Samuel D. Gosling - US grants

The proposed research is based on the idea that environments individuals craft around themselves, such as bedrooms and offices, are rich with information about the occupants' personalities, abilities, values, and lifestyles. My collaborators and I have developed a model articulating the mechanisms by which individuals impact the environments they inhabit and the processes that observers use to make inferences about the occupants on the basis of these spaces. Our model specifies two broad classes of mechanism linking individuals to the spaces they occupy: (1) identity claims, which are defined as deliberate statements directed to the self or others regarding how one would like to be viewed, and (2) behavioral residue, which is defined as the physical traces of activities conducted in the environment. The goal of the two studies proposed in the present application is to examine the first of these mechanisms identity claims. The first study will examine personal webpages on the Internet. This study will be exploratory in nature, examining the motives for placing information about oneself in publicly accessible perceived as they actually see themselves or as they would like to be ideally? To investigate the function of public self-expression, the second study will examine what happens when individuals are prevented from making identity claims in their living spaces. In an experimental study using a yoked design, we will examine what happens when students must display another students must display another individual's identity claims on their dorm-room walls. Do individuals become distressed when they cannot use their physical environments to make statements about their values, attitudes, and preferences? Is their self-esteem diminished? Do their grades suffer? By identifying the role of identity claims and the impact of not being permitted to use one highly visible medium of student expression, we can begin to understand the importance of self-expression in the environment and elsewhere. If environmental self-expression contributes to mental and/or physical well being, then the findings will inform policies regarding the design of physical spaces in institutions such as prisons, offices, hospitals, and retirement homes. The two pilot studies proposed here will provide the foundation for a subsequent grant application designed to test the specific processes proposed in our model of occupant-environmental links.

Individuals are constantly making statements about themselves. A broad range of media can be mobilized in the service of self-expression, ranging from the music people listen and the clothes they wear, to the ways they decorate their bedrooms and offices. For example, the pictures a person selects to hang on walls, the books she chooses to read, and the way she arranges the items that fill her living space all betray aspects of her personality and values. The ubiquity of self-expression suggests that it serves an important function. But what is that function?
Previous research indicates that understanding the causes and consequences of self-expression will shed light on processes underlying successful social and psychological functioning. For example, self-verification theory (Swann, 1997) suggests that people will be happy, healthy, and enjoy satisfactory relationships when others view them as they view themselves; individuals may use physical environments, clothing, and music to make expressions about themselves in the service of getting others to see them as they see themselves. In addition, some forms of self-expression can serve as marks of group affiliation, allowing individuals to fit in with social groups and convey information about themselves to others, ultimately promoting feelings of connectedness and well-being.
Using new and established methodologies, three studies will extend our research paradigm from physical (e.g., offices) and virtual (e.g., websites) environments to three new contexts in which personality is expressed and perceived. The studies will examine the information conveyed by individuals' music preferences (Study 1), elements of appearance such as clothing and hairstyle (Study 2), and features of everyday language (Study 3). To permit us to compare the findings across contexts, these studies will adopt parallel procedures. In each of the studies, targets will provide information about themselves (e.g., music preferences) that will serve as the stimuli from which judges will form impressions about the targets. The judges' impressions will be compared with measures of what the targets are really like obtained from the targets themselves and informant ratings from the targets' friends. Analyses of the stimuli will reveal which cues are used by judges to form impressions and which cues are valid indicators of what the targets are really like.
Ultimately the studies proposed here will serve as the foundation for a series of experimental studies in the laboratory and field, examining the causes and consequences of self expression. For example, what are the social and health consequences of living in institutions, such as prisons and retirement homes, that suppress self-expression?

0731216
Gosling

Military Working Dogs (MWDs) are the most effective and versatile means of identifying explosives in combat and low-intensity conflicts. These dogs are exceptionally sensitive sensors for all known threat substances and existing dogs can be trained to meet new threats by detecting new substances in very rapid order. Temperamental factors (such as emotional stability and boldness) rather physical abilities (such as olfaction and endurance) are the primary determinant of MWD effectiveness in the field. However, several elements of the current temperament assessment program are suboptimal from the standpoint of scientific assessment: Little attention is paid to psychometric criteria, measurement methods are unrefined, little is known about tasks be predicted, and little is known about the performance of individual MWDs in the field. This work will develop and psychometrically validate a set of temperament measures designed to improve the effectiveness with which MWDs are selected, trained, and utilized in combat situations. Specifically, the work will implement more sensitive measurement methods, will undertake a task analysis of MWD behavior in the field, and will create a system to track how well individual dogs perform. The work will build on earlier research, which has shown that temperament can be assessed in dogs and other species with high degrees of reliability and validity. The work will follow three cohorts of dogs through selection, training, and utilization to evaluate (1) the psychometrics of the temperament tests, (2) the basic structure underlying differences in temperament, (3) the relative merit of different assessment methods, and, most crucially, (4) the degree to which performance in the field can be predicted from tests conducted when the MWDs are acquired and before and after training. The findings will be used to devise a new selection, training, and evaluation strategy to improve the Military Working Dog program.

Individuals differ from each other in stable ways that have important implications for their prosperity, health, and welfare. Personality traits predict numerous consequential outcomes in the economic, social, and health domains, such as work performance, relationship quality, and the likelihood of getting sick. Despite personality's demonstrated importance, the predominant technology for assessing personality-- "self-report questionnaires"--has remained virtually unchanged over time. These self-reports are subject to an array of limitations, such as being disruptive, time consuming, and vulnerable to memory biases; these limitations potentially undermine the validity of personality questionnaires. Progress in the field of personality assessment has been constrained by the fact that the everyday behaviors and language through which personality is expressed have been challenging to measure directly in the natural stream of daily life. The few studies that have collected objective measures of behavior have typically done so on a very limited range of behaviors or within the artificial confines of a laboratory. However, the advent of smartphones and their ubiquity in modern life offer the promise of revolutionizing the field of personality assessment.

The present research will use a smartphone that will automatically and unobtrusively measure personality as it is expressed in daily life. The app will use embedded sensors (e.g., accelerometer, light sensor, microphone, GPS) to gather behavioral (e.g., activity type, sleep patterns, sociability, location) data from participants. The research will collect data from up to 2000 participants that is broad-based (many kinds of behavior), fine-grained (many assessments per hour), longitudinal (many weeks of continuous behavioral data), and context tagged. These data will have two primary uses. First, they will provide large-scale objective records of how behavior unfolds in the context of everyday life, allowing researchers to learn what kinds of behavior tend to co-occur in every life and what kinds of temporal patterns they follow. Second, the data will be used to generate an unobtrusive automated method for measuring personality via smartphones in everyday lives. Using such data, the principal investigator will determine whether the standard five-factor personality model adequately captures the structure of real-world behaviors or whether a new bottom-up, empirically derived revision of personality structure is needed. Methodologically, the project will yield software, analysis tools, and classifiers that allow researchers to move beyond their reliance on self-reports and artificially constrained lab-based proxies of real-world behavior. The study will advance and validate sensing techniques used to infer complex behaviors (e.g., situations, conversation contribution) from continuous steams of sensor data, and the resulting software and analyses tools will be made available for researchers to use.