Studying Children’s Emotions in an Ecologically Salient, Real-World Context: Challenges and Opportunities in the Pediatric Preoperative Setting

Recent advances in the development of portable and mobile psychophysiological and video-recording technology allow for the acquisition of ongoing biological signals and behavioral responses in ecologically salient, real-world contexts in real time in the study of children’s emotions. One such context is the pediatric surgical setting, arguably one of the most stressful real-life exposures for children and their families to encounter in the child’s young life. Nearly 5 million children undergo surgery annually in North America, and up to 75% of them experience preoperative anxiety. Higher preoperative anxiety in children is correlated with a range of adverse physical and behavioral correlates and outcomes. The study of children’s emotions in the surgical context provides unique opportunities for theory-building related to the role of context in children’s emotional experiences, and also has practical implications for informing how to develop effective interventions to help manage and reduce children’s preoperative anxiety. In this article, we discuss the opportunities and challenges for studying children’s emotions in the pediatric surgical setting using portable and mobile behavioral and psychophysiological technologies, their implications to theory and clinical practice, and future research directions.