Stanford
Media and Personality Lab

Lab News

2023

  • Our paper on Understanding Behaviors in Context Using Mobile Sensing was published in Nature Reviews Psychology.
  • Gabriella Harari is invited to speak about her work on mobile sensing on a symposium titled “Personality Applications Through Four Approaches” at SPSP 2024 for the Personality Science Preconference in San Diego, CA.
  • Gabriella Harari and Sumer Vaid will be co-organizing the Psychology of Media and Technology Preconference with Heinrich Peters and Joseph Bayer at SPSP in San Diego, CA.
  • Chiara Foerster joined the lab as a visiting student researcher! Welcome, Chiara!
  • Heinrich Peters joined the lab as a visiting student researcher! Welcome, Heinrich!
  • Noah Vinoya joined the lab as a Ph.D. student! Welcome, Noah!
  • Jada Hallman has graduated and completed her master's thesis, titled "Differential COVID-19 Pandemic Impacts on Community College and University Student Experiences." Congratulations, Jada!
  • Gabriella Harari spoke about personality states with Kai Horstmann, Whitney Ringwald, and René Mõttus for an episode of the Personality Psychology Podcast.
  • Serena Soh received second place for the ICA Communication and Technology Division Poster Award. Congratulations Serena!  
  • Serena Soh presented a poster titled, "Social Media Use Motivations Among Emerging Adults," at the annual meeting of ICA in Toronto, Canada.
  • Mahnaz Roshanaei gave a talk on “Contextualizing Meaningful Social Interactions and Psychological Wellbeing in Everyday Life” at ICA in Toronto.
  • Mahnaz Roshanaei received the ICA Interpersonal Communication Division’s Top Student Paper Award. Congratulations Mahnaz!
  • Gabriella Harari and Sumer Vaid co-organized the Psychology of Media and Technology Preconference with Heinrich Peters and Joseph Bayer at SPSP in Atlanta, GA.
  • Sumer Vaid and Gabriella Harari co-chaired a symposium at SPSP titled “Contextualizing Psychological States and Digital Media Behaviors in Everyday Life.”
  • Serena Soh presented a poster titled, “The Bidirectional Relationship Between Smartphone Use and Well-being in Everyday,” at the annual meeting of SPSP in Atlanta, GA.
  • Serena Soh presented a poster titled, "Identity Development and Social Media Use Motivation Among Emerging Adults," at the SPSP Psychology of Media and Technology Preconference in Atlanta, GA.
  • Sumer Vaid gave a talk on our work “ Social Media Sensitivity Across People, Places and Platforms” at SPSP in Atlanta, GA.
  • Sumer Vaid received a Graduate Research Assistantship at the Stanford Internet Observatory. Congratulations, Sumer!
  • Our paper on Well-Being in Social Interactions: Examining Personality-Situation Dynamics in Face-to-Face and Computer-Mediated Communication was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

2022

  • Our paper on Who Benefits from Which Activity? The Relations Between Personality Traits, Leisure Activities, and Well-Being was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
  • Our paper on Evaluating Voice Samples as a Potential Source of Information About Personality was published in Acta Psychologica.
  • Our paper on Investigating the Within-Person Structure and Correlates of Emotional Experiences in Everyday Life Using an Emotion Family Approach was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 
  • Our paper on Using GPS Data for Psychological Research: A Tutorial was published in Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science.
  • Gabriella Harari and Sumer Vaid received a $98,000 Google Cloud Credit award from Stanford HAI for “SABLE: Sensor-based Assessment of Behavioral Lifestyles and Experiences.”
  • Mathew Kiang (PI), Gabriella Harari (Co-I), & Johannes Eichstaedt (Co-I) received a $75,000 seed award from Stanford HAI for “Leveraging Smartphone Data Collection to Improve Data Quality and Sample Generalizability in Epidemiologic Studies.”
  • Sumer Vaid received an $8,000 graduate research funding award from the Stanford King Center for Global Development. Congratulations, Sumer!
  • Sumer Vaid co-organized a panel with Amy Orben, Nicole Ellison, Patti Valkenburg, and Gabriella Harari for the Communication & Technology Division at ICA in Paris on “Digital Media and Wellbeing: Unpacking The Heterogeneity of Users, Uses and Effects.”
  • Sumer Vaid gave a talk on “Social Media Sensitivity Across People and Places” at ICA in Paris.
  • Sumer Vaid presented an Extended Abstract at the Communication & Technology Division of ICA in Paris on “It's Time To Personalize Media Psychology: Moving from Nomothetic to Idiographic Research.”
  • Sumer Vaid presented a Data Blitz on “Person-Specific Effects of Social Media Use on Wellbeing” at SPSP for the Psychology of Media and Technology Preconference in San Francisco, CA.
  • Sumer Vaid gave a talk on “Social Media Sensitivity Across People and Places” at the Institute of Psychological Methods and Diagnostic at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.
  • Serena Soh presented a poster at the annual meeting of ICA in Paris titled, "Daily Smartphone Use and Well-being During COVID-19: The Moderating Role of Self-Perceived Compulsive Use."
  • Gabriella Harari (PI), Chris Tomsen (Co-I), and Carolyn Ibarra (Co-I) received a $40,000  award from the Stanford University Office of Community Engagement (OCE) for “Social Science Research Assistant Internship Program for Community College Students.”
  • Eleni Stogianni joined the lab as our Lab Manager. Welcome, Eleni!
  • Diana Jordan started as a Ph.D. student in Political Science at Duke University! Congratulations, Diana!
  • Sanaz Talaifar accepted a position as an Assistant Professor at Imperial College London, United Kingdom! Congratulations, Prof. Talaifar!
  • Timo Koch joined the lab as an affiliated researcher. Welcome, Timo!
  • Gabriella Harari gave a talk on "Using GPS Data to Understand the Relationship Between Mobility Behavior and Well-Being” for the Institute of Navigation's webinar series. Check it out here!
  • Eleni Stogianni presented a poster at the SPSP Psychology of Media and Technology Preconference titled, "Meditation Apps and Psychological Well-Being: Perspectives, Considerations & Future Directions."
  • Serena Soh presented a poster at the SPSP Psychology of Media and Technology Preconference titled, "Daily Smartphone Use and Well-being During COVID-19."
  • Gabriella Harari and other lab members joined a multi-institution project examining how individuals are coping with COVID-19. Please see the news article here for more about the project.
  • Jada Hallman and Sarah Edwards Lehman joined the lab as Research Assistants. Welcome, Jada and Sarah!
  • Sanaz Talaifar co-organized the 2022 Psychology of Media and Technology Preconference with Sandrine Müller at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology conference in San Francisco, California.

2021

  • Gabriella Harari co-organized an expert virtual meeting with Joanne Chung and Kai Horstmann for the European Association for Personality Psychology called “The Conceptualization and Measurement of Personality States.”
  • Gabriella Harari (Co-PI), Jamil Zaki (PI), and Matthew Jackson (Co-PI) received an award from the National Institute of Health for “Social factors in the mental health of young adults: Bridging psychological and network analysis.”
  • Mahnaz Roshanaei received a starting lecturer position at California State University, East Bay to teach about Human-Computer Interaction beginning in Spring 2022. Congratulations, Dr. Roshanaei!
  • Clemens Stachl accepted a position as an ​​Associate Professor of Behavioral Science at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland! Congratulations Prof. Stachl!
  • Gabriella Harari and Clemens Stachl received $9,800 Google Cloud Credit from Stanford University Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) for “SABLE: Sensor-based Assessment of Behavioral Lifestyles and Experiences.”
  • Our paper on Computational Personality Assessment was published in Personality Science. 
  • Gabriella Harari was a Mentor on the topic of "Under-Represented Minority Experiences in Academia" for the conference of the Association of Research in Personality (ARP).
  • Diana Jordan joined the lab as a Research Assistant. Welcome, Diana!
  • Our paper on Improving Prediction of Real-Time Loneliness and Companionship was published in SmartHealth. 
  • Mahnaz Roshanaei gave a talk at ReACT(Resana Annual Conference on Technology).
  • Our paper on Multi-modal data collection for measuring health, behavior, and living environment of large-scale participant cohorts was published in GigaScience. 
  • Serena Soh presented virtually at the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology on our work, titled “Smartphone Use and Feelings of Contentment and Connectedness During the COVID-19 Pandemic.”
  • Sanaz Talaifar presented virtually at the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology on our work, titled “Using Smartphone Sensing to Describe Behavior During the COVID-19 Pandemic.”
  • Sanaz Talaifar gave a talk at a symposium at the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology on “Crises Through New Lenses: Studying COVID with 21st Century Technology.”
  • Serena Soh joined the lab as a PhD student. Welcome, Serena!

2020

  • Gabriella Harari gave a keynote talk titled “Personality Sensing: A New Frontier for Personality Research in the Digital Age" at SPSP’s Personality Dynamics and Processes Pre-Conference in New Orleans, LA.
  • Our paper on A Process-Oriented Approach to Respecting Privacy was published in Current Opinion in Psychology.
  • Gabriella Harari, Jamil Zaki, & Mahnaz Roshanaei receive a $75,000 seed grant from Stanford University Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) for “Understanding the Changing Landscape of Social Life and its Effects on the Well-Being of Stanford’s Student Communities.”
  • Our paper on Personality Research and Assessments was published in the European Journal of Personality. 
  • Our paper on Personality-Trait Transactions was published in JPSP. 
  • Our paper on Predicting Personality was published in the Proceedings of the Natural Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 
  • Gabriella Harari gave a talk titled “Sensing the Behavioral Manifestation of Personality in Daily Life" at the Human-Computer Interaction seminar on “People, Computers and Design” at the Department of Computer Science, Stanford University. 
  • Our paper on Investigating the Relationships Between Mobility Behaviors Indicators of Subjective Well-Being was published in the European Journal of Personality. 
  • Our paper on Personality Sensing for Theory Development and Assessment was published was the European Journal of Personality. 
  • Gabriella Harari gave a talk titled “Sensing the Behavioral Manifestation of Personality in Daily Life" at the Institute for Personality and Social Research at the Department of Psychology, University of California at Berkeley. 
  • Our paper Who Uses What and How Often? was published in the Journal of Research in Personality. 

2019

  • Serena Soh joined the lab as a Research Assistant. Welcome, Serena!
  • Clemens Stachl joined the lab as a Postdoctoral Fellow. Welcome, Clemens!
  • Our paper on Personality Trait Predictors was published in the Social Science & Medicine. 
  • Chawannuch (Friend) Chaikulngamdee joined the lab as our new Lab Manager. Welcome, Chawannuch!
  • Our paper on Sensing Sociability was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
  • Gabriella Harari gave an invited keynote talk on "Mobile Sensing for Theory Development and Assessment in Social and Personality Psychology" at SPSP’s Summer Psychology Forum on Big Data.
  • Gabriella Harari co-organized a symposium session with Sandrine Müller on New Frontiers in Examining Person-Environment Interactions at the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Portland, OR.
  • Gabriella Harari gave a talk on Sensed Sociability Behaviors and Their Relationship to Personality Traits and Subjective Well-Being at the Social & Personality Psychology Colloquium of the Department of Psychology, UC Davis.
  • Gabriella Harari was invited to present at the annual meeting of the Association for Psychological Science on “Sensing individual​ ​differences​ ​in everyday social behavior” in Washington, DC.

2018

  • Our paper on Sensing Behavioral Change Over Time was published in the Journal of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies journal series.
  • Our work on Naturalistic Assessment of Situations Using Mobile Sensing Methods was published in the Oxford Handbook of Psychological situations.
  • Gabriella Harari gave an invited talk on Self-Tracking Using Smartphones to Assess Behavior and Promote Self-Insight at the Department of Psychology’s Institute of Psychological Methods and Diagnostics, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.
  • Gabriella Harari gave a talk on Using Smartphones to Collect Behavioral Data in Psychological Science at the Department of Psychology, University of Pittsburgh.
  • Gabriella Harari gave an invited talk on Using Smartphones to Understand Well-Being in Daily Life at the Happiness and Well-Being Preconference of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology Annual Convention, Atlanta, Georgia.
  • Sumer Vaid joined the lab as a Ph.D. student. Welcome, Sumer!
  • We received a grant from the National Science Foundation for our work on SABLE: Sensor-Based Assessment of Behavioral Lifestyle and Experiences.
  • Gabriella Harari participated as a Dissertation Committee Member at Stanford University, Stanford, CA.  
  • Gabriella Harari participated as a Diversity Mentor for the SPSP Student Mentor on “Navigating Academia as a Minority Scholar.”

2017