ArticleCurrent directions in psychological science2017
The Electronically Activated Recorder (EAR): A Method for the Naturalistic Observation of Daily Social Behavior.
Article in Current directions in psychological science, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 85 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
85 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 248 citations in OpenAlex.
- Ecological Momentary Assessment: A Meta-Analysis on Designs, Samples, and Compliance Across Research Fields.Assessment · 2023Pooled it
- Personalizing interventions using real-world interactions: Improving symptoms and social functioning in schizophrenia with tailored metacognitive therapy.Journal of consulting and clinical psychology · 2022Trial
- In here and out there: Evidence that age-related differences in memory specificity are attenuated in natural social conversations.Journal of experimental psychology. General · 2026Article
- Brief speech samples reveal emotional states in daily life.PNAS nexus · 2026Article
- Beyond who, what, and where: Findings from two experiments on age group differences in narrative elaborateness of autobiographical events.Memory & cognition · 2026Article
- Exploring individual differences in volitional personality state and trait change: The role of motivation and engagement during a 12-week intervention.European journal of personality · 2026Article
- Experience sampling methods require more than numbers.Communications psychology · 2026Review
- Inflammation is associated with greater social media use over face-to-face interaction, especially among individuals high in introversion or neuroticism.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Loneliness modulates social threat detection in daily life.Communications psychology · 2026Article
- Cross-species conversations: the development of the AURAL-Pet coding system to capture how people talk to pets in daily life.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2026Article
- Mode of social contact is associated with momentary verbal communication of emotion and well-being in older adults.Communications psychology · 2025Article
- Real-world conversations across the schizophrenia spectrum: Implementing passive audio sensing to examine linguistic style matching.Journal of psychopathology and clinical science · 2025Article
- Families being supportive together: A multimethod and multi-informant intensive longitudinal study of family protective mechanisms for adolescent depression.Psychological assessment · 2025Article
- Fabla: A voice-based ecological assessment method for securely collecting spoken responses to researcher questions.Behavior research methods · 2025Article
- Individual-Specific Animated Profiles of Mental Health.Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2025Article
- Speech Detection via Respiratory Inductance Plethysmography, Thoracic Impedance, Accelerometers, and Gyroscopes: A Machine Learning-Informed Comparative Study.Psychophysiology · 2025Article
- Are women really (not) more talkative than men? A registered report of binary gender similarities/differences in daily word use.Journal of personality and social psychology · 2025Article
- Empathy is associated with older adults' social behaviors and verbal emotional expressions throughout the day.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- The Ecological Assessment of Responses to Speaking-up tool-development and reliability testing of a method for coding safety listening behavior in naturalistic conversations.Frontiers in public health · 2025Article
- Tell Me about yourself: Analyzing self-referential language use in borderline personality disorder.Journal of psychiatric research · 2024Article
25 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
1 author at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
This article reviews the Electronically Activated Recorder or EAR as an ambulatory ecological momentary assessment tool for the real-world observation of daily behavior. Technically, the EAR is an audio recorder that intermittently records snippets of ambient sounds while participants go about their lives. Conceptually, it is a naturalistic observation method that yields an acoustic log of a person's day as it unfolds. The power of the EAR lies in unobtrusively collecting authentic real-life observational data. In preserving a high degree of naturalism at the level of the raw recordings, it resembles ethnographic methods; through its sampling and coding, it enables larger empirical studies. The article provides an overview of the EAR method, reviews its validity, utility, and limitations, and discusses it in the context of current developments in ambulatory assessment, specifically the emerging field of mobile sensing.
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What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.