Description: I have posted a couple of links already to articles discussing research looking at different issues related to the taking of Selfies. Rather than being something exotic, it’s clear that the taking of Selfies and the conducting of research involving the taking of Selfies is going to become more common theme in the psychological research literature. Before reading the article linked below, think a little bit about how you would design a study to look at the effects of taking Selfies, pictures of events that make one happy, or pictures that one thinks might make someone else happy (and sending them to them) that could be conducted as part of students day-to-day lives rather than in a psychology laboratory.
Source: Study links Selfies, happiness, Science News, ScienceDaily.
Date: September 13, 2016
Links: Article Link — https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/09/160913173436.htm
How did your thoughts about study design match with those that the researchers used in the article discussed in the link above? Often this is one of the big challenges in conducting psychological research on the sorts of factors that affect our day-to-day functioning. While it is possible to measure emotional responses or mood changes in lab settings it is not entirely clear if the effects observed under the controlled conditions of a lab experiment would actually generalize and be seen as real effects in people’s everyday lives. The researchers in this study went to some length to look at a number of key factors having to do with the ways in which taking pictures with one’s smart phone and doing something with those pictures such as posting them or sending them to a friend or simply reflecting upon them might impact different aspects of people’s day-to-day emotional experiences. In the end, while the study suggest a number of real-life implications for certain self and related behaviours such as taking Selfies at least somewhat open the question of why the observed effects arose. What might be some of the underlying causes of the results observed in this study and what sort of studies might we need to do to investigate them more directly?
Questions for Discussion:
- What did the researchers have research participants do with their cell phones and how did they assess participants emotional responses or levels of well-being?
- What are some of the differences that you can think of between this sort of “in real life” study” and a study looking at similar kinds of things but conducted in a lab setting?
- What do you think some of the underlying causes of the results obtained in this study might be? Can you think of some ways we might design and run studies to look at some of these potential causes?
References (Read Further):
Yu Chen, Gloria Mark, Sanna Ali. Promoting Positive Affect through Smartphone Photography. Psychology of Well-Being, 2016; 6 (1) DOI: 10.1186/s13612-016-0044-4
Gueguen, N., & De Gail, M. A. (2003). The effect of smiling on helping behavior: Smiling and good Samaritan behavior. Communication reports, 16(2), 133-140. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/08934210309384496
Gueguen, N., Eyssartier, C., & Meineri, S. (2016). A pedestrian’s smile and drivers’ behavior: When a smile increases careful driving. Journal of safety research, 56, 83-88.
Farve, N., & Maes, P. (2016, April). Smile Catcher: Can Game Design Lead to Positive Social Interactions?. In International Conference on Persuasive Technology (pp. 211-218). Springer International Publishing. https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/810b/3965b1c3f6b42696bf364b1a4cc321b71150.pdf
