As humans, our nature compels us to modify our behavior to tackle incipient challenges. But we differ in how those modifications emerge. For example, children exhibit a wide array of behaviors following a standard inoculation; indicating that each child returns to a calm state through…
When testing children in the laboratory, we often face the challenge of designing tasks that can both be completed quickly and produce rich data. Here we illustrate the workings of a novel task developed with the Child Brain Development Lab that made use of an…
How might individuals benefit from diversity in their experiences? Functionalist theories of emotion suggest that the dynamics of daily life can activate a diversity of emotions because each emotion (e.g., excitement, fear, anger) serves specific adaptive purposes by prioritizing, organizing, and regulating behavior in ways…
During our interdisciplinary travels we have noted that biologists and ecologists often use methodological approaches that are, even with relatively small amounts of empirical data, informative about the latent processes underlying observed phenomena (i.e., the stuff under the blanket). Systems biology, for instance, makes use…
We were invited to write a chapter on ‘Intraindividual Variability Over the Life Span”. The editors provided us an opportunity for new “outside the box” explorations. So we started pulling together some of the things we have been playing with in the last months. The…
iSAHIB Steps used data from the iSAHIB project to explore both between-person differences and multiple time-scales. From the visualizations and sonifications of them, we learned a lot about meaning, both in terms of person-level characteristics that are stable over a fast time-scale and change over…
In the study of human development it is well accepted that multiple observations are needed to obtain a robust characterization of individuals’ behaviorial tendencies across time and context. The time-scale and frequency of repeated measurement are selected so as to map onto specific change processes….
In Playing the Archive we sonified data that was collected immediately after a child received an inoculation (stuck with a needle). The interest was to convert the mother-infant (dyad) exchange into a musical form. Check out the performance. We continue to work on ways to…
According to a paper written by Ram, Coccia, Conroy, Lorek, Orland, Pincus, Sliwinski and Gerstorf entitled ‘Behavioral Landscapes and Change in Behavioral Landscapes: A Multiple Time-Scale Density Distribution Approach’ it states that the ‘notions of personality have progressed beyond the idea that people are well…
Cortisol Data is a study by Nilam Ram on how people regulate their stress levels after going through a stressful situation in life. This study was done with 34 people by measuring their cortisol level when under stress and how quickly they regulate it back…