ABSTRACT
Ask any parent to describe his or her child’s mood. Perhaps most parents will agree that the only predictable characteristic of a child’s mood is that it varies—not only day to day, but moment to moment. A toddler at the supermarket contentedly sits in the grocery cart in one instance, and minutes later throws a temper tantrum. An adolescent cheerfully spends time with her friends after school lets out, yet feels irritable and melancholic when she begins homework. Despite normative variability in youths’ daily mood experience, quantitative research methods for measuring children’s and adolescents’ emotions have focused primarily upon (a) aggregating emotional experiences across longer intervals of weeks or months and (b) differentiating between youth rather than exploring daily or momentary changes within a given child or adolescent.
