-occur in everyday life systematically diverge from associations observed in ESM data, suggesting that these represent related but distinct aspects of human experiences, with implications for both clinical research and practice.