Psychoaccelerometry: Mapping psychological constructs to movement in experimental research

For a discipline that is concerned with describing and explaining human behaviour, personality and social psychologists are often over-reliant on the use of self-report measures. Attempts to infer psychological states through specific behaviours include the observation of walking speed, exercise intensity, and interpersonal synchrony. An increasingly accessible method of measuring magnitude and frequency of specific behaviours is accelerometry, a method that is frequently used in health research. The potential for accelerometer data to infer psychological states was highlighted early in the development of modern devices. To make the link between accelerometer data and Psychological state thought must be given to the chain of causation between the construct of interest and the output of the device. The purposes of this paper are to introduce accelerometry as a method to psychologists; to present some of the hardware (e.g. sampling rate) and software (e.g. data reduction) configuration variables and the ways in which they can influence results; to recommend methods to identify and communicate the chain of inference between constructs and outcomes; and to present a guide for running and reporting psychological studies using accelerometers. It concludes that Psychoaccelerometry is still in a fledgling state but may be useful once standardised.