Rife, Sean C*

Introduction:

My lab (the Social and Personality Analytics Lab) is concerned with (1) examining how people interact online, and (2) leveraging large amounts of data from social media to test fundamental assumptions of personality and social psychology.

Temperature and aggression validation

We test the hypothesis the higher ambient temperatures are associated with interpersonal aggression by analyzing over 10 million Facebook status posts and temperature values obtained from the National Climactic Data Center.

Moral Foundations Theory validation

Existing research has proposed that human moral judgments fall into five categories. We use a large database of Facebook status updates to test this hypothesis using natural language analysis.

Faculty involved: Sean C. Rife, PhD (Murray State University - Psychology)

Software:

Two software packages / languages will be used: Python (along with the Natural Language Toolkit and psyLex will be employed to quantify text data. Once these data have been extracted, data will be analyzed using generalized estimating equations and multilevel modeling in R.

Collaborators:

David Stilwell, PhD (University of Cambridge)
Michal Kosinski, PhD (Stanford Graduate School of Business)

Grants

Publications