When ‘Right Now’ Isn’t ‘Right Now’: The Elasticity of the Moment(ary) in ESM Studies

Recently, Eisele and colleagues (2025) published the ESM-Q, a set of quality criteria for developing and evaluating Experience Sampling Method (ESM) items. While we agree with one of their core recommendations to specify the timeframe an item refers to (e.g., “Right now, I feel happy”), we comment here on how this may be less straightforward than implicitly assumed by ESM researchers. Drawing on our own ESM studies, in which we collected qualitative data from participants, we show that the popular momentary timeframe “right now” is interpreted by participants in different ways, often covering not only the moment just before the assessment but drawing on past, present and anticipated future times. We outline how differences in interpretations can be explained by the linguistic ambiguity of the time adverbs that we use to signify timeframes, as well as by participants’ individual experience of time. We close the commentary with implications on the severity of these differences in interpretation, and provide some concrete recommendations for ESM researchers.