This is the fourth post in a series introducing some of the members of the Signal Patterns Scientific Advisory Board.  These leading psychologists and researchers work with Signal Patterns to bring their work to the public in the form of various mobile and online applications.

David Buss, PhD is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin.  Buss is the author of more than 200 scientific articles and has won many awards.   He is the author of a number of publications and books, including The Evolution of Desire, The Dangerous Passion, and most recently, The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology and The Murderer Next Door, which introduces a new theory of homicide from an evolutionary perspective. He is also the author of Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind which is currently in its third edition and was released in 2007 (Wikipedia).

David, what’s your research focus?

Human mating strategies, sexual motivations, personality and sexual strategies, and the evolution of personality.

What are the applications for your work?

There are many POTENTIAL applications of my work on human mating strategies.

What are you reading?

In addition to scientific articles, I enjoy books on travel [Paul Thereaux, for example], and books on true crime.

What are good books for the lay person to understand your area?

The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating

and Why Women Have Sex [due out in October]

How is the internet/online applications impacting your work?

My lab does a lot of studies on line these days.  Makes life easier in many ways.

What do you always get asked?  What do your students want to know?

Students want to know what women want in a mate, and why men and women seem to get into so much conflict.

How would you like to bring your work to the public?

Through my books.

What’s the biggest misperception of your field?

That evolutionary psychology is “genetic determinism.”

What’s the ‘holy grail’ for your work?

Charles Darwin’s “Origin of Species.”

What’s wrong with psychology?

It is insufficiently infused with the most important theory that unified all of the life sciences–evolution by natural selection.

Research has shown that people benefit greatly from showing gratitude. Being grateful for what you have and expressing thanks directly to a friend or colleague has a significant and lasting effect on one’s well-being and happiness.

Studies performed by positive psychologists like Sonja Lyubomirsky (author of The How of Happiness) have empirically measured these effects and quantified how much happier it makes one feel and for how long.  It turns out that maintaining a gratitude journal for only one week makes one noticeably more happy even three months later (!) when compared to a statically-balanced control group.

These studies are remarkable and carry a valuable lesson for improving happiness.  Perhaps more interesting is the fact that people also benefit from reading and learning about the things that others are grateful for.  Scientists think that the reason for this phenomenon is that knowing about others’ gratitude inspires people to think about their own good fortune and makes them aware of the good things that others experience that could come their way too in the future.  This additional boost in happiness when learning about others’ good fortune most likely comes from the optimistic attitude that it cultivates.

The Gratitude Stream is an easy-to-use online app that we developed here at Signal Patterns Labs.   There’s also an accompanying iPhone app for those ‘on the go.’

The Gratitude Stream app’s designed to help people get the best of both worlds of gratitude: see the stream of gratitude that people all over the world share, and get inspired by others’ good fortune, and also share what you are thankful for and inspire others.

Gratitude Stream iPhone App

Here at the labs we already feel the joy!  The morning after the Gratitude iPhone application was approved by Apple, we all woke up to see people from Kyoto, Kuala Lumpur and Texas counting their blessings and sharing their gratitude with the rest of the world.

This is the third post in a series introducing some of the members of the Signal Patterns Scientific Advisory Board.  These leading psychologists and researchers work with Signal Patterns to bring their work to the public in the form of various online applications.

Tom Buchanan is Reader in Psychology at the University of Westminster in London, UK.  His main interests are in the broad areas of personality and social psychology, and how they intersect with the Internet.

He has been using the Internet for research and teaching since the mid 1990s – and learns more about its possibilities every day.  Most of his publications are in the area of online research methodology, and application of online research techniques to important real life issues.

What’s your research focus?

I am generally interested in how people behave ”on the Internet” - for example, there is considerable evidence that levels of self-disclosure are very high in online communication.  I’m interested in the implications such factors have for psychological research conducted via the Internet (e.g. online data collection).  My work has a specific focus on online psychological testing - especially measurement of personality.

What are the applications for your work?

This work has numerous applications - as psychologists increasingly use the Internet for research and applied practice, it becomes ever more important to ensure that such work is methodologically sound.  For example, if you completed a psychometric test online as part of a job application or filled in a depression screening measure on the web, you’d obviously want to make sure those tests worked properly.

What are you reading?

My current reading mainly consists of student essays and papers I am reviewing for publication.  I also read a lot of online material (especially the BBC News website). The last ‘leisure’ book I read was a Stephen King novel.

What are good books for the lay person to understand your area?

Adam Joinson’s 2003 book “Understanding the Psychology of Internet Behaviour: Virtual Worlds, Real Lives“, while being an academic text, is actually quite readable and accessible to non-experts.

How is the internet/online applications impacting your work?

Pretty much all my research, and an increasing amount of my teaching, is conducted via the Internet.

What do you always get asked?  What do your students want to know?

“Can you trust all this Internet data?  Don’t people just lie all the time online?”

There’s a considerable body of evidence that indicates good quality data can be collected online - but also a number of methodological caveats one needs to be aware off.  And no, our research doesn’t suggest people lie more online - quite the opposite.

How would you like to bring your work to the public?

In a number of ways, really.  We need to move beyond the traditional academic journals as an outlet for our findings.  Traditional and new media organisations can be very useful in that. Science blogs and other Web 2.0 platforms are also becoming important (though quality and peer review issues need to be kept in mind).

What’s the biggest misperception of your field?

There are a number of misperceptions that I’ve encountered amongst academic psychologists.  One is that Internet research falls short of the ‘gold standard’ of traditional lab based work.  They are just different tools with different strengths and weaknesses.

Another is that people lie more online.  A third is that if you put a questionnaire or experiment ‘on the Internet,’ then thousands of people will just appear and complete it; it’s not that easy.

Finally, many (if not most) researchers don’t realise that there are important methodological and ethical considerations in online research - you can’t just take an existing paper-and-pencil personality test, for example, stick it online and expect it to work exactly the same. It might, but it might not - and that’s an issue we need to look at.

What’s the ‘holy grail’ for your work?

I wouldn’t necessarily describe this as a holy grail, but I think there is a pressing need to examine the equivalence of online and offline psychological tests, to systematically identify and describe any differences (in terms of variables measured, populations of interest and other key factors) and to explore the mechanisms underlying any such differences.   Not the kind of research that excites people unfortunately!

What’s wrong with psychology?

What’s wrong with psychology? Difficult question - I’m torn between ‘not much’ and ‘a lot.’  Perhaps the profusion of pet theories and applied approaches unsupported by systematic research, and the general lack of a ‘big picture’ or overall orienting framework for understanding human thought, feeling and behaviour.

This is the second post in a series introducing some of the members of the Signal Patterns Scientific Advisory Board. These leading psychologists and researchers work with Signal Patterns to bring their work to the public in the form of various online applications.

James W. Pennebaker is Professor and Department Chair in the Psychology Department at the University of Texas at Austin. His research explores the links among emotion, language and health.  James finds that physician use, biological markers of stress and disease, and maladaptive behaviors can be reduced by simple writing and/or talking exercises.
More recently, he and his students have been examining how people’s natural use of words can more broadly reflect who they are.  The words people use in daily conversation can be powerful predictors of people’s health, personality, social situations, and the ways they relate to others.  Author or editor of 9 books and over 200 articles, James has received numerous research and teaching honors, including an honorary doctorate degree, the Pavlov award, and continuous funding from NSF, NIH, and other federal agencies for over 25 years.

Jamie, what’s your research focus?

Words.  I’m interested in how putting experiences into words can affect the ways we think about those experiences and also transform our physical and mental health.  At the same time, I’m fascinated how the words we use in everyday language can reflect our personality, behavior, health, and relationships with others.

What are the applications for your work?

There are two very broad applications to this research:

First, my students and I have been developing in-person and online methods whereby people in distress are asked to write about emotional upheavals.  We find, for example, that married soldiers returning from war evidence higher marital satisfaction and fewer instances of family violence if they are asked to write about their relationship than soldiers asked to write about non-emotional topics.  Several labs around the world are now adapting this writing research to study wound healing after surgery, college adjustment among new students, or even ways of coping with job losses.

The second application has been to devise automated ways to track the psychological states of people through their use of words.  Using computer programs such as our own Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count program, we have been able to make evaluations of world leaders through their speeches and interviews.  We can also make informed decisions about people’s personalities, motives, purchasing patterns, etc. by looking at the words they use.  You can get a sense of some of these applications from our website.

What are you reading?

I’m a random reader influenced by my wife (who is a writer), my own research and books that catch my eye in airports.  In the last month, I’ve read:

• Eric Weiner’s The Geography of Bliss,
• Kate Atkinson’s Behind the Scenes at the Museum, and
• American English Grammar written by Charles Carpenter Fries in 1940.

I’m also addicted to geezersisters.com.

What are good books for the lay person to understand your area?

For the writing work, I would recommend my book Opening Up: The Healing Power of Expressing Emotion.

For the language work, there really isn’t a book that captures what our research team is doing right now.  A good start would be to go to my website.

How is the internet/online applications impacting your work?

The internet is at the heart of everything we do now.  As with other labs, we are able to analyze tremendous data sets very quickly and begin to link language use to a wide array of behaviors.  What makes all this so exciting is that the research community is now on the threshold of rethinking how we do research.

For the last century, social scientists have been forced to ask people about their worlds using forced-choice questionnaires.  The technology is quickly evolving in a way that we can now actually ask people to tell us what they are thinking or feeling directly.  With new text analysis methods, we can convert their open-ended answers into meaningful responses that can be analyzed in dozens of ways.

What do you always get asked?  What do your students want to know?

My own Frequently Asked Questions are:

• Why does writing about a topic help to change the topic in our mind?
• Why do you study function words (e.g., pronouns, prepositions) instead of content words (e.g., nouns, regular verbs)?
• When will you be in your office?
• Will it be on the test?

How would you like to bring your work to the public?

I feel that I’m doing it through journal articles, books, internet and the mass media.  My fear is that some of this work will get out too soon before we know what we are doing or really finding.

What’s the biggest misperception of your field?

Misperception of my field?  I’m not sure what my field is.  Maybe the misperception is that I have a field or am in a field.

What’s the ‘holy grail’ for your work?

For me, the holy grail is that I have fun discovering new patterns and relationships.

What’s wrong with psychology?

Actually, nothing is wrong with psychology.  Sure, most theories, methods and assumptions don’t pan out.  Even the most established findings or schools of thought have limited shelf lives.  In a sense, this is what makes the field so vibrant and fun.

Signal Patterns recently developed a new survey that is designed to assess different parenting styles. Do you think it’s important for parents to be strict? Do you think it’s necessary for children to have clearly defined rules? Is it okay for children to act out or disobey from time to time? Based on analyses of several hundred parents, our results revealed three dimensions of parenting styles.

The first dimension, which we labeled Shaping Their Character, captures how parents set expectations for their children. Some parents establish expectations for their children by providing rules and instructions for how to behave and by playing active roles in their children’s lives, whereas other parents feel it’s best to let their children express themselves in whatever way they choose and therefore take a relaxed stance toward rules.

The second parenting dimension, labeled Making the Rules, captures how parents communicate with their children. Some parents run their families democratically and allow everyone a say in what happens. In contrast, other parents take more of a one-way street approach, feeling that as parents, they have a responsibility to make decisions for their children.

The third parenting dimension, labeled Enforcing Discipline captures the way in which parents discipline their children. Some parents are strict and believe punishment is necessary for establishing proper boundaries. Other parents adopt a more tolerant approach with their children and feel as though children should be able to do what they want and that lessons can be learned from making mistakes. These parenting dimensions are consistent with empirical research in developmental and family psychology.

It is important to realize that our results do not mean that there are three ‘types’ of parents. In fact, the results suggest that there are a variety of approaches to parenting. The dimensions highlight different domains that are very important to parenting—communicating, enforcing rules, and exerting influence—and areas in which parents take different approaches. For example, some parents may take a laissez-faire approach to discipline and be democratic with their children but nevertheless feel as though it is important to establish clear boundaries and expectations. Other parents may be strict disciplinarians but not provide clear expectations or rules for children.

Is parenting related to personality or is it something that is learned? What are the personality characteristics that relate to parenting styles? Are partners’ parenting styles related? In future posts on the parenting survey, we will present results from analyses linking parenting styles with personality. We will also look at relationships between partners’ parenting styles.

You may take the survey yourself and for a partner at Parenting.com.

This is the first post in a series.

This is the first post in a series introducing some of the members of the Signal Patterns Scientific Advisory Board. These leading psychologists and researchers work with Signal Patterns to bring their work to the public in the form of various online applications.

Sam Gosling, Ph.D. is an associate professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. Sam’s environmental research is based on the idea that the spaces in which we live and work are rich with information about what we are like. In turn, we gain valuable lessons for both our personal and professional lives. His work has been widely covered in the media, including The New York Times, Psychology Today, NPR, and “Good Morning America,” and his research is featured in Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink.  Sam’s latest book, Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You was released in May 2008.

Sam, what’s your research focus?

I have three main areas of interest:

(1) How personality is manifested in everyday life (and how we perceive others on the basis of those manifestations). For example, how do people express their goals, attitudes, values, preferences, traits and identity in the places (e.g., bedrooms, offices, Facebook profiles) they craft around themselves? And how do people form impressions of others on the basis of such places?

(2) Personality in non-human animals. Do animals have personality? If so, what traits do they have, how do they develop and how can we measure them?

(3) Internet methods in the social sciences. What are the costs and benefits of using technologies associated with the Internet to examine basic and applied questions in the social sciences?

What are the applications for your work?

Environments
The first area has applications in understanding others, learning how others are perceiving us, marketing, and in the design of spaces at home and at work.

Animals
The second area has numerous applied and theoretical applications. In the applied domain, we can use personality assessments of animals to match shelter dogs to appropriate homes and to identify working dogs (e.g., in explosive detection, border patrol) best suited to their tasks. The work can also be useful in animal welfare (identifying animals suited to different housing conditions) and wildlife management (finding the combinations of animals best suited to re-introduction techniques). From a theoretical standpoint, we can use animal models to understand the genetic, biological and environmental bases of personality.

Internet
The third area is useful because it develops methods for studying questions that were hard to study using conventional methods (e.g., for questions that require very large samples) and for reaching populations that are hard to access with standard procedures (e.g., very rare conditions).

What are you reading now?

“Some Place Like Home: Using Design Psychology to Create Ideal Places” by Toby Israel

What are good books for the lay person to understand your area of study?

Environments

Um…my book: “Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You”

Toby Israel: Some Place Like Home
Dan P. MacAdams: The Stories We Live By: Personal Myths and the Making of the Self
Richard Florida: The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life

Animals
Hmm…there’s nothing that really gets at it directly but here are a few:
Frans de Waal: Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex among Apes
Robert Sapolksy: A Primate’s Memoir: A Neuroscientist’s Unconventional Life Among the Baboons
Stan Coren: Why We Love the Dogs We Do: How to Find the Dog That Matches Your Personality

Internet
Chris Fraley: How to Conduct Behavioral Research over the Internet: A Beginner’s Guide to HTML and CGI/Perl (Methodology In The Social Sciences)

How is the internet/online applications impacting your work?

It’s having a great impact because the Internet is now one of the primary environments in which people express themselves.

What do you always get asked?  What do your students want to know?

- I have an “X” in my living room….what does that mean?

- Let me tell you about my dog/cat…

How would you like to bring your work to the public?

With my book.

What’s the biggest misperception of your field?

That there’s a simple one-to-one relationship between what a person owns and what that person is like.

What’s the ‘holy grail’ for your work?

Understanding how the deepest element of personality–our identity, plays out in everyday life.

What’s wrong with psychology?

A lack of creativity & imagination: Much of the field has become so obsessed with fine tuning methods and statistical techniques that it has taken its eye off the rich psychological behaviors that surround us all.

A couple of months ago when we were working on Election Patterns, Garrett brought to my attention to a great TED talk by Jonathan Haidt from the University of Virginia. The talk discusses the definition of morality and its relationship with personality traits. Jon and his colleagues at YourMorals.org developed a five factor model of morals, breaking down morality into its statistically independent components: Care, Fairness, Loyalty, Respect, and Purity. Yourmorals.org includes a bunch of very interesting questionnaires in different domains including morality, personality, ethics, and satisfaction with life. It’s a great resource for learning more about oneself and advance science at the same time.

Here’s also the TED talk video:

Voters from the mid-term election of 2006

In less than 3 weeks, the country will participate in arguably the most critical election of our generation. Much has been made about the candidate’s personalities, and much of that has been derisive. At Signal Patterns, we don’t deign to evaluate people from afar; there’s great danger in that. But we can describe people who are willing to tell us about themselves.

McCain and Obama haven’t, to my knowledge, taken our personality measures– but thousands of voters have. And with the Election Patterns application, we can share what we know about voters with you.

Now, someone’s vote is a highly personal thing; ballots are secret for good reason. Similarly, not everyone is willing to share the details of his or her personality. But what we can do is describe trends– personality profiles in the aggregate, voting patterns in regions– that speak to the role of personality in the upcoming election.

What traits define people who’ll vote for McCain? What traits describe Democrats? Election Patterns will tell you. And we can get more specific: What factors are common to women voters? Female Obama supporters? Female Obama voters over 40 who live in Kentucky? Stay tuned.

Meanwhile, Election Patterns will leverage the vast Signal Patterns data to give a more complete picture of voter segments. What hobbies are Obama voters likely to enjoy? What music appeals to McCain supporters? Election Patterns will, as we find patterns among voters, update with details that shed light on the electorate.

So check back early, and check back often. Monitor the vote on Election Patterns, along with the personality trends that could determine the outcome of the election.

In my previous post, I discussed some issues surrounding a recent study by Dr. David Schmitt, in which he concluded that in more egalitarian societies, psychological differences inherent to men and women are more dramatic. John Tierney, writing in the New York Times, cites the researcher’s position that in poor countries, the stressful environmental conditions lessen gender differences, since they disproportionately affect the stronger gender.

There is one other major issue with this conclusion, and with using the evidence at hand to corroborate evolutionary theories: the premises that are central to evolutionary psychology are rarely falsifiable.

Let’s say that Schmitt had found that gender differences were lessened in modern, egalitarian societies. Evolutionary psychologists could argue that societal constructs are interfering with the natural gender differences that are evinced in less developed areas. Advertising and media could be said to distort traditional gender roles, enforcing the will of the ruling class. In other words, findings in either direction could be seen as evidence for theories of evolutionary psychology. Karl Popper has put forth a philosophy of science that insists that any scientific theory be falsifiable– that there could be evidence that would refute it. The actual finding of lesser gender differences doesn’t demonstrate the theory to be false– but neither would the opposite set of findings. Either this study doesn’t speak to the issue that it seems to… or this isn’t a true scientific question. While some have argued that evolutionary biology is a science and Popper is incoherent, I’ll just say that these studies are interesting, but that we’re still a long way from understanding what they say about brain development, the impact of social roles, and evolution.

Tierney ends by saying that if Schmitt is right, then “men and women shouldn’t expect to understand each other much better any time soon.” That may make for dramatic copy, but by continuing to investigate these issues, researchers such as Dr. Schmitt– and the Signal Patterns team– are helping everyone understand each other. To say that we don’t understand other genders is to diminish our intellectual capacity; we can comprehend something without being similar. Or, at least the men and women that I know can…

Gavin O’Malley recently wrote about a study that found that people were more likely to try a product that was recommended by friends and family than they were to buy a product recommended by a well-known blogger. His conclusion is that “so-called ‘influencers’ might have less clout than some marketers think.” The authors of the study, the Pollara research firm, reach a similar conclusion, “Marketers might have to reconsider who the real influencers are out there,” according to the article. This flies in the face of over 50 years of thought on the issue. But if friends and family are most influential, should marketers give up on finding social influencers? I’ll explore this issue in a series of posts.

Before we get to the issue of how important these influencers are, let’s think about who they are thought to be. In Malcom Gladwell’s 2002 book The Tipping Point, he writes about Mavens, Salesmen, and Connectors, each of whom plays a role in spreading social phenomena and critical information. Mavens collect information about the marketplace, often to the point of obsession. They remember specifics, down to specific prices. They also want to share the information with others, and to help others find good deals—helping is one of their primary objectives. They continually teach and learn, but don’t try to persuade. Connectors are interested in connecting others—they are primarily responsible for introducing people to other people. They are action-oriented: They don’t sit around and think about things, but rather they do things. They are curious, self-confident, sociable, and energetic. Salesmen are persuaders. Their enthusiasm allows others to trust them. They are energetic, likable, optimistic, and emotionally expressive. They love being the center of attention.

These people sound as if they might have a big impact when it comes to the spread of social phenomena, but O’Malley and Pollara seem to think that you’re more likely to seek advice from your loved ones than you are to seek it from experts, social butterflies, or persuaders. In my next post, I’ll discuss whether “so-called influencers” are still worth targeting.