Salons & Methods
Salon Speakers
Informal events based on the concept of 16th C Italian and French Salons – a gathering to increase knowledge though conversation – hosted by topic experts. Come along to ask your burning questions, sharpen your knowledge, or simply enjoy lively discussion!
Studying Affective and Emotional Experience in the Wild
Friday, March 21, 8:30 – 9:30AM
Karen Quigley, Northeastern University
We now have better methods for understanding naturalistic affective and emotional experiences as they occur in daily life outside the laboratory. These methods can range from measures of context (like temperature, humidity, ambient noise or social context) to ambulatory physiology, to experience sampling, and even biologically-triggered experience sampling, whereby an experiential report is obtained from a person when they just exhibited a larger-than-average physiological change not due to a major physical event. Taking such a contextualized and naturalistic approach is critical when viewing affective feelings or emotions as inherently situated inside a brain while also being influenced by conditions inside the body and outside in the world. Join us for a Salon conversation about new methods for studying real-world, naturalistic affective experiences and how these methods can reveal extensive variation across daily life instances of affective or emotional experiences.
How We Got Here and Where We’re Going
Friday, March 21, 4:30-5:30PM
In this salon, Jamil Zaki (2024 SAS mid-career award winner) and Brett Ford (2024 SAS early-career award winner) will share key lessons learned along their career paths—from choosing collaborators wisely to following curiosity over convention. We’ll discuss balancing interest with impact, navigating service commitments, and finding meaning in both creating and sharing knowledge. Join us for an open conversation on the challenges and opportunities that shape a research career, with a look toward the future of the field.
Jamil Zaki, Stanford University
Brett Ford, University of Toronto
Creativity & Thinking Outside the Research Box
Friday, March 21, 6:00-7:00PM
Diana Tamir, Princeton University
Applying for SAS Awards: Is this important? Why should I do this?
Saturday, March 22, 08:30-09:30AM
Maital Neta, University of Nebraska – Lincoln
Academic Pathways Across Borders: Navigating Opportunities and Applications as International and Domestic Students
Saturday, March 22, 11:15AM-12:15PM
Join us for an insightful salon discussing two different kinds of academic journeys–one from an international perspective and the other from a domestic perspective! The student committee invited two speakers. In the first half, Srishti Goel will share her experiences applying to post-baccalaureate, master’s, and graduate programs as an international student, highlighting key challenges and offering her insights and tips. In the second half, Kaitlyn Werner will share her experiences applying internationally as a domestic U.S. applicant for postdocs, research grants, and faculty positions, providing her advice on obtaining academic opportunities abroad. We hope this salon can help attendees gain knowledge on navigating the different types of academic application processes.
Kaitlyn Werner, University of Oregon
Srishti Goel, Yale University
Methods
Multiverse Analysis
8:30 – 9:30AM on Friday, March 21
The research process is inherently flexible, requiring researchers to make numerous decisions that can significantly influence study results. These “researcher degrees of freedom” span all stages of the research pipeline, including study design, data collection, data processing, and analysis. This variability poses challenges to the robustness and reproducibility of findings. A promising method to address these challenges are multiverse analyses (or specification curve analyses), a systematic framework to explore how different choices impact results. While often applied to post hoc decisions in data processing (e.g., outlier handling) and analysis (e.g., variable selection and model specification), multiverse analyses can also be used to evaluate study design decisions, such as selecting measurements or determining sampling rates, and data collection choices, like sample size. This workshop will identify key decision points in the research process and demonstrate how multiverse analyses can enhance transparency and rigor. Using examples from intensive longitudinal data and large-scale studies, participants will gain a comprehensive understanding of the utility of this method. We will discuss how to design and interpret multiverse analyses, addressing both their promises and pitfalls. Participants will leave equipped with practical tools to apply this approach in their own research, fostering more robust and credible findings.
Leonie Cloos, KU Leuven
Applying Multiverse Analyses Across the Research Pipeline
Dyadic Experience Sampling Methods
4:30-5:30PM on Friday, March 21
Martine Verhees, KU Leuven
Designing and Conducting Interpersonal ESM Studies: A Practical Introduction
Emotions are inherently dynamic and social, continuously elicited, shaped, and regulated in the presence of others. The experience sampling method (ESM) is a prominent approach for assessing emotions in daily life. Given the interpersonal nature of emotions, it can be valuable to study them within an explicitly interpersonal framework, that is, to collect ESM data from multiple mutually interacting individuals. This approach enables researchers to map emotions, behaviors, and perceptions of interacting individuals onto one another, allowing explorations of questions like how emotions covary or how perceptions of behavior may differ between people. However, conducting interpersonal ESM studies introduces methodological considerations and challenges that go beyond those of individual-focused ESM studies. In this session, I will provide an introduction to the particularities of designing and conducting interpersonal ESM studies. Drawing on insights from previous studies, I will touch upon considerations at various stages of the research process: before the study (e.g., study design), during the study (e.g., participant (de)briefing), and after the study (e.g., data analysis). While the session will primarily focus on ESM studies in dyads, many considerations are applicable to other interpersonal contexts.
Passive Monitoring in Daily Life
8:30 – 9:30AM on Saturday, March 22