SISPP 2023
After skipping our 2021 event due to the pandemic, the Summer Institute for Social and Personality Psychology (SISPP) returned in July 2023 at Ohio State University. One hundred students from around the globe convened at the Columbus campus for courses in different areas of psychological research as well as a day-long skill-building workshop.
Learn more about this unique learning experience firsthand from the students who participated in SISPP 2023.
COURSES
Christian Waugh, [email protected], Maria Gendron ([email protected]) - Emotions
Emotion has long been thought of as a "syndrome"—a mixture of components (e.g., physiological activity, behavioral readiness, cognitive appraisal, subjective experience, motor activity) that operate at different levels of analysis (neurological, physiological, semantic, personal, cultural) and thus are typically examined with different methods (neuroimaging, psychophysiology, self-report, facial movements, behavioral observation). As such, scholars debate theories that advance particular components, levels, and methods as most important to understanding emotion. But, how can our thinking and research shift if we more fully embrace the syndrome idea with the meta-theory that emotion is a multi-level system of systems?
This course will introduce a systems meta-theory of emotion to enable students to reevaluate historical and contemporary theory, research, application, and scientific practice. Informed by a range of research examples that integrate across levels of analysis, we will collectively generate a set of conceptual and methodological tools and praxes necessary to work integratively across levels, from the most micro (e.g., neurophysiological) to the most macro (e.g., cultural/structural). Throughout the course, students will develop research ideas that attend to multiple levels of analysis and likely use multiple, complementary, methods.
Instructors: Lisa Jaremka ([email protected]), John Updegraff ([email protected]) - Health
How do our social worlds influence physical health, through both our behaviors and biological processes? This class will cover foundational theories and research in social and health psychology and how they can help us understand physical health. We will review core social-psychological predictors of health such as stress, close relationships, and discrimination. We will also cover the basic mechanisms underlying these links, including norms and attitudes, self-regulation of health behavior, and peripheral physiological processes. We will detail methodological techniques to collect health data, and highlight applied social psychology interventions to improve health. Our goal in this course is to help you apply these topics to develop your own research program and form collaborations with others.
Marina Milyavskaya ([email protected]), Brandon Schmeichel ([email protected]) – Self-regulation and goals
Self-regulation is a core construct in psychological science—studied by clinicians, developmentalists, neuroscientists, and social/personality psychologists, among many others. Self-regulation also carries practical consequences for individuals and for society. This course will provide an overview of both classical and current theory and research on goal pursuit and self-regulation, focusing on how people set and pursue goals, and why attempts at self-regulation so often fail. We will also explore ongoing controversies currently dominating the scientific study of self-regulation. Possible topics include: Is willpower necessary for self-regulation? How do people juggle multiple goals? And just what good is effort, anyway, and how should we measure it? We will complement general and theoretical discussions with a focus on practical applications in various domains such as work, education, and everyday life. We will also consider the myriad methods used to study self-regulation across the different sub-areas of psychology.
Instructors: Dominic Packer ([email protected]), Steve Spencer ([email protected]) - Groups
This course will focus on developing a deeper understanding of social identities and how they interact with social institutions to affect people's interactions with each other and their engagement with social change. Along the way, we will explore the dynamics of intergroup contact, social identity threat, political polarization, mis- and disinformation, and leadership. In close collaboration, students will work on a series of exercises leading to the development of novel and innovative research proposals.
Instructors: Kim Rios ([email protected]), Adam Cohen ([email protected]) - Religion
Psychologists of religion Adam Cohen (Arizona State University) and Kimberly Rios (Ohio University) have four goals for this SISPP class on psychology and religion. First, we want to provide some historically and intellectually critical background and history, like covering how scholars have defined and operationalized religion in psychology. Second, we want to bring these discussions up to date in currently important topics, like prejudice and intergroup conflict. Third, we want to share and develop the newest topics and approaches, like social identity and cultural/evolutionary perspectives on religion. Fourth, we want to develop meaningful relationships between us and students, and students with each other, for long-term collaborations and moving the field forward. Our tentative list of topics is Defining and Operationalizing Religion; Religion vs./and Science; Prejudice and Conflict (e.g., nationalism, racial and sexual prejudice, inter-religious prejudice); Religion as Social Identity; Culture, Morality, and Religion; Evolution and Religion; Intersectionality (e.g., how religion interacts with other meaningful social categories/groups); and Meta-Science and Religion (e.g., how the study of religion is perceived in psychology, and how such perceptions might affect our approach to research).
WORKSHOPS
Instructors: Matthew Rocklage ([email protected]), Tessa Charlesworth ([email protected]) – Textual Analysis
Language is ubiquitous. We use it to communicate our deepest thoughts and feelings on a daily basis. Moreover, with the advent of the Internet, psychologists now have ready access to the largest recordings to ever exist on human thoughts, feelings, and behavior. But how can we make use of all this text to uncover psychological insights? In this one-day workshop, we will introduce students to the latest advances in text analytics for psychological research. The workshop will span the text analysis pipeline, starting with how to acquire text, including making use of existing archived text sources, scraping new text from online sources, and eliciting text from participants. We will then provide hands-on training on how to quantify text, introducing tools that use construct-driven top-down approaches (e.g., manual coding, word imputation) and data-driven bottom-up approaches (e.g., large-scale word embedding models). Finally, we will discuss how to interpret text, with a focus on ensuring that insights drawn from text data are robust, reliable, and valid. Throughout, students will be guided through published research and code that uses text to test and discover new hypotheses of the mind and society.
Instructors: Erin Hennes ([email protected]), Sean Lane ([email protected]) - Statistical power or other stats-oriented workshop
Collecting informative data that observe real and publishable psychological effects is challenging for a number of methodological, statistical, and pragmatic reasons. Even when a null hypothesis is false, an empirical study may "fail" due to any number of seemingly mundane researcher decisions, such as sample size, frequency of observations, measurement or operationalization, inclusion criteria, or statistical model. The impact of these decisions on the power to detect true effects can be difficult to intuit, particularly in new lines of research or in studies using complex modeling techniques. Adequately addressing such issues may also be impeded by limited financial resources or access to sufficient numbers of individuals from the population(s) of interest. Together, it may be difficult to ascertain sufficient information a priori to make wise design decisions.
This workshop aims to address such challenges by exploring both methodological and practical considerations for optimal study design. Participants will work with expansive, user-friendly, and free software developed by the instructors to conduct comprehensive power and sensitivity analyses for a wide variety of models. Participants will learn a number of techniques for optimizing study design beyond merely increasing sample size. The workshop will also provide guidance regarding decisions to abandon vs. revise lines of research when initial findings are inconclusive or non-significant. Attendees are encouraged to bring their own study design problems to be workshopped as a group. Finally, the workshop will clarify common misperceptions related to statistical power and replicability.