Lab Mission
Emo Sky. Ram, N., Conroy, D., Pincus, A. L., Lorek, A., Rebar, A. H., Roche, M. J., Morack, J., Coccia, M., Feldman, J., & Gerstorf, D. (2014). Examining the interplay of processes across multiple time-scales: Illustration with the Intraindividual Study of Affect, Health, and Interpersonal Behavior (iSAHIB). Research in Human Development, 11, 142-160
The Change Lab @ Stanford, directed by Professor Nilam Ram, studies change and attempts to invoke change.
We study how people change, how media change, how the world changes, and how all those changes interact and influence each other over time. We develop novel techniques for measuring change (often using mobile technologies), cool data visualizations (and sonifications), and novel methods for analysis of longitudinal data. We occasionally forward new theory about the dynamics of human behavior and human interaction.
We code a lot – and use coding and digital design to bring together interdisciplinary expertise that spans from computer science to psychology through sustainability/environmental science, symbolic systems, communication, and statistics to the visual and musical arts. Current research directions include using intensive longitudinal data to model dynamics of individuals’ emotion regulation, media use, environmental exposures, and well-being, and how those dynamics change over time and across the life span.
We are often engaged in analyzing the large repositories of smartphone data collected in the Human Screenome Project.
The Change Lab @ Stanford is committed to global diversity and fostering minority representation in social and computational science. We collaborate widely across schools and departments at Stanford and work with lots of academic and industry partners across the world to create change.
Emo Sky
Functionalist emotion and ecological systems theories suggest emodiversity – the variety and relative abundance of an individual’s emotion experiences – is beneficial for psychological and physical health. Each emotion (e.g., excitement, fear, anger) serves specific adaptive purposes by prioritizing, organizing, and regulating behavior in ways that optimize an individual’s adjustment to current situational demands. Data are drawn from iSAHIB (Ram et al, 2014), a study where individuals reported the intensity of their everyday experience with 26 different emotions.
Depicted as a flower, the “petals” indicate the range and quality of nine individuals’ emotional experiences for each emotion, high arousal positive valence (enthusiasm) in the top right quadrant and moving clockwise through low arousal positive (calm), low arousal negative (sad), and high arousal negative valence (angry) emotions. Colors indicate the proportion of reports of low (blue) to high (pink) intensity. The small bouquet prompts consideration of the diversity of individuals’ unique daily lives – their sadness, anxiety, anger, joy, happiness, and many in-betweens.
More About Our Lab
