Academic Research
Here you'll find research papers / projects I've been privileged to be a part of. You can find more details and links at my google scholar page.
(NB: this is page is in the process of begin updated.)
In Progress Research Projects:
Paradoxical Patterns of Personality Co-Development In Families
Where do our personalities come from? Personality psychologists have struggled to identify specific environmental influences (like life events) on personality development. We wanted to look into how changes in the psycho-social environment impact youth personality development. More specifically, we wanted to look at the co-development of personality traits in families.
Data are from 674 Families (or ~1800 Mom-Dad-Child triads) over 16 years. Modeling included fitting 125 Second-order Dyadic Growth Curves and testing each for 3 moderating effects.
The short story is that parent personality development is mostly uncorrelated with adolescent personality development. But intra-spousal personality development is strongly related. This is sorta known as "The Michelangelo Effect."
Coming soon to a reputable journal near you!
Me and Drs. Emorie Beck, Angelina Sutin, and Richard Robins.
Why Children Like (Or Dislike) Themselves: The Language of Self-Esteem Across the Lifespan
Over two-thousand people were asked why the responded to a set of psychometric self-esteem items the way they did... and we tried to figure out how to make sense of what they told us. In particular, we are interested in whether young children have the same kind of self-esteem as adults.
Yixin Tang, Myself, and Dr. Kali Trzesniewski.
Submitted For Peer Review
Trying to assess emotions is hard, and here we develop techniques and validate the use of a free response / open vocabulary approach. Katie (who led this project) and I spent a while talking things over, over zoom. Lots of people did many things. For this project I created a novel kind of sentiment analysis algorithm capable of inferring the three primary dimensions of language (Valence, Affective Arousal, Dominance) for any arbitrary phrase.
Dr. Katie Hoemann, myself, Dr. Catilin Mills, Dr. Laura Allen, Dr. Peter Kuppens, Dr. Jolie Wormwood.
Midlife Personality Development, Cognitive Functioning, and the Risk Factors for Cognitive Decline
An investigation into how personality traits and personality trait change predisposes people for a) cognitive decline, and b) risk factors thereof. Recently submitted to the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Turns out having a personality is either good or bad for your health. An excellent project for training researchers.
Dr. Emorie Beck, myself, Winkie Ma, Dr. Angelina Sutin, and Dr. Richard Robins
Published Papers
The Personality Of American Nations: An Exploratory Study
The writer Colin Woodard, following the tradition of Joel Garreau, has proposed that there are several culturally distinct regions of the U.S. We test his ideas using personality and psychological data from most counties in the country. The computational challenge here was creating large enough areas of contiguous counties to give us enough of a sample size without distorting the map. We also permuted counties to see if they resulted in a better "fit" of the proposed boundaries... Which is an implementation of idea I saw when I was an undergrad working in Dr. Terry Regier's Language and Cognition Lab at Berkeley.
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Changing Channels? A comparison of Fox and MSNBC in 2012, 2016, and 2020
We analyzed the transcripts of all day-time weekday broadcasts of Fox and MSNBC in three election years.
Ion-Acoustic Waves in A High School Plasma Physics Laboratory
When I was in High School I was fortunate enough to participate in an extra-curricular program at UCLA. The professor and teachers running the program wrote up what we were doing, and they were kind enough to include all of us there at the time as co-authors.