|
|
|
PSY 357 Personality and Social Life
UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH PROJECT
Faculty:
James Pennebaker, Ph.D.
Contact:
Matthias Mehl mehl@psy.utexas.edu
Description:
We are interested in how everyday life differs for different people. Research in personality has linked traits like Extraversion to a variety of behaviors – unfortunately almost exclusively in the laboratory. David Funder, a famous personality researcher, recently said Òif for example, one were to go to the literature and look for a list of contextualized behaviors that had been shown to be robustly associated with, say, extraversion, one would find surprisingly littleÓ. Why is it like that? Well, because it is not easy to study peopleÕs everyday behaviors. You can collect self-reports, but who can accurately remember things that happened days ago? WouldnÕt it be good to simply follow people over the course of a day or two? Recently, we developed the Electronically Activated Recorder (EAR), a research tool that allows us to track peopleÕs everyday life – at least the acoustic part. The EAR is a modified digital tape-recorder that comes on for 30 seconds every 12 minutes and records ambient sounds. Participants carry the EAR for a couple of days while going about their normal lives. We then analyze the sampled sound recordings (several hundred per person) in terms of where people spent their days, how they spent their days and with whom they spent their days. Also, we analyze participantsÕ utterances from a linguistic perspective. What we get is authentic real-life data of a personÕs daily locations, activities and natural conversations. We then link this data to different aspects of a personÕs personality (such as extraversion, emotionality, dominance, etc.) We also look at how other psychological phenomena, such as depression, mood, and stress are related to our everyday social lives. Finally, we are interested in what the way people naturally talk (word choice) can tell us about their personality. For example, do extraverted people talk more than introverted? Do depressed people talk in a more negative way than non-depressed? Does cognitive complexity go with a rather complex language in everyday life? And, how similar is our spoken language to the language we use in writing?
Current Research Projects:
- How do we form impressions about people based on their social life? What do we think of someone who parties all the time? What impression do we carry away if someone talks a lot? What does it mean if someone behaves completely differently with different people? To what extent are the impressions that we get from peopleÕs social life accurate? Which cues do we use to form these impressions?
- Can listening to (the EAR sounds) of oneÕs own social life serve as a social / clinical feedback tool, i.e. can we learn something about the way we behave, our relationships and how we appear from hearing how we sound to others?
Qualifications:
RESPONSIBLE, motivated students with an interest in real-life social/personality psychology
Duties:
Running participants (administering the EAR), coding participantsÕ recorded social life, transcribing natural conversations; we have regular lab-meetings! Possibility to get a letter of recommendation.
|
