Why and How to Deal With Diurnal Cyclic Patterns in Ambulatory Assessment of Emotions A Practical Guide and Discussion

The use of ambulatory assessment (AA) based methods in emotion research has steadily increased over the past decades. Although having a number of benefits over other methods, the use and analysis of AA data may pose specific challenges. Among these, the issue of dealing with diurnal cycles in emotion data has received relative scant attention. This article therefore discusses why cyclic models may be considered for analyzing AA data on emotions, and describes how this approach can be applied to an empirical AA dataset. Results suggest that cyclic modeling may be a useful method for describing and accounting for (diurnal) cyclic patterns in AA data, but should be used with a number of considerations in mind.