Psychoinformatics

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Psychoinformatics is an emerging interdisciplinary field that uses principles from computer science for the acquisition, organization, and synthesis of data collected from psychology to reveal information about psychological traits such as personality and mood. [1] The term may also be used in context of affective computing or character computing.

Psychology has historically relied on experiments and questionnaires in order to collect data. These methods face several disadvantages, namely that experiments often consist of a small quantity of users (who must be incentivized to participate) and self-reported questionnaires and interviews are subject to bias and unreliable memory. Psychoinformatics solves these problems by storing Big Data related to psychology (such as communications on smartphones or social media websites) and then data mining for relevant psychological information. [2]

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Psychophysiology is the branch of psychology that is concerned with the physiological bases of psychological processes. While psychophysiology was a general broad field of research in the 1960s and 1970s, it has now become quite specialized, based on methods, topic of studies and scientific traditions. Methods vary as combinations of electrophysiological methods, neuroimaging, and neurochemistry. Topics have branched into subspecializations such as social, sport, cognitive, cardiovascular, clinical and other branches of psychophysiology.

Affective computing is the study and development of systems and devices that can recognize, interpret, process, and simulate human affects. It is an interdisciplinary field spanning computer science, psychology, and cognitive science. While some core ideas in the field may be traced as far back as to early philosophical inquiries into emotion, the more modern branch of computer science originated with Rosalind Picard's 1995 paper on affective computing and her book Affective Computing published by MIT Press. One of the motivations for the research is the ability to give machines emotional intelligence, including to simulate empathy. The machine should interpret the emotional state of humans and adapt its behavior to them, giving an appropriate response to those emotions.

Questionnaire construction refers to the design of a questionnaire to gather statistically useful information about a given topic. When properly constructed and responsibly administered, questionnaires can provide valuable data about any given subject.

Survey methodology is "the study of survey methods". As a field of applied statistics concentrating on human-research surveys, survey methodology studies the sampling of individual units from a population and associated techniques of survey data collection, such as questionnaire construction and methods for improving the number and accuracy of responses to surveys. Survey methodology targets instruments or procedures that ask one or more questions that may or may not be answered.

Experimental psychology refers to work done by those who apply experimental methods to psychological study and the underlying processes. Experimental psychologists employ human participants and animal subjects to study a great many topics, including sensation, perception, memory, cognition, learning, motivation, emotion; developmental processes, social psychology, and the neural substrates of all of these.

Prof. Dr. Ulf-Dietrich Reips is a full professor in the Faculty of Sciences at the University of Konstanz, where he holds the Chair for Psychological Methods, Assessment, and iScience. Between 2009 and 2013 he was a full-time tenured IKERBASQUE research professor at University of Deusto in Bilbao, Spain, and remains affiliated with Ikerbasque. Until 2009 he was an assistant professor and lecturer ('Oberassistent') at the Psychology Department of the University of Zurich, Switzerland. He received his PhD in 1997 and his habilitation in 2004 from the University of Tübingen, Germany. In 1992, he received an M.A. in Psychology from Sonoma State University, California. Reips spent most of his undergraduate and graduate years at the University of Tübingen, where he had attended the Leibniz Kolleg. He majored in both Psychology and General Rhetoric and had a minor in Political Science. In 2012, Ulf-Dietrich Reips received a FIRST award from University of Colorado Boulder and is since affiliated on an honorable basis with its Department of Psychology and Neuroscience. Based on his publications' impact and his affiliation with IKERBASQUE, the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas, Spain, ranked him 7th of "Top Scientists working at Spanish Private Universities" in 2014. In Fall 2015, Reips was offered to direct the Leibniz Institute for Psychology Information in Trier, in association with a full professorship for Psychology at University of Trier.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Questionnaire</span> Series of questions for gathering information

A questionnaire is a research instrument that consists of a set of questions for the purpose of gathering information from respondents through survey or statistical study. A research questionnaire is typically a mix of close-ended questions and open-ended questions. Open-ended, long-term questions offer the respondent the ability to elaborate on their thoughts. The Research questionnaire was developed by the Statistical Society of London in 1838.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Response bias</span> Type of bias

Response bias is a general term for a wide range of tendencies for participants to respond inaccurately or falsely to questions. These biases are prevalent in research involving participant self-report, such as structured interviews or surveys. Response biases can have a large impact on the validity of questionnaires or surveys.

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Affective science is the scientific study of emotion or affect. This includes the study of emotion elicitation, emotional experience and the recognition of emotions in others. Of particular relevance are the nature of feeling, mood, emotionally-driven behaviour, decision-making, attention and self-regulation, as well as the underlying physiology and neuroscience of the emotions.

In social research, particularly in psychology, the term demand characteristic refers to an experimental artifact where participants form an interpretation of the experiment's purpose and subconsciously change their behavior to fit that interpretation. Typically, demand characteristics are considered an extraneous variable, exerting an effect on behavior other than that intended by the experimenter. Pioneering research was conducted on demand characteristics by Martin Orne.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Data</span> Units of information

In common usage, data is a collection of discrete or continuous values that convey information, describing the quantity, quality, fact, statistics, other basic units of meaning, or simply sequences of symbols that may be further interpreted formally. A datum is an individual value in a collection of data. Data is usually organized into structures such as tables that provide additional context and meaning, and which may themselves be used as data in larger structures. Data may be used as variables in a computational process. Data may represent abstract ideas or concrete measurements. Data is commonly used in scientific research, economics, and in virtually every other form of human organizational activity. Examples of data sets include price indices, unemployment rates, literacy rates, and census data. In this context, data represents the raw facts and figures from which useful information can be extracted.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Negative affectivity</span> Personality variable

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Psychological research refers to research that psychologists conduct for systematic study and for analysis of the experiences and behaviors of individuals or groups. Their research can have educational, occupational and clinical applications.

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With the application of probability sampling in the 1930s, surveys became a standard tool for empirical research in social sciences, marketing, and official statistics. The methods involved in survey data collection are any of a number of ways in which data can be collected for a statistical survey. These are methods that are used to collect information from a sample of individuals in a systematic way. First there was the change from traditional paper-and-pencil interviewing (PAPI) to computer-assisted interviewing (CAI). Now, face-to-face surveys (CAPI), telephone surveys (CATI), and mail surveys are increasingly replaced by web surveys. In addition, remote interviewers could possibly keep the respondent engaged while reducing cost as compared to in-person interviewers.

Feminist HCI is a subfield of human-computer interaction (HCI) that applies feminist theory, critical theory and philosophy to social topics in HCI, including scientific objectivity, ethical values, data collection, data interpretation, reflexivity, and unintended consequences of HCI software. The term was originally used in 2010 by Shaowen Bardzell, and although the concept and original publication are widely cited, as of 2020 Bardzell's proposed frameworks have been rarely used since.

Character computing is a trans-disciplinary field of research at the intersection of computer science and psychology. It is any computing that incorporates the human character within its context. Character is defined as all features or characteristics defining an individual and guiding their behavior in a specific situation. It consists of stable trait markers and variable state markers. Character computing aims at providing a holistic psychologically driven model of human behavior. It models and predicts behavior based on the relationships between a situation and character. Three main research modules fall under the umbrella of character computing: character sensing and profiling, character-aware adaptive systems, and artificial characters.

The seriousness check is a technique that can be used in online research to improve data quality. Nowadays, many scientific studies with human participants are conducted online and are accessible to a large diversity of participants. Nonetheless, many people just want to look at the different pages of the questionnaire, instead of giving carefully chosen answers to the questions. The seriousness check addresses this problem: In this approach the respondents are asked about the seriousness of their participation or for a probability estimate that they will complete the entire study or experiment. Thus, by using the seriousness check irrelevant data entries can be easily identified and be excluded from the data analysis.

References

  1. Yarkani, Tal (3 December 2012). "Psychoinformatics". Current Directions in Psychological Science. 21 (6): 391–397. doi:10.1177/0963721412457362. S2CID   220398196.
  2. Montag, Christian; Duke, Eilish; Markowetz, Alexander (16 May 2016). "Toward Psychoinformatics: Computer Science Meets Psychology". Computational and Mathematical Methods in Medicine. 2016: 1–10. doi: 10.1155/2016/2983685 . PMC   4923556 . PMID   27403204.