The Electronically Activated Recorder (EAR) Mehl, Matthias R.
Current directions in psychological science : a journal of the American Psychological Society,
04/2017, Volume:
26, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
This article reviews the Electronically Activated Recorder (EAR) as an ambulatory ecological momentary assessment tool for the real-world observation of daily behavior. Technically, the EAR is an ...audio recorder that intermittently records snippets of ambient sounds while participants go about their lives. Conceptually, it is a naturalistic observation method that yields an acoustic log of a person’s day as it unfolds. The power of the EAR lies in unobtrusively collecting authentic real-life observational data. In preserving a high degree of naturalism at the level of the raw recordings, it resembles ethnographic methods; through its sampling and coding, it enables larger empirical studies. This article provides an overview of the EAR method; reviews its validity, utility, and limitations; and discusses it in the context of current developments in ambulatory assessment, specifically the emerging field of mobile sensing.
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Knowing Me, Knowing You Vazire, Simine; Mehl, Matthias R
Journal of personality and social psychology,
11/2008, Volume:
95, Issue:
5
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Many people assume that they know themselves better than anyone else knows them. Recent research on inaccuracies in self-perception, however, suggests that self-knowledge may be more limited than ...people typically assume. In this article, the authors examine the possibility that people may know a person as well as (or better than) that person knows himself or herself. In Study 1, the authors document the strength of laypeople's beliefs that the self is the best expert. In Study 2, the authors provide a direct test of self- and other-accuracy using an objective and representative behavioral criterion. To do this, the authors compared self- and other-ratings of daily behavior to real-life measures of act frequencies assessed unobtrusively over 4 days. Our results show that close others are as accurate as the self in predicting daily behavior. Furthermore, accuracy varies across behaviors for both the self and for others, and the two perspectives often independently predict behavior. These findings suggest that there is no single perspective from which a person is known best and that both the self and others possess unique insight into how a person typically behaves.
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Online social networking is a pervasive but empirically understudied phenomenon. Strong public opinions on its consequences exist but are backed up by little empirical evidence and almost no causally ...conclusive, experimental research. The current study tested the psychological effects of posting status updates on Facebook using an experimental design. For 1 week, participants in the experimental condition were asked to post more than they usually do, whereas participants in the control condition received no instructions. Participants added a lab “Research Profile” as a Facebook friend allowing for the objective documentation of protocol compliance, participants’ status updates, and friends’ responses. Results revealed (1) that the experimentally induced increase in status updating activity reduced loneliness, (2) that the decrease in loneliness was due to participants feeling more connected to their friends on a daily basis, and (3) that the effect of posting on loneliness was independent of direct social feedback (i.e., responses) by friends.
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Research suggests that older adults who remain socially active and cognitively engaged have better cognitive function than those who are isolated and disengaged. This study examined the efficacy of ...learning and using an online social networking website, Facebook.com, as an intervention to maintain or enhance cognitive function in older adults.
Forty-one older adults were assigned to learn and use Facebook (n = 14) or an online diary website (active control, n = 13) for 8 weeks or placed on a waitlist (n = 14). Outcome measures included neuropsychological tests of executive functions, memory, and processing speed and self-report questionnaires about social engagement.
The Facebook group showed a significant increase in a composite measure of updating, an executive function factor associated with complex working memory tasks, compared to no significant change in the control groups. Other measures of cognitive function and social support showed no differential improvement in the Facebook group.
Learning and using an online social networking site may provide specific benefits for complex working memory in a group of healthy older adults. This may reflect the particular cognitive demands associated with online social networking and/or the benefits of social engagement more generally.
Natural language use is a promising candidate for the development of innovative measures of well-being to complement self-report measures. The type of words individuals use can reveal important ...psychological processes that underlie well-being across the lifespan. In this preregistered, cross-sectional study, we propose a conceptual model of language markers of well-being and use written narratives about healthy aging (N = 701) and computerized text analysis (LIWC) to empirically validate the model. As hypothesized, we identified a model with three groups of language markers (reflecting affective, evaluative, and social processes). Initial validation with established self-report scales (N = 30 subscales) showed that these language markers reliably predict core components of well-being and underlying processes. Our results support the concurrent validity of the conceptual language model and allude to the added benefits of language-based measures, which are thought to reflect less conscious processes of well-being. Future research is needed to continue validating language markers of well-being across the lifespan in a theoretically informed and contextualized way, which will lay the foundation for inferring people's well-being from their natural language use.
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Around the turn of the millennium, the "age-prospective memory (PM) paradox" challenged the classical assumption that older adults necessarily evidence a marked decline in PM functioning. As previous ...investigations highlighted ecological validity to be a potential explanation, the present study sought to extend established approaches by using novel real-world assessment technologies to examine PM unobtrusively in everyday-life conversations.
Next to laboratory PM tasks, real-life PM performance of 53 younger adults (19-32 years) and 38 older adults (60-81 years) was assessed from three sources: Over 9 days, participants completed an experimenter-given naturalistic task, a diary-based approach assessing self-assigned intentions, as well as an ambulatory assessment with the Electronically Activated Recorder (EAR), a device that unobtrusively samples ambient sounds to detect spontaneous speech production related to (lapses in) everyday PM.
Older adults showed lower performance in laboratory PM only for the time-based task and performed either equally well as or even better than younger adults in everyday PM. With regard to PM performance as captured in real-life ambient audio data, younger adults talked more frequently about PM than older adults, but no significant difference between younger and older adults was found for speech related to PM errors.
Findings confirmed older adults' preserved PM performance in everyday life across different indicators with increasing ecological validity. Furthermore, as a novel method to assess conversational PM in everyday life, the EAR opens new insights about the awareness of PM lapses and the communication of intentions in real life.
The paper discusses the role of language and culture in the context of quantitative text analysis in psychological research. It reviews current automatic text analysis methods and approaches from the ...perspective of the unique challenges that can arise when going beyond the default English language. Special attention is paid to closed-vocabulary approaches and related methods (and Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count in particular), both from the perspective of cross-cultural research where the analytic process inherently consists of comparing phenomena across cultures and languages and the perspective of generalizability beyond the language and the cultural focus of the original investigation. We highlight the need for a more universal and flexible theoretical and methodological grounding of current research, which includes the linguistic, cultural, and situational specifics of communication, and we provide suggestions for procedures that can be implemented in future studies and facilitate psychological text analysis across languages and cultures.
Personality in Its Natural Habitat Mehl, Matthias R; Gosling, Samuel D; Pennebaker, James W
Journal of personality and social psychology,
05/2006, Volume:
90, Issue:
5
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
To examine the expression of personality in its natural habitat, the authors tracked 96 participants over 2 days using the Electronically Activated Recorder (EAR), which samples snippets of ambient ...sounds in participants' immediate environments. Participants' Big Five scores were correlated with EAR-derived information on their daily social interactions, locations, activities, moods, and language use; these quotidian manifestations were generally consistent with the trait definitions and (except for Openness) often gender specific. To identify implicit folk theories about daily manifestations of personality, the authors correlated the EAR-derived information with impressions of participants based on their EAR sounds; judges' implicit folk theories were generally accurate (especially for Extraversion) and also partially gender specific. The findings point to the importance of naturalistic observation studies on how personality is expressed and perceived in the natural stream of everyday behavior.
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Depressive symptomatology is manifested in greater first-person singular pronoun use (i.e., I-talk), but when and for whom this effect is most apparent, and the extent to which it is specific to ...depression or part of a broader association between negative emotionality and I-talk, remains unclear. Using pooled data from N = 4,754 participants from 6 labs across 2 countries, we examined, in a preregistered analysis, how the depression-I-talk effect varied by (a) first-person singular pronoun type (i.e., subjective, objective, and possessive), (b) the communication context in which language was generated (i.e., personal, momentary thought, identity-related, and impersonal), and (c) gender. Overall, there was a small but reliable positive correlation between depression and I-talk (r = .10, 95% CI .07, .13). The effect was present for all first-person singular pronouns except the possessive type, in all communication contexts except the impersonal one, and for both females and males with little evidence of gender differences. Importantly, a similar pattern of results emerged for negative emotionality. Further, the depression-I-talk effect was substantially reduced when controlled for negative emotionality but this was not the case when the negative emotionality-I-talk effect was controlled for depression. These results suggest that the robust empirical link between depression and I-talk largely reflects a broader association between negative emotionality and I-talk. Self-referential language using first-person singular pronouns may therefore be better construed as a linguistic marker of general distress proneness or negative emotionality rather than as a specific marker of depression.
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