An Interview
We talked with Sjoerd van Halem, the winner of the Wiley 2020 Award for Outstanding Contribution to the European Journal of Personality based on Masters or Doctoral research. Last year, Sjoerd published his paper in EJP as a graduate student first author, which is titled: “Moments that Matter? On the Complexities using Triggers Based on Skin Conductance to Sample Arousing Events within an Experience Sampling Framework”. Sjoerd is currently a PhD candidate at Tilburg University.
Read on to learn more about Sjoerd’s paper and his other work!
Q: Can you tell us a bit about yourself and your research interests?
At the moment I am in the last year of my PhD at Tilburg University at the department of Developmental Psychology. For my PhD, I study the link between people’s daily experiences and their overall levels of wellbeing. How do people balance their activities in daily life and how do they structure their daily activities in such a way to achieve optimal well-being? I believe examining people’s daily experiences could perhaps help us to better understand why certain people are doing better than others. That’s a broad explanation of my research interests.
Besides working and studying in Tilburg, I also live in Tilburg. Before I moved here, I was a little bit skeptical, as Tilburg is not known as the prettiest city in the Netherlands, however I was pleasantly surprised when I came here! There are lots of things to do around here, everything is walking distance, but more importantly the people here are really friendly and laid-back.
Q: Your study “Moments That Matter? On the Complexity of Using Triggers Based on Skin Conductance to Sample Arousing Events Within an Experience Sampling Framework” was selected as the best student paper of 2020! What does this award mean to you?
It means a lot actually! I wasn’t really aware that I was being considered. I knew this prize existed; however, I didn’t make the link when I submitted the paper. When I first received the news, I thought it was spam! I am honoured, it’s great! I can’t remember the last time I won a real prize haha.
Q: Can you tell us about the study and the motivation behind it?
Sure! We wanted to sample moments in a person’s daily life that “mattered” – moments that are relatively more arousing and exciting than just any random moment in a person’s daily life. For me personally, the general idea emerged while I was conducting an experience sample study on myself. It’s common practice for me to first try things on myself and then see what happens. While I was filling in 6-7 questions per day about my general mood and whereabouts on random time points across the day, I realized that either my life was really boring, or I was always sampling at the wrong time. Or both! Every time something exciting occurred, I wasn’t notified by the application. Every time I was notified, it appeared as if I was simply working for 8 hours straight. I saw something very similar when I was looking at some data my supervisor showed me. Most participants reported that they were not doing anything special in particular. The dataset was overwhelmingly filled with these kinds of empty experiences. As a result, we started to wonder whether we were actually sampling at the right moments.
Our department had skin conductance devices available for use, and because skin conductance has been related to a person’s levels of psychological arousal, we were thinking about whether we could set up a study where we would use an individual’s level of skin conductance to specifically target activities that are more important to people than just the average random activity. If we send a person a survey right after we observe an increase in skin conductance, do we capture moments that are relatively more important? We decided to set up a study and apply for the special issue in EJP.
In the summer of 2018, we had two Masters’ students vising our university – Lara Kroencke and Niclas Kuper from the University of Hamburg, who are also the co-authors of this paper. They were looking to start a project of this kind, and since I was available in the summer, I was happy to supervise them. I thought that they might be great students to supervise, especially since they sacrificed their summer holiday to work on this voluntarily! As it turned out, they were amazing, and it was far more a collaborative effort than me supervising them. We did a lot of pilot testing for the study together. After Lara and Niclas returned to Germany, we started testing between 8 to 12 participants per week. We each gave them a skin conductance device and configured an algorithm for the experience sampling methodology app to sample participants when they had a relative increase in skin conductance level. We wanted to compare if participants would experience relatively more important moments during these increases, compared with just a random sampling scheme. We did that for 82 participants which was a lot of hard work but very fun as well!
Overall, although it was possible to measure a person’s skin conductance in real life for prolonged periods, we found that it is very complex to meaningfully relate this signal to subjective reports of mood and whereabouts, let alone use the signal to specifically sample important moments in a person’s daily life. Our article contains a detailed and transparent report on our attempt to sample these moments and provides guidance for future researchers wishing to implement similar sampling strategies.
Q: In your paper you suggest that future studies might also investigate other psychological correlates of physiological arousal in daily life such as personality. Could you explain to us what such a study would look like and whether you would be interested in conducting it?
For our study, a validation of the skin conductance signal as measured in daily life was crucial. Most previous studies exclusively measured skin-conductance in a controlled and confined experimental setting. Because we measured people in real life for longer periods, it was important to study how the skin conductance signal related to self-reports of participants. In other words, is the physiological skin conductance signal as we measured it indicative of any relevant psychological processes? If it is, we would be able to find relationships with self-reports of arousal, mood, and people’s whereabouts. In this case, I can also imagine that that there will be individual differences in the overall characteristics of the skin-conductance signal. It would be interesting to see if these individuals differences are in any way related to personality traits.
At the moment, I am not really focused on conducting such a study myself. However, I don’t think you would need data that differs significantly from ours: we have data of participants for 5 days and we have personality measures of those participants. You would however need to get a larger sample size. I think such a study would be a very nice way to further validate the findings.
Q: What advice would you give young researchers?
Be assertive, take initiative. I don’t think I have ever been criticized for taking initiative! Doing a PhD can be very lonely and sometimes you have a feeling that everything you do, you have to do by yourself. Taking initiative might feel like quite an effort, but no one else is going to take that initiative for you. Once you have taken the first step of getting something going, then you will find that a lot of people will join your efforts. So many people helped create the current paper, it’s insane!
Another thing, which perhaps doesn’t apply strictly for young researchers but researchers in general: try not to compare yourself too much with other researchers. I think that is something everyone in the academic world is doing too much. Every career or project is unique. It’s hard to compare and there isn’t much use in doing so. You will always have a feeling that someone is ahead of you.
Q: Can you tell us some of the scholars that have inspired you and influenced your work?
I think that’s a very hard question. As a researcher, you are influenced by so many people in so many different ways! I think I have been greatly influenced by my teachers during my Master’s, especially those teaching stats. Where would I be without R and multilevel analyses? More recently, of course my PhD supervisors. Both co-authored this paper, and both work with me on a daily basis. Eeske van Roekel has a lot of expertise on Experience Sampling research, which naturally inspired me to consider this type of research and Jaap Denissen is the reason I always ask myself “Does personality play a role here?”.
Q: What’s next for you?
As I am in the last year of my PhD, my world right now is dedicated to finishing it haha. I still have a lot of work to do, as I’m working on two papers at the moment. What happens after my PhD? I’m not really sure, but I think I am at an exciting crossroad. I might continue doing research, as it is something I enjoy a lot! I love teaching as well, so that is something I definitely want to continue doing. The combination of doing both research and teaching is appealing to me!