In Tandem Processes Not Lonely Outcomes: Evaluative Dynamics, and their Significance for Measuring Means and Mechanisms Inside Psychological Science

Psychological science often measures emotional endpoints, such as final ratings of valence and arousal, while the processes through which those endpoints emerge remain largely unexplored. This gap is consequential. For example, when individuals experience visual-emotional ambivalence, such as evaluating a stimulus as simultaneously positive and negative, they often report neutral ratings indistinguishable from those of genuinely indifferent participants. In such cases, endpoint measurements cannot distinguish between states that are functionally and meaningfully different. We argue that psychological science should involve psychological processes that take place at endpoints on the border of what is already experienced, and what is yet to emerge. We argue that endpoints capture the conclusions that guide human cognition and behaviour, while processes reveal how those cognitions and behaviours emerge, why identical endpoints can arise from profoundly different psychological trajectories, and why those trajectories can produce divergent outcomes. Drawing on converging theoretical frameworks, we account for how evaluative dynamics carry information that endpoint measurements often discard. We present a novel methodological approach for capturing these dynamics in real time, and outline its implications and insights for psychological measurements across several domains.