The study, published in Translational Psychiatry, was led by Ali Ghadami and Heike Tost of the Central Institute of Mental Health in Mannheim, together with colleagues at Charité-Universitätsmedizin Berlin and partner institutions. The researchers used a technique called ecological momentary assessment, or EMA, in which participants carry a smartphone that buzzes them repeatedly throughout the day, asking in real time what they are experiencing, whom they are with, how they feel, and whether they are drinking. This approach sidesteps the recall bias and temporal smearing that plague retrospective questionnaires, capturing behavior at the exact moments it unfolds.

The team analyzed data from two independent cohorts of non-treatment-seeking individuals. The discovery cohort comprised 73 adults aged 17 to 62 with, on average, mild-to-moderate DSM-5 alcohol use disorder, drawn from the German Collaborative Research Center TRR265. The replication cohort included 56 young adults aged 19 to 35, recruited from the community in Mannheim and Berlin and screened for risky drinking using the AUDIT-C questionnaire. After quality control, the analysis rested on 19,579 individual prompts across 129 participants, with average compliance rates of roughly 66 percent in both groups — a remarkably high figure for such intensive protocols.

The EMA schedules were demanding. In the discovery cohort, participants completed six weeks of assessment, beginning with eight prompts per day — a randomized morning prompt and seven daytime prompts spaced at least an hour apart — before tapering to four daily prompts in the second half. The replication cohort completed four weeks with seven prompts per day, including fixed morning and evening prompts. At each prompt, participants reported whether they were drinking at that moment and whether they had been exposed to alcohol-related cues since the last prompt, using a set of 11 images depicting alcoholic beverages and alcohol-present contexts. They also rated their social company, contact with people they typically drink with, affective valence, energetic arousal, calmness, guiltiness, irritability, loneliness, anxiousness, and their appraisal of recent positive and negative events.

The statistical approach was deliberately conservative. The researchers used logistic mixed-effects models in which every time-varying predictor was decomposed into a within-person component — how a given moment deviated from that individual’s own average — and a between-person component capturing stable individual differences. All predictors were entered simultaneously, meaning the cue-drinking association had to survive adjustment for social context, affective states, arousal, and event appraisal all at once. Models were further adjusted for age, sex, and time of day, with participant-specific random intercepts absorbing stable traits. This design directly addresses the central weakness of earlier real-world studies, which typically examined cue exposure alongside only a narrow subset of co-occurring influences.

The results were striking and reproducible. In the discovery cohort, within-person exposure to alcohol cues was associated with an odds ratio of 1.32 per 0.1-unit increase (95 percent confidence interval 1.29 to 1.35), and in the replication cohort the corresponding figure was 1.40 (95 percent confidence interval 1.36 to 1.44), both highly significant. Expressed as the full contrast from cue absence to cue presence, the odds of momentary drinking were 16.19 times higher in the discovery cohort and 29.17 times higher in the replication cohort. Crucially, the association survived two sensitivity analyses designed to address temporal ordering: one restricted to prompts preceded by non-drinking, focusing on transitions into drinking episodes, and another in which cue exposure was lagged by one prompt so that prior exposure prospectively predicted later drinking. In both cases the association remained significant at p below 0.001.

Alcohol cues were not alone. Three other time-varying predictors showed replicable within-person associations with drinking in both cohorts: being in company, exposure to drinking companions, and higher energetic arousal, all significant at p below 0.002. These findings align with social facilitation and opportunity models of drinking and with prior EMA work linking social settings and elevated arousal to increased consumption. Perhaps more telling was what did not replicate: negative affective states such as guiltiness, irritability, loneliness, and anxiousness showed no consistent within-person association with drinking. This absence echoes recent meta-analytic evidence that daily affect-drinking links are heterogeneous and often smaller than the popular negative-reinforcement narrative would suggest.

Beyond average effects, the team explored whether individuals differ in what triggers their drinking. They refitted the models in the pooled sample with participant-specific random slopes for the replicated predictors — alcohol cue exposure, being in company, and drinking companion exposure — and then applied k-means clustering to the standardized individual slope estimates, guided by the elbow criterion and average silhouette width. A two-cluster solution emerged along a clear axis: one group of individuals for whom drinking was primarily related to alcohol cues, and another for whom drinking was primarily related to social context. Post-hoc comparisons revealed that the alcohol cue-reactive cluster was significantly older, met more DSM-5 criteria for alcohol use disorder, scored higher on the AUDIT, and reported more stressful life events than the social context-reactive cluster, which comprised relatively younger and less severely affected individuals.

The authors interpret these profiles through the lens of established heterogeneity in alcohol cue-reactivity. Laboratory and neuroimaging work has distinguished reward-related from relief-related drinking phenotypes with distinct striatal cue-reactivity patterns, as well as appetitive, aversive, and mixed neural subtypes. The cue-reactive profile observed here may correspond to relief- or severity-related drinking, whereas the social context-reactive profile may better match reward- and socially motivated drinking. If validated prospectively, such daily-life phenotyping could complement efforts to match individuals to mechanism-targeted interventions — for example, cue-focused approaches for one group and context- or social-focused strategies for another — and could inform just-in-time adaptive interventions delivered through mobile technology at the moments of greatest risk.

The researchers are careful about the limits of their evidence. The within-person associations are correlational and observational, and even the temporal-ordering sensitivity analyses cannot establish that cue exposure causally triggers drinking. The cluster analysis was exploratory, and k-means imposes a discrete partition on continuously distributed slope estimates that were shrunk toward the mean by empirical-Bayes estimation, so the two profiles should be treated as hypothesis-generating poles rather than established diagnostic categories. The two cohorts also used somewhat different response formats for affect and arousal items, harmonized through within-person standardization, which cautions against over-interpreting cross-cohort differences in effect sizes. Measurement reactivity — the possibility that frequent prompting itself alters behavior — cannot be fully excluded, although prior work suggests such effects are typically absent, modest, or short-lived in substance-use monitoring, and the person-mean-centered models absorb stable individual-level shifts.

Even with those caveats, the study delivers something the field has long needed: a replicated, real-world demonstration that conditioned alcohol cues carry specific, momentary information about drinking risk that is not reducible to social context, mood, arousal, or how a person appraises events. The findings provide ecological support for incentive-sensitization theory, which holds that drug-associated cues acquire motivational salience, bias attention, and evoke craving and approach behavior. They also hint that the relative weight of conditioned motivational processes versus social opportunity may shift across age and disease stage, with cue-driven drinking emerging as drinking problems deepen. For the millions of people worldwide affected by alcohol use disorder, the message is that risk is written not only in who they are but in where they are, whom they are with, and what they see — and that a smartphone buzzing in the pocket may one day know precisely when to intervene.

Subject of Research: Real-world alcohol cue exposure and momentary drinking risk in alcohol use disorder measured with ecological momentary assessment

Article Title: Real-world alcohol cue exposure and drinking risk in alcohol use disorder

Article References: Ghadami, A., Sreepada, A., Reinhard, I., Ganz, M., Boehmer, J., Meyer-Degering, K., Walter, H., Andoh, J., Lenz, B., Bach, P., Kiefer, F., Schwarz, E., Reichert, M., Ebner-Priemer, U. W., Meyer-Lindenberg, A., Heim, C., & Tost, H. (2026). Real-world alcohol cue exposure and drinking risk in alcohol use disorder. Translational Psychiatry, 16(1), Article 537. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41398-026-04506-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s41398-026-04506-4

Keywords: alcohol use disorder, alcohol cues, ecological momentary assessment, cue reactivity, drinking behavior, incentive sensitization, social context, energetic arousal, risk profiles, mHealth, addiction, Translational Psychiatry

Personal expressiveness has its roots in eudaimonic identity theory, a neo-Eriksonian framework developed by psychologist Alan Waterman that connects identity development with well-being research. The theory draws on Aristotle’s idea of the daimon, the set of inherent potentials, capacities, and interests that give direction to a person’s development. When people engage in activities that express those potentials, they report a distinctive subjective fit, a feeling that the activity reflects their true self rather than merely producing pleasure or enjoyment. Decades of research have linked this experience to identity commitment, identity achievement, autonomy, flow, and positive emotion, while showing that it remains statistically distinct from hedonic enjoyment. In other words, personal expressiveness is not just feeling good; it is feeling real.

What has remained surprisingly unclear is how this experience relates to the social world. Classic studies of college students found that the activities rated as most personally expressive were often relational ones: spending time with friends, helping others, engaging with a romantic partner, or participating in religious and community life. Waterman himself concluded that activities experienced as personally expressive are likely to involve connections with others. Theoretical perspectives converge on the same intuition. Self-determination theory treats relatedness as a basic psychological need, the belongingness hypothesis frames social bonds as a fundamental human motivation, and Erikson’s lifespan model holds that identity is enacted and confirmed through participation in social roles. Yet almost no research had directly tested how personal expressiveness unfolds in the social contexts of adult daily life.

The first study addressed the question at the level of activities. Waxler analyzed cross-sectional data from 294 adults aged 23 to 78, with an average age of about 40, who each nominated an activity they considered important, meaningful, and descriptive of themselves. Participants had typically pursued these activities for roughly 18 years, underscoring how deeply embedded identity-relevant pursuits become in adult life. Each person rated the activity on the six-item feelings of personal expressiveness subscale of the Personally Expressive Activities Questionnaire, a measure asking, among other things, whether the activity feels like what the respondent is meant to do. Internal consistency was high, and participants also reported whether the activity was typically individual, group or team based, or both.

The results defied the pattern seen in younger samples. Personal expressiveness did not differ reliably across social formats, with the analysis of variance yielding an effect size near zero, and nonparametric robustness checks confirmed the null result. When activities were coded into domains and grouped into other-oriented categories such as socializing and religious or altruistic pursuits versus everything else, relational activities did show descriptively higher expressiveness, 5.81 versus 5.39 on a seven-point scale, but the difference fell short of statistical significance, partly because only 20 activities fell into the other-oriented group. Crucially, expressiveness also showed striking continuity across the adult lifespan: levels did not differ between emerging, established, middle, and later adulthood, and the link between activity characteristics and expressive classification held steady in every age group.

That null pattern at the activity level pointed to a possibility that broad categories may simply be the wrong lens. If personal expressiveness in adulthood is not strongly structured by whether an activity is typically done alone or with others, perhaps it varies moment to moment depending on the situation. The second study tested exactly that using experience sampling, a method that captures life as it happens rather than in retrospect. Fifty-two adults, averaging about 40 years of age, received six random prompts per day on their smartphones for seven days, drawn from a 14-hour window matched to their sleep schedule. Of 2,184 prompts, 1,478 were completed, a compliance rate of nearly 68 percent. At each signal, participants rated three adapted items measuring momentary personal expressiveness and reported whether they were alone or with others.

The momentary data told a very different story from the retrospective one. Across all observations, personal expressiveness averaged 4.55, but it was significantly lower when people were alone, 4.31, than when they were with others, 4.79, a moderate difference. More strikingly, 76 percent of the variability in expressiveness occurred within individuals across moments rather than between them, meaning that the feeling of being one’s true self fluctuates substantially over the course of a single day. To untangle the temporal dynamics, Waxler estimated a Bayesian lagged multilevel mediation model that asked whether above-average expressiveness at one moment predicted social presence at that moment, and whether social presence in turn carried forward to the next prompt.

The model’s estimates were precise and internally consistent. Above-average momentary expressiveness was associated with roughly 53 percent higher odds of being with others at the same prompt, with an odds ratio of 1.53 and a 95 percent credible interval well above one. Being with others at one moment, in turn, more than tripled the odds of being with others at the next prompt, an odds ratio of 3.42, reflecting the simple but powerful fact that social engagement tends to persist. The indirect effect of expressiveness on subsequent sociality through concurrent social presence was positive, with a posterior probability exceeding 0.99 that the effect exceeded zero, while the direct effect of expressiveness on later sociality was essentially zero. In plain terms, feeling deeply yourself and being with others travel together in the moment, and because social moments chain together, expressive moments are embedded in ongoing stretches of connection.

The combined findings reshape how scientists should think about authenticity in adulthood. Broad activity categories, it turns out, capture little of the action: by midlife, intrinsically motivated pursuits are so long-standing and integrated into the self that whether one paints alone or volunteers in a group matters less than theorists once assumed. Instead, personal expressiveness appears to function as a momentary process through which established identities are socially enacted. The pattern fits neatly with broaden-and-build theory, which holds that positive experiences expand thought-action repertoires and build social resources over time, and with self-determination theory, suggesting that expressiveness may mark the experiential integration of autonomy, competence, and relatedness during identity-congruent activity. It also echoes earlier diary research showing that eudaimonic activity predicts greater meaning the following day, hinting at upward spirals linking authentic engagement and connection.

The authors are careful about limits. The data are correlational, so the studies cannot determine whether being with others produces expressiveness, whether expressive people seek company, or whether both flow from unmeasured factors. The experience sampling sample was small and locally recruited, social context was reduced to a simple alone-versus-with-others distinction, and the first study relied on a single self-nominated activity per person. Still, this appears to be among the first research programs to measure personal expressiveness in real time, and the approach opens a window that retrospective questionnaires cannot provide. If the findings hold in larger and more diverse samples, they carry an arresting implication: the experience of being most fully oneself may be inseparable from the experience of being with others, a reminder that even the most inward sense of authenticity is, at root, profoundly social.

Subject of Research: Personal expressiveness as a momentary, socially embedded marker of eudaimonic identity functioning in adult daily life

Article Title: With Others, More Myself: Personal Expressiveness as Identity Enactment in Adult Daily Life

Article References: Waxler, E. A. (2026). With Others, More Myself: Personal Expressiveness as Identity Enactment in Adult Daily Life. Journal of Adult Development. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10804-026-09579-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10804-026-09579-5

Keywords: personal expressiveness, eudaimonia, identity, experience sampling, social context, adult development, well-being, self-determination theory, authenticity, daily life, positive psychology, Journal of Adult Development

Forest patches in agricultural landscapes have long been the neglected children of ecosystem service research. While vast, contiguous tropical forests have attracted the lion’s share of scientific attention across Sub-Saharan Africa, the small, fragmented stands of trees scattered through farmland—often just one to ten square kilometers in area—have been largely overlooked. Yet these patches, defined in the study as areas with at least 30 percent tree cover, tree heights of five meters or more, and areas between one and ten square kilometers, are biodiversity-rich reservoirs that sit at the immediate doorstep of millions of rural households. In a region where nearly 500 million people depend heavily on natural resources for their livelihoods, understanding what these small forests provide, and to whom, is far from academic.

The research team, led by Paule Pamela Tabi Eckebil and including Matthias Bürgi, Felicia O. Akinyemi, Denis Jean Sonwa, and Chinwe Ifejika Speranza, drew their study sites from a remarkable regional inventory encompassing more than 400,000 forests outside protected areas. From this vast dataset, they purposively selected nine forest patches spanning two distinct agroecological zones: four in the Tropical Warm and Humid rainforest zone and five in the Tropical Warm and Subhumid Guinea savannah. Crucially, the selection also captured three fundamentally different governance regimes. Family-owned forests, controlled by family heads who decide on access and use, included sites such as Agou in Togo and Ikot in Nigeria. Sacred forests, governed through customary and culturally rooted institutions where religious beliefs and social norms enforced by traditional authorities dictate use, included Koui in Togo and Kouvizoun in Benin. Community-based forests, managed collectively through management committees, included Iko in Nigeria and Ngam-Kondomeyos in Cameroon.

The scale of the fieldwork is itself notable. Between September 2022 and February 2023, enumerators conducted household surveys across communities neighboring the nine patches, reaching a total of 2,621 households. Sample sizes were calculated using Cochran’s formula at a 90 percent confidence interval with a five percent margin of error, yielding a target of roughly 271 households per forest, which the team increased to a minimum of 300 where population density allowed. Enumerators were positioned along walking routes on both sides of village paths, approaching each block of houses individually to minimize clustering bias and ensure that participants were evenly distributed throughout each community. Surveys were administered in French or English, and sometimes orally in local languages, with back-translation checks applied to verify consistency.

The analytical architecture of the study is rigorous and multilayered. Local perceptions of forest benefits were systematically mapped onto the Common International Classification of Ecosystem Services version 5.1, ensuring that what villagers reported could be translated into internationally recognized categories of provisioning, regulating, and cultural services. Chi-square tests of homogeneity assessed whether sociodemographic profiles differed across sites. Friedman tests compared rankings across the three ecosystem service categories. Binary logistic regression, with eight sociodemographic predictors including gender, age group, marital status, residency, education level, main occupation, household size, and the number of economically active household members, modeled which factors predicted perceived forest benefits. Kruskal-Wallis H tests with Dunn-Bonferroni post-hoc comparisons evaluated the magnitude of perceptions, and a multivariate Gaussian generalized linear model incorporating all interactions between governance type and sociodemographic factors tested how institutional context moderates perception patterns.

The sociodemographic portrait that emerged is telling. More than 70 percent of respondents in each agroecological zone were male household heads, a reflection of the patrilineal systems dominating the study areas, where men act as household spokespersons. Nearly 40 percent of respondents had attended secondary school, more than half were farmers, and most had lived in their communities for over twenty years. Average household size was six members, with roughly three children per household and up to five economically active members in larger families.

The study’s hypotheses about perception hierarchies were grounded in a straightforward material logic: because provisioning services—forest foods, timber, fuelwood, medicinal plants, and non-timber forest products—offer tangible, daily, physical contact, local stakeholders were expected to rate them higher than the intangible regulating services such as carbon storage and climate buffering, or cultural services such as spiritual enrichment and aesthetic appreciation. The region’s forests, fragmented over decades by agriculture, population growth, and land-use change into patches of varying size and connectivity, deliver a mosaic of benefits whose visibility to local users varies with how directly those users can touch them.

What makes this study a genuine advance is its insistence that access rules matter as much as material dependence. African forest tenure is a palimpsest of colonial and customary law: most forests remain formally state-owned, yet customary systems persist and actually govern access across the continent, with customary tenure covering roughly three-quarters of Africa’s land. Secure tenure, prior research has shown, encourages long-term forest management, while unclear rights correlate with weaker stewardship and diminished willingness to invest in protection or restoration. By treating governance type not as background context but as an active moderator interacting with gender, age, education, and occupation, the study tested whether the same demographic profile produces different perceptions under different institutional arrangements. The conceptual framework posited that stakeholders with fewer restrictions on forest access would be more likely to perceive declines in ecosystem service availability over time—on the reasoning that familiarity, born of frequent use, sharpens awareness of loss. Perceived change was measured over a five-year window from 2018 to 2022, a period long enough to capture meaningful dynamics while acknowledging the inherent limitations of memory decay.

The methodological choice to foreground social preferences rather than biophysical measurements is itself a quiet provocation. Quantitative spatial approaches have dominated ecosystem service assessment, but their application is hampered by chronic data scarcity in the region. Local stakeholders, the authors argue, possess intimate knowledge of their landscapes that allows them to identify key forest ecosystem services more accurately than external evaluations ever could. Making forest management participatory and inclusive, the study contends, is not merely an ethical nicety but an epistemic necessity: the voices and needs of the people who actually use these forests must anchor any policy meant to sustain them.

The implications ripple outward. For conservation practitioners and policymakers in Western Africa and beyond, the message is that a one-size-fits-all forest strategy is doomed to misfire. A medicinal plant harvesting program designed for a community-based forest with a management committee cannot simply be transplanted to a sacred forest where traditional authorities enforce norms through religious belief, nor to a family-owned woodland where a single household head controls decisions. The study’s evidence that sociodemographic variables such as education—which shapes cognitive framing—and age—which shapes lived experience—interact differently with governance regimes suggests that interventions must be tuned simultaneously to who people are and to the institutional rules that govern their relationship with the forest. As agricultural mosaics continue to expand across the Guinea coast, the fate of the region’s remaining forest patches, and the food security, incomes, and spiritual wellbeing they quietly sustain, will depend on governance systems that recognize these layered realities.