Events Calendar

Big Data and Human Behavior Speaker Series: Matthias Mehl (Associate Professor) University of Arizona

Abstract: How much time do we spend talking? Or laughing? Or arguing with others? How often do we show gratitude or express empathy? These seemingly trivial questions are important because they illustrate how little is known about our everyday social interactions. Over the last fifteen years, I have (co-)developed and validated the Electronically Activated Recorder or EAR, an ecological momentary assessment tool that can track people's naturally occurring (acoustic) social lives. Technically, the EAR is a digital audio recorder that intermittently records snippets of ambient sounds while participants go about their normal lives. Conceptually, it is a naturalistic observation sampling method that produces an acoustic log of a person's day as it unfolds. With the EAR, we can begin to study how subtle yet objective (in the sense of observable) aspects of people's daily social interactions are related to important psychological processes such as personality, well-being, and health. In this talk I will give an overview of the EAR method and the research we have done with it, highlight recent findings about virtuous behavior in everyday life, and discuss the method in the broader context of mobile sensing research.

Bio: Matthias Mehl received his Ph.D. in social/personality psychology from the University of Texas at Austin in 2004. After that, he joined the faculty of the University of Arizona’s Psychology Department where he is now a tenured Associate Professor. He is also an Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Communication, an Associate Investigator at the Arizona Cancer Center, and an Affiliate Faculty at the Evelyn F. McKnight Brain Institute. Over the last decade, Dr. Mehl has developed and validated the Electronically Activated Recorder (or EAR) as a novel methodology for the unobtrusive naturalistic observation of daily life. He has repeatedly written about and given workshops on novel real-world assessment methods and, recently, co-edited the Handbook of Research Methods for Studying Daily Life (2012; Guilford Press). His research has been published in various high-impact journals including Science, Psychological Science, Annual Review of Psychology, Psychological Assessment, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Health Psychology, and Psychosomatic Medicine, and has been funded by the National Institutes of Health (NCI, NICHD, NCCAM), the American Cancer Society, and the John Templeton Foundation. Dr. Mehl is the current Vice President of the Society for Ambulatory Assessment. In 2011, the Association for Psychological Science identified him as a ‘Rising Star’.

Location: Cammilleri Hall, BCI

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Assistant to CS chair