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The Sounds of Social Life Project: Observing Language and Interactions IRL
Matthias R. Mehl
Professor of Psychology,
Director of the Naturalistic Observation of Social Interaction Laboratory
University of Arizona
https://psychology.arizona.edu/users/matthias-mehl
How much time do we spend talking? Or laughing? Or sighing? Or arguing with others? And what do these behaviors tell us about how we live our lives? These seemingly trivial questions are important because they illustrate how little is known about our everyday social interactions. Over the last 20 years, I have 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 and language use 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.