Call for unpublished data!

Louisa You

Dear colleagues,

Do you research intergroup contact? Does your work also consider participants’ political ideologies?

We are a team from the University of Toronto working on a meta-analyses on the effect of intergroup contact on affective polarization, or dislike toward political others (or partisan animosity, political prejudice etc.). This meta-analysis is part of a larger project led by Zi Ting You, a PhD Student, and Dr. Elizabeth Page-Gould, a Professor, in the Psychology Department at the University of Toronto. We are seeking your help in including your unpublished research.

To submit data: Please complete this Qualtrics survey.

Inclusion criteria:

  1. The groups must be explicitly political in nature (e.g. Democrats/Republicans, conservatives/liberals). That is, the intergroup contact in question must be participants interacting with their political outgroup.
  2. Affective polarization must be the dependent variable (negative attitudes towards political outgroup e.g. prejudice, feelings thermometer, social distance, stereotypes).
  3. Contact must represent face to face interactions with the political outgroup. Direct, manipulated, vicarious, extended, imagined, and indirect contact will all be included but contact in the form of exposure to outgroup ideas (e.g. reading outgroup speeches or social media posts) are outside the scope of our analysis.

What do we need from you?

We will need the raw correlation coefficient (Pearson’s r) between intergroup contact and affective polarization. We will use this measure as an indicator of effect size and compare them between studies. If you calculated effect size a different way (e.g. Cohen’s d), please provide your metric and statistic and we can convert it. If you did not calculate a full effect size but you are willing to provide the raw data and coding guide for us to calculate r ourselves, that would be great as well.

What format do we need the data in?

We prefer CSV files, but we can also handle SPSS or STATA data files. We are primarily R users, but we can use different packages to read your data. If you are concerned that we may not be able to read your data, please let us know through the open question in the Qualtrics form or by emailing louisa.you@mail.utoronto.ca.

How will you get the data to us?

Please fill out our Qualtrics form. There are opportunities in the form to type in statistics or to upload raw data.

Direct link: https://utorontopsych.az1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_3eltdjrAZ3tZNDU

When do we need the data by?

December 1, 2022.

What if your work is already published?

We’ve scoured the literatures for already published work, but there is a chance we missed your paper. Please let us know of your work by emailing louisa.you@mail.utoronto.ca or fill out the Qualtrics form and provide the citation of your published paper.

If your work matches these criteria, please click here to submit your statistic or data.

Thank you so much!

Best wishes,

Zi Ting You and Elizabeth Page-Gould

Canada SROP Presentation Fair!

Louisa You

On July 30, the inaugural Canada Summer Research Opportunity Program (SROP) wrapped with its own presentation fair, where students could present their work from the past 8 weeks. Congratulations to all the student researchers, faculty mentors, and organizers!

The SROP is an important diversity initiative that was brought to Canada this year by Dr. Page-Gould, Dr. Sonia Kang (Associate Professor, University of Toronto) and Dr. Kelci Harris (Assistant Professor, University of Victoria). Its American counterpart is in its 35th year, run by the Big Ten Academic Alliance. This anti-racism initiative seeks to diversity academia by providing access to the graduate school preparation, planning, and admission processes.

The Canadian version developed from the vision of Dr. Harris, who was an Ontario Postdoctoral Fellow in SPRQL from 2017-2019. Kelci made a Welcome Video for all the SROP students that was much loved.

In 2021, the program was open to undergraduate students who identified as Black, Indigenous, or People of Colour (BIPOC). Learn more about all the researchers and their projects here!

Running from June 7 to July 30th, the SROP provided student researchers with GRE preparation, community building opportunities, professional development sessions, and importantly, independent research experience and mentorship from a faculty member. All students were paid a living wage stipend for the duration of the program.

In its first iteration, the Canada SROP was hosted by the tri-campus University of Toronto Psychology Department, Graduate School of Management, and the Rotman Research Institute, all at the University of Toronto. The organizers hope to expand this program across Canadian universities in the coming years!

For more information, check out the Canada SROP website and Twitter page. For interested students, applications for Summer 2022 will open in November 2021 and will be due around February 15, 2022.

Congratulations to Joel Le Forestier!

Louisa You

Joel and his five collaborators (including incoming University of Toronto Scarborough faculty member Andre Wang) won an Community Catalyst Grant from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP)! These awards support psychologists from underrepresented groups to fund events, develop professional skills, and build community!

Joel et al.’s grant, titled “Here and Queer: SPSP Social for LGBTQ+ Students and Early-Career Members”, will fund a series of events for early-career LGBTQ+ social psychologists to build a community.

From Joel himself: “Because LGBTQ+ identities are often invisible and not discussed in professional settings, being queer in academia can feel isolating and disconnected… Our goal is to start building a network of people across institutions to try to make the community more visible and more connected.”

Congratulations on this important work!

Dr. Page-Gould is renewed as Canada Research Chair!

Louisa You

Dr. Page-Gould was awarded the position of Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Social Psychophysiology in 2015 and she was renewed in 2020! The Canada Research Chair program is headed by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC), and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) to support research excellence. Read more here.

Land Acknowledgement

Elizabeth Page-Gould

The Social Psychophysiological Research and Quantitative Methods Laboratory and the University of Toronto operates on the traditional and ancient land of the Huron-Wendat, the Seneca, the Haudenosaunee, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, and the Mississaugas of the Credit River. Today, this meeting place is still the home to many diverse Indigenous people from across Turtle Island. We are grateful to have the opportunity to live and work on this land.

Please see these resources to learn more about the Indigenous history of Tkaronto: https://guides.library.utoronto.ca/Toronto

Dr. Page-Gould and Dr. Thai create ExperienceSampler!

Lab Webmaster

ExperienceSampler is an open-source scaffold for creating experience-sampling smartphone apps. The app scaffold has been designed to address common obstacles in using experience sampling in research, such as cost and customizability. Results from a social psychophysiological study using ExperienceSampler are also presented in Dr. Page-Gould and Dr. Thai’s article.

Thai, S., & Page-Gould, E. (2018). ExperienceSampler: An open-source scaffold for building                        smartphone apps for experience sampling. Psychological Methods, 23, 729-739.