Arthur Stone, PhD

Arthur Stone was trained as a clinical psychologist and is currently professor of Psychology and director of the Dornsife Center for Self-Report Science at the University of Southern California. He is also Emeritus Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science at Stony Brook University.

Stone's early work was concerned with improving the measurement of life events and coping with the goal of understanding how events and coping impact our susceptibility to somatic illnesses. These studies led to an interest in psychobiology with a particular emphasis on how environmental events affect the immune system and the endocrine system. At the same time, he was researching how people self-report information about their psychological and symptom states. This led to the development of various kinds of daily diaries that measured end-of-day and within-day phenomena, which ultimately yielded a set of techniques known as Ecological Momentary Assessment.

More recently, Stone has been involved with the development of alternative methods for capturing the ebb and flow of daily experience for large-scale surveys, including the development of the Day Reconstruction Method. He has also been involved with the development of questionnaires for use in clinical trials, which has been supported by a consortium from the National Institutes of Health. Stone has used these new methods to explore a variety of phenomena including pain, fatigue, stress and wellbeing.