Matthias R. Mehl

University of Arizona | UA · Department of Psychology

The Autobiographical Interview is a widely used tool for examining memory and related cognitive functions. It provides a standardized framework to differentiate between internal details, representing the episodic features of specific events, and external details, including semantic knowledge and other non-episodic information. This study introduces...

Introduction: Individuals’ construals of aging capture how they think of aging, and what aging well means to them. Assessing such construals is important for understanding attitudes towards aging and, ultimately, how to tailor personalized aging well interventions to an individual.Methods: We analyzed 100 younger adults and 92 older adults’ spoken...

No literature so far explores gender variability at the day‐to‐day, within‐person level, to what extent aspects of the social context impact this variability, and to what extent transgender, gender non‐conforming, and cisgender people experience this variability similarly or differently. This project explores the potential that ambulatory assessmen...

Women are widely assumed to be more talkative than men. Challenging this assumption, Mehl et al. (2007) provided empirical evidence that men and women do not differ significantly in their daily word use, speaking about 16,000 words per day (WPD) each. However, concerns were raised that their sample was too small to yield generalizable estimates, an...

Although interpersonal rejection and acceptance unfold in a social context by definition, such experiences are typically investigated from the perspective of individuals receiving, or observing, social information alone. Employing a novel dyadic task, we examined affective responses to shared (i.e., simultaneously received) social feedback among co...

Frequency of (aural) language exposure and productive (oral) language use, context, and interlocutors are important factors for language learning. Applied linguists and study abroad (SA) researchers have studied these variables mostly retrospectively through questionnaires and learners’ self-reports which have unknown correspondence with learner's...

For the longest time, the gold standard in preparing spoken language corpora for text analysis in psychology was using human transcription. However, such standard comes at extensive cost, and creates barriers to quantitative spoken language analysis that recent advances in speech-to-text technology could address. The current study quantifies the ac...

Natural language use is a promising candidate for the development of innovative measures of well-being to complement self-report measures. The type of words individuals use can reveal important psychological processes that underlie well-being across the lifespan. In this preregistered, cross-sectional study, we propose a conceptual model of languag...

A broad aim of the precision mental healthcare (PMH) movement is to increase the efficacy of treatment. While showing promise, which factors are influential in predicting positive outcomes is still unclear. One possibility is an individual’s subjective experience – especially when using longitudinal, multidimensional data from naturalistic settings...

Introduction: Stroke survivors experience high levels of social isolation which hinder their rehabilitation and well-being. A gap in the field that impedes intervention development is a lack of real-time social interaction measurement tailored for this population. In response, we developed SocialBit, a smartwatch-based machine learning algorithm to...

The COVID-19 pandemic posed a global threat to nearly every society around the world. Individuals turned to their political leaders to safely guide them through this crisis. The most direct way political leaders communicated with their citizens was through official speeches and press conferences. In this report, we compare psychological language ma...

Introduction: Current cognitive assessments suffer from floor/ceiling and practice effects, poor psychometric performance in mild cases, and repeated assessment effects. This study explores the use of digital speech analysis as an alternative tool for determining cognitive impairment. The study specifically focuses on identifying the digital speec...

Ambient audio sampling methods such as the Electronically Activated Recorder (EAR) have become increasingly prominent in clinical and social sciences research. These methods record snippets of naturalistically assessed audio from participants’ daily lives, enabling novel observational research about the daily social interactions, identities, enviro...

The literature on the relationship between social interaction and executive functions (EF) in older age is mixed, perhaps stemming from differences in EF measures and the conceptualization/measurement of social interaction. We investigated the relationship between social interaction and EF in 102 cognitively unimpaired older adults (ages 65-90). Pa...

Introduction Social isolation has been found to be a significant risk factor for health outcomes, on par with traditional risk factors. This isolation is characterised by reduced social interactions, which can be detected acoustically. To accomplish this, we created a machine learning algorithm called SocialBit. SocialBit runs on a smartwatch and d...

During the Covid-19 pandemic, the global public has relied on their political leaders toguide them through the crisis. The current study investigated if and how political leader’srhetoric would be associated with collective emotional responses. We used text analyticalmethods to investigate association between political leader speech and daily aggre...

Whole-body hyperthermia (WBH) shows promise for the treatment of major depressive disorder (MDD). Because MDD is associated with increased inflammation, and anti-inflammatory agents show some promise as antidepressants, the current study sought to identify the acute and longer-term immune effects of WBH in participants with MDD and to explore wheth...

Given its centrality in scholarly and popular discourse, morality should be expected to figure prominently in everyday talk. We test this expectation by examining the frequency of moral content in three contexts, using three methods: (a) Participants’ subjective frequency estimates (N = 581); (b) Human content analysis of unobtrusively recorded in-...

Mobile and wearable devices are equipped with an array of embedded digital sensors that produce continuous steams of digital trace data. These now effectively ubiquitous digital trace data can empower psychologists to study human behavior “in vivo” and “in situ,” which has been an important goal following the American Psychology Association’s “Deca...

We conducted a field study using multiple wearable devices on 231 federal office workers to assess the impact of the indoor environment on individual wellbeing. Past research has established that the workplace environment is closely tied to an individual’s wellbeing. Since sound is the most-reported environmental factor causing stress and discomfor...

People differ in the way they live their daily lives. For some people, daily life is characterized by multiple and diverse experiences, while others have more stability and routine in their lives. However, little is known about how variety in daily life relates to the expression of personality states. The present study examined within-person associ...

The empirical literature on the relationship between social interaction and executive functions in older age is mixed, perhaps stemming from sample differences (e.g., sample size and composition), differences in executive functioning measures (e.g., a single test or a test battery), and differences in conceptualization and measurement of social int...

The current study adds to the emerging interest in workplace person-environmental associations by exploring the interaction between employee personality traits and office workstation type (open bench seating, cubicle, private office) in predicting on-task focus and happiness. To capture an ecologically valid assessment of such interactions, 231 fed...

Objectives Mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) touch on concepts deemed spiritual or religious in the popular imagination, which may interact with participants’ own religious beliefs to influence implementation-relevant outcomes. Methods Four studies examined how interactions between different (a) religious framings of MBIs and participants’ re...

Marital disruption is associated with increased risk for a range of poor health outcomes, including disturbed sleep. This report examines trajectories of actigraphy-assessed sleep efficiency following marital separation as well as the extent to which daily social behaviors and individual differences in attachment explain variability in these trajec...

Objectives The present research examines genomics and in vivo dynamics of family context and experienced affect following discharge from psychiatric hospitalisation for suicidal thoughts and behaviours (STBs). The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of a new model, description of model-guided integration of multiple methods, documentati...

Cambio emocional en su “hábitat natural”: Medición de la regulación emocional cotidiana con métodos de evaluación ambulatorios pasivos y activos Los métodos de evaluación ambulatoria han hecho posible el estudio de fenómenos en tiempo real, con potencial traslacional para la investigación del proceso psicoterapéutico. Este artículo utiliza dato de...

Background: This study investigated the ways in which adults reflect on their psychological experiences amid a recent marital separation and how these patterns of thought, manifest in language, are associated with self-reported negative affect and actigraphy-assessed sleep disturbance. Methods: In a sample of 138 recently separated adults assess...

Objectives Extensive research suggests that short-term meditation interventions may hold therapeutic promise for a wide range of psychosocial outcomes. In response to calls to subject these interventions to more methodologically rigorous tests, a randomized controlled trial tested the effectiveness of a mindfulness meditation intervention and a com...

Social networks are the persons surrounding a patient who provide support, circulate information, and influence health behaviors. For patients seen by neurologists, social networks are one of the most proximate social determinants of health that are actually accessible to clinicians, compared with wider social forces such as structural inequalities...

Objective: Extensive research suggests that short-term meditation interventions may hold therapeutic promise for a wide range of psychosocial outcomes. In response to calls to subject these interventions to more methodologically rigorous tests, a randomized controlled trial tested the effectiveness of a mindfulness meditation intervention and a com...

The paper discusses the role of language and culture in the context of quantitative text analysis in psychological research. It reviews current automatic text analysis methods and approaches from the perspective of the unique challenges that can arise when going beyond the default English language. Special attention is paid to closed-vocabulary app...

We conducted a field study using multiple wearable devices on 231 federal office workers to assess the impact of the indoor environment on individual wellbeing. Past research has established that the workplace environment is closely tied to an individual’s wellbeing. Since sound is the most-reported environmental factor causing stress and discomfor...

Objectives Around the turn of the millennium, the “age-prospective memory (PM) paradox” challenged the classical assumption that older adults necessarily evidence a marked decline in PM functioning. As previous investigations highlighted ecological validity to be a potential explanation, the present study sought to extend established approaches by...

According to the theory of generativity, one would expect older adults to inherently feature life lessons in naturalistic conversations with younger adults. Little though, is known about the process of these conversations, and to what extent they convey wisdom characteristics. In this project, intergenerational conversations between university stud...

Self-compassion is a positive psychological construct associated with heightened well-being, but the construct is largely measured via self-report. In a study of divorcing adults ( N = 120), we sought to replicate and extend prior research on the association between self-rated and observed self-compassion, the linguistic cues associated with self-r...

We review extant research on the psychological implications of the use of first-person singular pronouns (i.e., “I-talk”). A common intuition is that I-talk is associated with an overly positive, highly agentic, and inflated view of the self—including arrogance, self-centeredness, and grandiose narcissism. Initial (small-sample) research provided e...

Although central to well-being, functional and dysfunctional thoughts arise and unfold over time in ways that remain poorly understood. To shed light on these mechanisms, we adapted a “think aloud” paradigm to quantify the content and dynamics of individuals’ thoughts at rest. Across two studies, external raters hand coded the content of each thoug...

We review extant research on the psychological implications of the use of first-person singular pronouns (i.e., “I-talk”). A common intuition is that I-talk is associated with an overly positive, highly agentic, and inflated view of the self—including arrogance, self-centeredness, and grandiose narcissism. Initial (small-sample) research provided e...

In dyadic interaction, a verbal focus on one individual (“you-talk”, “I-talk”), rather than on the couple (“we-talk”) has predominantly been linked to dysfunctional relationship processes. However, context differences in these links have not yet been systematically examined. Is it functional to asymmetrically focus on one partner during support int...

Prior research suggests that the implicit biases of physicians are negatively associated with quality of medical care and patient satisfaction among minority patients. However, relatively little is known about how physicians express these subtle forms of bias in patient interactions. This study examined the implicit and explicit anti-Hispanic biase...

Objective: This study examined office workstation types' impact on the relationship between fatigue and three health metrics: physical activity, stress, and sleep quality. Methods: Data from 225 office workers were collected for perceived fatigue, perceived sleep quality (Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index [PSQI]), physiological stress response (sta...

Although family environment in the aftermath of potentially traumatic pediatric injury appears critical to recovery, there are no studies observing children’s daily life at home. We aimed to explore the daily family environment (activities and interactions) of 3- to 16-year-olds and their families following an injury requiring hospital admission. W...

Background: Language use and social interactions have demonstrated a close relationship with cognitive measures. It is important to improve the understanding of language use and behavioral indicators from social context to study the early prediction of cognitive decline among healthy populations of older adults. Objective: This study aimed at pr...

BACKGROUND Language use and social interactions have demonstrated a close relationship with cognitive measures. It is important to improve the understanding of language use and behavioral indicators from social context to study the early prediction of cognitive decline among healthy populations of older adults. OBJECTIVE This study aimed at predic...

Over the recent years, machine learning techniques have been employed to produce state-of-the-art results in several audio related tasks. The success of these approaches has been largely due to access to large amounts of open-source datasets and enhancement of computational resources. However, a shortcoming of these methods is that they often fail...

Employee personality traits have long been studied in the context of workplace outcomes, and drawbacks of certain workstation types have become regularly debated in the last decade. However, very little is known at the intersection of these two areas of interest. This study of 231 federal office workers explored how personality levels interacted wi...

While language style is considered to be automatic and relatively stable, its plasticity has not yet been studied in translations that require the translator to “step into the shoes of another person.” In the present study, we propose a psychological model of language adaptation in translations. Focusing on an established interindividual difference...

Sighing is a common nonverbal everyday behavior thought to signal the experiencing of negative emotions. Prior research from a small-scale study suggests that observed daily expressions of sighing is associated with subclinical depression (Robbins et al., 2011). This paper replicates and extends these findings, hypothesizing that individual differe...

The huge power for social influence of digital media may come with the risk of intensifying common societal biases, such as gender and age stereotypes. Speaker’s gender and age also behaviorally manifest in language use, and language may be a powerful tool to shape impact. The present study took the example of TED, a highly successful knowledge dis...

Language use during structured clinical tasks predicts pathological cognitive aging. However, structured tasks reflect only a narrow band of potential communication contexts, which limits the ability to capture cognitive processes manifested in language use under more natural conditions (i.e., minimal constraints). The Electronically Activated Reco...

In this chapter, we argue for the importance of employing naturalistic observation methods in research on social factors underlying health and disease. We review existing field observation methods and highlight the Electronically Activated Recorder (EAR) as an innovative yet by now well‐validated tool for the unobtrusive (acoustic) observation of r...

Sighing is a common nonverbal everyday behavior thought to signal the experiencing of negative emotions. Prior research from a small-scale study suggests that observed daily expressions of sighing is associated with subclinical depression (Robbins, Mehl, Holleran, & Kasle, 2011). This paper replicates and extends these findings, hypothesizing that...

Ambulatory assessment methods provide a rich approach for studying daily behaviour. Too often, however, these data are analysed in terms of averages, neglecting patterning of this behaviour over time. This paper describes recurrence quantification analysis (RQA), a non‐linear time series technique for analysing dynamic systems, as a method for anal...

Past research using the Electronically Activated Recorder (EAR), an observational ambulatory assessment method for the real‐world measurement of daily behaviour, has identified several behavioural manifestations of the Big Five domains in a small college sample (N = 96). With the use of a larger and more diverse sample of pooled data from N = 462 p...

Ambulatory assessment methods provide a rich approach for studying daily behavior. Too often, however, these data are analyzed in terms of averages, neglecting patterning of this behavior over time. This paper describes Recurrence Quantification Analysis (RQA), a non-linear time series technique for analyzing dynamic systems, as a method for analyz...

The retrieval of autobiographical memories is an integral part of everyday social interactions. Prior laboratory research has revealed that older age is associated with a reduction in the retrieval of autobiographical episodic memories, and the ability to elaborate these memories with episodic details. However, how age-related reductions in episodi...

In this study, we examined the association between naturalistically observed in-person contact with an ex-partner and separation-related psychological distress (SRPD). One hundred twenty-two recently separated adults were assessed using the Electronically Activated Recorder on three occasions across 5 months. The association between in-person conta...

Objectives: Language markers derived from structured clinical interviews and assessments have been found to predict age-related normal and pathological cognitive functioning. An important question, then, is the degree to which the language that people use in their natural daily interactions, rather than their language elicited within and specifica...

As proposed by the healthy aging model of the World Health Organization (2015), participation in social and cognitive activities is important for healthy aging and for understanding individual differences in personality and health trajectories. This chapter introduces a naturalistic observation method for assessing social and cognitive activities i...

Poster available from here: https://osf.io/h8ypt/

We provide a basic, step‐by‐step introduction to the core concepts and mathematical fundamentals of dynamic systems modelling through applying the Change as Outcome model, a simple dynamical systems model, to personality state data. This model characterizes changes in personality states with respect to equilibrium points, estimating attractors and...

Since its introduction in 2001, the Electronically Activated Recorder (EAR) method has become an established and broadly used tool for the naturalistic observation of daily social behavior in clinical, health, personality, and social science research. Previous treatments of the method have focused primarily on its measurement approach (relative to...

Research has shown that language can be gender-biased; however, little research has investigated the prevalence of this bias in everyday speech. Using recordings sampled from undergraduates’ daily conversations, we investigated two forms of gender bias: paternalism through use of the infantilizing label girl to refer to women and androcentrism thro...

The present study examined the interpersonal focus within autobiographical memories (AMs) of older and younger adults from the perspective of socioemotional selectivity theory (SST). Specifically, we measured interpersonal focus directly through rater codings (relational vs. individual focus) and social word use, and indirectly through personal pro...

This study examined the association between naturalistically-observed in-person contact with one’s ex-partner and separation-related psychological distress (SRPD). 122 recently separated adults were assessed using the Electronically Activated Recorder (Mehl, 2017) on three occasions across five months. The association between in-person contact with...

We provide a basic, step-by-step introduction to the core concepts and mathematical fundamentals of dynamic systems modeling through applying the Change as Outcome model, a simple dynamical systems model, to personality state data. This model characterizes changes in personality states with respect to equilibrium points, estimating attractors and t...

Narcissism is unrelated to using first-person singular pronouns. Whether narcissism is linked to other language use remains unclear. We aimed to identify linguistic markers of narcissism. We applied the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count to texts ( k = 15; N = 4,941). The strongest positive correlates were using words related to sports, second-perso...

This study offers a new perspective on the role of relative humidity in strategies to improve the health and wellbeing of office workers. A lack of studies of sufficient participant size and diversity relating relative humidity (RH) to measured health outcomes has been a driving factor in relaxing thermal comfort standards for RH and removing a low...

While children’s voice is core to paediatric care, their own assessment of future psychological needs is underexplored. We conducted a prospective observational study among children hospitalised for injury in Melbourne, Australia. Their expectations of psychological recovery at baseline (in hospital) were significant and substantial predictors of t...