For the John Templeton Foundation, I wrote about how life’s major disruptions forge our psychological landscapes.
How are people transformed by life’s major events? Marriage and divorce, childbirth and death, illness and natural disaster — all can upend people’s lives, altering their outlook and perhaps even their personalities. But not everyone responds to the same upheavals in the same ways. Following a health scare, one person might slide into depression while another might find new sources of joy and gratitude. So how do these major events impact our social worlds and the ways that we cope with change? And what are the psychological characteristics that shape the different ways in which people respond to such events?
Computer scientist Rada Mihalcea from the University of Michigan and social psychologist James Pennebaker from the University of Texas at Austin have teamed up to answer these questions using the latest in big data methods. Supported by a $1.7 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation, the project team will apply computational linguistics and machine learning tools to study social media posts and online writing samples from hundreds of thousands of people to understand changes associated with major events. The project team will make use of publicly available sources as well as private communications that people have agreed to share for research purposes.