Five articles on the Situated Assessment Method (SAM²) have now been published.  The first of these articles introduced the SAM²psychometric approach and provides the most detail about its background, implementation, and implications.  This initial report provides a good starting point for exploring the SAM² approach to measuring individual differences in a situated manner.  It also provides empirical results that bear on the nature of habitual behaviour, including the role of goals and reward:

Dutriaux, L., Clark, N., Papies, E.K., Scheepers, C., & Barsalou, L.W. (2023). The Situated Assessment Method (SAM²): Establishing individual differences in habitual behavior. PLoS ONE, 18(6): e0286954. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0286954.

Four later articles implemented the SAM² approach to assess individual differences in trichotillomania (compulsive hair pulling), eustress, climate anxiety, and water drinking in a situated manner:

Taylor Browne Lūka, C., Hendry, K., Dutriaux, L., Stevenson, J. L., & Barsalou, L. W. (2025). Developing and evaluating a situated assessment instrument for trichotillomania: The SAM² TAI.  Assessment, 32, 738-758.  Supplemental materials.

Kloidt, J., & Barsalou, L.W. (2026). Successful outcomes, fulfilment, and positive affect: Establishing facets of eustress across real-life challenging situations. Social Indicators Research, 184, 20, 1-25. SM

Hill-Harding, C. K. V., Klein, M. D., von Stackelberg, C., Papies, E. K., & Barsalou, L. (2025). Developing and evaluating a situated psychometric instrument for assessing climate anxiety: The SAM² CAM. Applied psychology: Health and Wellbeing. Online publication.

Rodger, A., Barsalou, L.W., & Papies, E.K. (2024). Habitualness, reward and external constraints: Exploring the underlying influences of daily water intake using the Situated Assessment Method.² Applied psychology: Health and Wellbeing, 16, 2458-2483. 

An early precursor to the SAM² approach was presented in the following article on stress:

Lebois, L.A.M., Hertzog, C., Slavich, G.M., Barrett, L.F., & Barsalou, L.W. (2016). Establishing the situated features associated with perceived stress.  Acta Psychologica, 169, 119-132. Supplemental Materials.

Additional precursors can be found in:

Barsalou, L.W. (2020). Challenges and opportunities for grounding cognition. Journal of Cognition. 3(1): 31, 1–24.

Lebois, L.A.M., Wilson-Mendenhall, C.D., Simmons, W.K., Barrett, L.F., & Barsalou, L.W. (2020). Learning situated emotions. Neuropsychologia, 145, 106637.

Barsalou, L.W. (2016). Situated conceptualization: Theory and applications. In Y. Coello & M. H. Fischer (Eds.), Foundations of embodied cognition, Volume 1: Perceptual and emotional embodiment (pp. 11-37). East Sussex, UK: Psychology Press.

Yeh, W., & Barsalou, L.W. (2006). The situated nature of concepts. American Journal of Psychology, 119, 349-384.

Barsalou, L.W. (2003). Situated simulation in the human conceptual system. Language and Cognitive Processes, 18, 513-562.[Reprinted in H. Moss & J. Hampton, Conceptual representation (pp. 513-566). East Sussex, UK: Psychology Press.]

Barsalou, L.W. (1982). Context-independent and context-dependent information in concepts. Memory & Cognition, 10, 82-93.

The three primary projects comprising Juliane Kloidt’s PhD work on eustress (positive stress responses to challenging situations) have been published in the following articles:

Kloidt, J., Barsalou, L.W. (2024). Establishing a Comprehensive Hierarchical construct of Eustress (CHE). Current Psychology, 43, 32258-32273. SM-1, SM-2

Kloidt, J., & Barsalou, L. (2026). Developing and evaluating the Comprehensive Hierarchical Eustress Review  (CHER). Journal of Happiness Studies. Online publication. SM

Kloidt, J., & Barsalou, L.W. (2026). Successful outcomes, fulfilment, and positive affect: Establishing facets of eustress across real-life challenging situations. Social Indicators Research, 184, 20, 1-25. SM

The first of these articles presents a new theory of eustress, The Comprehensive Hierarchical Construct of Eustress (CHE), established empirically from a review and integration of the eustress literature.  According to CHE, eustress originates from three potential sources:  (1) performing goal-directed activity effectively, (2) engaging with momentary experience, and (3) possessing positive stable qualities that support goal pursuit and engaging with the moment.  The second article develops an unsituated psychometric instrument, CHER, to assess the CHE theory.  The third article develops a situated SAM² instrument to assess CHE further.  Both empirical studies offer strong converging support for the CHE theory.

SOCITS, referring to SOCial sITuational Systems, is an MRC-funded project to develop a multi-method approach to measuring and modeling stress and loneliness in adolescent mental health.  The methods implemented include social network modeling, agent-based modeling, qualitative psychometrics, and quantitative psychometrics, all assessed in several Scottish secondary schools.  SOCITS team members include staff from UG’s School of Health and Wellbeing and School of Psychology and Neuroscience.  The following article provides an overview of SOCITS and the specific projects performed for it:

Goodfellow, C., Bate, C., Shetty, J.R., Allen, J.M., Letina, S., Long, E., Ncube, N., Riddell, J., Obazee, R.S., Benjamin, M., Garment, A., Duncan, N., White, C., Elsenbroich, C., Barsalou, L., & McCann, M. (2026). Evidencing the relational and situated aspects of complex social systems affecting health: introducing an integrated mixed methods approach to understand school mental health. SSM – Mental Health, 10, 100679.

Later articles will offer more detailed reports on each of the specific methodological tools developed in the larger project and the results obtained with them.

The three projects comprising Chiara Hill-Harding’s PhD work on climate anxiety have been published in the following articles:

Hill-Harding, C. K. V., Klein, M. D., von Stackelberg, C., Papies, E. K., & Barsalou, L. (2025). Developing and evaluating a situated psychometric instrument for assessing climate anxiety: The SAM² CAM. Applied psychology: Health and Wellbeing. Online publication.

Hill-Harding, C. K. V., Barsalou, L. W., & Papies, E. K. (2025). Beyond symptomatic support: Students’ emotional experiences with climate change and how universities can help. Global Environmental Psychology. Online publication.

Hill-Harding, C. K. V., Papies, E. K., Barsalou, L. W., & Reid, K. (2026). From hope and action to giving up: Students’ stories of coping with climate change. Applied Psychology: Health and Well-Being. Online publication.

The first of these articles used the Situated Assessment Method (SAM²) to assess climate anxiety in a representative UK sample.  The second and third articles assessed climate anxiety in a University of Glasgow sample using quantitative and qualitative methods, respectively.

With Juliane Kloidt as the strong lead on this project, we empirically induced a theory of eustress (a positive response to challenging situations) from diverse literatures that address it.  Although eustress has received considerable attention for decades, it has been defined, measured, and manipulated in myriad ways, leading to fragmentation and vagueness.  Because a unified and well-specified construct would significantly support eustress research and applications, we developed one here, extracting 57 unique features of eustress from 80 theoretical, interventional, empirical, and psychometric articles.  Organizing and interpreting these 57 features extracted empirically from the literature produced the Comprehensive Hierarchical construct of Eustress (CHE).  According to CHE, eustress emerges from three sources:  (1) successful goal-directed action, (2) experiencing the moment in an enjoyable, fulfilling, or meaningful manner, and/or (3) positive stable qualities of the individual.  Within these three sources, 13 facets differentiate them further in theoretically motivated ways.  We further explore the relation of eustress in challenging situations to wellbeing more broadly across all situations, finding considerable overlap but also important differences.

This article can be accessed at:

Supplemental materials:

With Amy Rodger as the strong lead on this project, we used the Situated Assessment Method to establish predictors of water drinking across everyday drinking situations, such as during work, exercise, or a meal (with a UK sample 213 UK adults).  Factors associated habitualness (e.g. subjective effort), self-relevance (e.g. health consciousness) and immediate feedback (e.g. taste) explained 66% if the variance in individual water intake at the group level with mixed-effects modeling.  As expected, the influence of these factors varied widely across individuals and situations, demonstrating that a comprehensive situated approach to water drinking is necessary to understand its natural complexity.  Interestingly, a variety of findings strongly implicated the central role of reward in the development of water drinking habits.

This article can be accessed at:

https://doi.org/10.1111/aphw.12598

Deep thanks to everyone who contributed, to David Kemmerer for organizing this event, and to the Psychonomic Society for hosting it.

The event can be found here:

In two studies with hair pullers, this work applied the SAM^2 psychometric approach for measuring individual differences across situations to trichotillomania (compulsive hair pulling).

Findings demonstrated large situational effects, along with large situation X individual interactions and trait-level individual differences.

Multiple findings questioned the classic distinction between hairpulling subtypes (e.g., automatic versus focused pullers), indicating that almost all pullers do some of both.

Predictive measures from the Situated Action Cycle assessed how well different theories of trichotillomania in the literature explain pulling.  At the group level, situational triggers, emotion, and reward all predicted pulling behavior highly, accompanied by considerable variation for individual predictor profiles.  At the individual level, these predictors explained a median 74%–83% of the variance across individuals and studies.

Correlations with the classic unsituated measure of pulling (the MGH-HPS) were relatively low.

This article can be accessed at:  https://barsaloulab.org/Online_Articles/2024-Taylor_Browne_Luka_et_al-Assessment-SAM2_trich.pdf

Through the University of Glasgow’s Translational Research Initiative (TRI), the SITUATE team has received an Impact Accelerator Account (IAA) for one year to perform opportunity qualification, funded by the Medical Research Council (MRC).  Of primary interest is whether a market opportunity exists for SITUATE, a digital tool for changing health and social habits.

During this process, our commercial champion, Kate Bradley, will interview experts in a wide variety of potential market segments to assess the extent of stress problems in the respective communities, along with current stress tools being used, strengths and weaknesses of these tools, desirable features of future tools, and openness to adopting new tools.  A significantly redesigned version of SITUATE will also be evaluated during this process.The SITUATE team currently includes Lawrence Barsalou (PI), Kate Bradley (commercial champion), Juliane Kloidt (PhD student at the UKRI Social AI CDT), and Sheena MacCormick (IP and Innovation manager in Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Engagement).

Introducing the Situated Assessment Method, SAM^2, a psychometric approach that establishes individual differences for constructs in situations where they occur. The psychometric instrument developed here, the SAM^2 Habitual Behavior Instrument (SAM^2 HBI), assessed the regularity of good and bad habits.

The published article can be found here:  https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0286954

The SAM^2 HBI established individual traits for the regularity of performing good and bad habits, with large situation effects and large individual X situation interactions.  Good test reliability was achieved from broad coverage of low-coherence situations as test items.

The SAM^2 HBI also demonstrated high construct and content validity, with automaticity, consistency, immediate reward, and long-term reward predicting group habit regularity well (65% explained variance).  Prediction was even stronger for individuals (median 75% explained variance), with large multifaceted individual differences.

The SAM^2 HBI also captured well-known personality effects of self-control and neuroticism on performing good versus bad habits.  Cognitive-affective processes from the situated action cycle (situated and embodied cognition) explained nearly all the variance in these interactions.

A composite measure of habitualness established habitualness for behaviors at the group and individual levels. Their distribution questions the construct of ‘habit-hood.’ Most behaviors showed moderate levels of habitualness (e.g., study breaks).  Only a few showed high levels.

A composite measure of reward was strongly related to habitualness at the group and individual levels, implicating reward in habitual behavior. Self-control and neuroticism modulated the reward-habitualness relation, increasing with self-control and decreasing with neuroticism.

This work is relevant to habits researchers, especially those interested in the relation between reward and habitual behavior.  It is also relevant to researchers interested in situation effects and person X situation interactions, to researchers interested in the relation between personality and habitual behavior, to researchers interested in rich situational description, and to researchers interested in situated, embodied, grounded, and 4E cognition.