Positive emotions’ ecological assessment with multiple devices in a diary study

Nowadays, given the growth in technological developments, psychological constructs can be assessed using many different devices (personal computers, laptops, tablets, smartphones). Many advantages can be related with this possibility, however there is a lack of scientific literature concerning the uses and the real effectiveness of these applications to increase collected data quality and consequently psychological research quality. The present study aims to address this gap presenting the results of a daily measurement of positive emotions connected with the amount of time a person spends in a natural setting, considering the paradigm of restorative environments in particular the “Attention Restoration Theory" and the “Stress Recovery Theory”. On the basis of these theoretical approaches, many research studies report that the exposure to natural environments arouses positive emotions. The study involved 100 Italian first- and second-year undergraduate students enrolled on a degree course in Psychology. During the study week, the participants received an e-mail message every day reminding them to answer to an online questionnaire at the end of the day. Positive emotions were assessed considering positive activating emotions (enjoyment, hope and satisfaction) and positive deactivating emotions (relief and relaxation). The quality of the measurements was tested in term of construct validity using Confirmatory Factor Analysis respectively on the daily measurement of positive emotions, and checking for the invariance of the measure across days. The criterion related validity was assessed analysing for each day the correlation between positive deactivating emotions and the daily exposure to natural environments.