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PSY 357 UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH PROJECTS

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Language use and sex in fiction and real-life romance

Faculty:

James Pennebaker, Ph.D.

Contact:

Molly Ireland molly.ireland@gmail.com

Description:

How do men and women talk when they’re on a date? How is the linguistic style a person uses on a date related to its outcome – i.e, are people more or less attractive or datable when they verbally mimic their date? We’re answering these questions and many more with our large dataset of audio recordings of naturalistic and experimental speed dates. Second, life imitates art, allegedly, but how accurately does art imitate life? Or, more specifically, how well are authors (playwrights and screenwriters) able to get inside the heads of their characters? I’m most interested in whether authors can write realistic opposite-sex characters. My current RAs and I have already collected and analyzed nearly 1 million words of dialogue. Help us wrap up this project during the first couple of weeks of the summer.

Qualifications:            

Basic Word and Excel skills are a plus, and high conscientiousness is required. Applicants should also be interested in empirical research and genuinely curious about social interaction. If you are planning to apply to law or graduate school in the near future and would like to add valuable research credentials to your application, these projects are ideal for you: Both primary studies are at least half-finished, so within a short period of time you will have the opportunity to answer your own research questions with these data and present your findings at future academic conferences.

Duties:           

You will have the chance to 1) listen to and transcribe audio recordings of real-life speed dates between men and women aged 18-30, and 2) prepare classic movie and play scripts for text analysis. I will also teach you to use a variety of text analysis methods, including using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) and latent semantic analysis (LSA). Time commitment is 15-20 hours per week. When and where you work is very flexible. Working from home or in the middle of the night is perfectly fine.

PSY 357 Undergraduate Research Projects (SUMMER 2009)
PSY 357 Course Requirements

Updated 24 April 2009
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