Within-Person Processes in Experienced Love in Daily Life, 2016

We conducted an Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA; or experience sampling) studies to examine the within-person processes in experienced love in daily life and how these processes relate to person characteristics. This study was conducted at the Pennsylvania State University. The study procedure along with the sample characteristics is as follows: SAMPLE. This EMA study consisted of 52 individuals (17 male and 35 female, mean age = 30 years, SD = 10, min = 19, max = 48). This sample consisted of students and university staff of the Pennsylvania State University and data collection occurred during the summer of 2016. We refer to this sample as the Community Sample due to the diversity in age range in our participants. PROCEDURE. This study was a four-week long EMA study. The day before the EMA procedure began, in the introductory session, the participants completed a battery of self-report surveys (BFI-2, Flourishing, Health, General Happiness, Gratitude, Satisfaction With Life, Meaning in Life, Authentic Happiness, PERMA Profiler) and demographics items. They then provided informed consent and their respective phone numbers were registered with the text messaging service SurveySignal (SurveySignal, LLC, 2015). Text messages to complete the EMA surveys were sent to the participants' smartphones six times a day. Survey timing was determined by dividing participants' self-reported usual waking hours into six equal-length intervals, and survey prompts were delivered at a random timing within each time interval, constrained so that no two prompts were less than 30 minutes apart. This sampling scheme was chosen to reduce expectation biases in reporting while providing a representative sampling of the individuals' context. Web-based EMA surveys were designed in and delivered by the Qualtrics survey system (Qualtrics, Provo, UT, 2017). Over the course of the four weeks, participants received and responded to up to 168 text-message (six per day) prompted web-based EMA surveys. Each EMA survey contained 10-12 questions/statements, three of which were centered on loving feelings (“How much do you feel loved right now?”, “I love the world around me.”, “Since the last survey, I have been expressing love.”). Additional items were related to elements of well-being. After the four-week EMA data collection, in an Exit session, participants returned to the laboratory to retake the battery of self-report surveys that they completed in the introductory session (Flourishing, Health, Authentic Happiness, PERMA Profiler) plus additional questionnaires (Interpersonal Support Evaluation, Inclusion of Other in the Self, Spirituality Religiosity, Experiences in Close Relationships-Relationship Structure, Mindfulness, General Happiness). Compliance was high, with participants completing an average of 157 (SD = 15) of the surveys. Participants were paid proportional to their response rate. This study received approval from Pennsylvania State University’s Institutional Review Board. IRB# 00001017