Nicholas S. Thompson - US grants

Funds are sought to purchase the sound analysis programs known as SIGNAL and REAL TIME SPECTROGRAPH (RTS) and the event recording program known as OBSERVER and the computer equipment on which they can be run. The purpose of this purchase is to help reinstitute courses successfully taught during the 1970's which offered undergraduates the opportunity to collect original observations on familiar bird species. These courses taught the fundamental precepts of science as organized curiosity of focussing on the student's own perception of the birds and on research problems of the students' own devising. Students came to understand scientific methods not as arbitrary constraints as a way of accomplishing goals of their own devising. Since bird song is the most salient feature of bird behavior, these courses will be made much more effective if students have access to a simple, convenient device for the display and analysis of bird song. Such a device will enable many students, particularly the more inventive and persistent, to develop and test hypotheses concerning the relationship of bird song to other behaviors that they are observing.

The Department of Psychology at Clark University is establishing an undergraduate laboratory network in support of the teaching of observational and experimental methods in psychology through hands-on experience. For more than half of the Department's major students, the high point of their curriculum is participation in the Department's Research Course Program. The Research Course Program is a system of courses in which advanced undergraduate students work closely with faculty and graduate students in faculty laboratories. Their work usually culminates in a presentation at a local, regional, or national research conference. This project provides three undergraduate laboratories. It provides equipment for faculty research settings that are specifically dedicated to undergraduate use. It will also outfit a "research skills room" where sophomores preparing for research experiences may simulate experimental and statistical decision making and practice observational techniques. Finally, it provides and equips a "Poster/Presentation Room," where research course students can prepare poster and pamphlet presentations.

With support from a National Science Foundation Major Research Instrumentation Award, Clark University will purchase psychophysiological measurement systems for studies of schematic stimuli that provoke emotions. These systems, including supporting computer hardware and software, will be used in a suite of research projects by researchers in Clark's Social, Evolutionary, and Cultural Psychology Program. Principal Investigator Dr. James Laird is a social psychologist with a research speciality in embodied emotion. Among Dr. Laird's co-PIs are two other members of Clark's psychology department-Dr. Nicholas Thompson (an ethologist and evolutionary psychologist with a joint appointment in Biology) and Dr. Jaan Valsiner (a cultural psychologist)-as well as a member of Clark's Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Dr. Lee Rudolph, who is supported by an NSF Interdisciplinary Grant in the Mathematical Sciences. With other senior personnel, graduate students, and undergraduates, the PI and co-PIs will use the systems funded by the MRI award to find general features common to emotionally provocative sign stimuli across sensory domains (vocal/auditory, visual, and tactile domains) and to formulate mathematical descriptions of what these features have in common.

Emotions are states of the organism that relate the conditions of its world with patterns of urgent action. Conditions sufficient to produce an emotional response often are a schematic subsample of the total conditions impinging on the organism: a wink can be as good as a nod, and either (like a small twitch of the lips or a widening of the eyes) can express or evoke emotion greatly disproportionate to the exertion involved. The general method being developed in the supported research is to elicit and vary emotional responses using stimuli designed to reproduce only the sign stimuli appropriate to those responses, not the full array of conditions that typically elicit them in nature; the rationale for this approach resembles that behind demonstrations of sign stimuli in ethology. To identify and quantify an emotional stimulus requires an unequivocal method to identify and quantify emotional responses. Any definitive study of human emotional stimuli must include physiological-behavioral measures to supplement emotion self reports. The funded instrumentation will provide these measures.

This project is important for several reasons. It is likely to provide empirical results that have significance beyond academic psychology-for example, to the practice of clinical psychology, or to the design and engineering of warning devices; it is a testing ground for new kinds of mathematical models in psychology; and it will play a significant role in education and training. Clark University is one of the nation's smallest research universities. Seventeen percent of Clark seniors graduate as Psychology majors, and the Department's long commitment to empirical methods has made it by far the largest provider of scientific education within the university. Clark students (and psychology majors) are disproportionately female, and thus the Department is a disproportionate provider of science education to women, who-because of Clark's tradition of undergraduate participation in faculty and graduate research projects at all levels-receive a lot of training that prepares them for a psychological or other scientific career. This project will continue that tradition.

This grant will support the Principal Investigator, a Professor of Mathematics, during one year of a longer-term, already on-going interdisciplinary research project in collaboration with two co-PIs,
both Professors in the School of Psychology at the PI's home institution. Specifically: (1) The PI will undertake intensive study and training in social psychology, with particular attention to current theories of embodied human emotions. (2) The PI will develop mathematical models of individual and group ``emotion
spaces'', and will supervise the development of computer-aided tools to map and explore these models using techniques from topology, geometry, and dynamics. (3) The PI, co-PIs, and other collaborators (including graduate and undergraduate students in Psychology, faculty and students in Computer Science, and in time probably clinical faculty in the School of Psychology) will use these models and tools to develop new experimental protocols, gather data, and refine the models and tools.

The starting point of this investigation is the observation by the psychologists Fritz Heider and Albert Michotte, over half a century ago, that even a very degraded geometric stimulus (crude animations of circles and triangles moving, in highly constrained ways, along a line or in a plane) produces in very many observers a compelling experience of highly varied emotions. Despite tremendous advances in animation technology, it has only been comparatively recently that psychologists and cognitive scientists have begun a vigorous exploration of the Heider-Michotte Phenomenon; even these recent explorations have done little in the way of mathematical modeling, an oversight which is addressed by this grant. The larger project of which this grant forms a key part is an exploration of the psychophysical, developmental, evolutionary and cultural bases of human emotions. Because of its apparently simple geometrical nature, the Heider-Michotte phenomenon provides a convenient, and very intriguing, entry point into this project for the PI, a mathematician with expertise in topology and geometry.

This IGMS project is jointly supported by the MPS Office of Multidisciplinary Activities (OMA) and the Division of Mathematical Sciences (DMS).