Nicholas S. Thompson - US grants

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.