Since February 2021, the research project “Personality Processes and Oral Communication” was carried out at the University of Arizona (USA). The project was supported by the Fulbright-Masaryk Scholarship of the J. W. Fulbright Commission (2020-28-11). The project is run by Dalibor Kučera (Department of Psychology, USB) in cooperation with Matthias Mehl (Psychology Department, Naturalistic Observation of Social Interaction Laboratory, UA).
Detailed information:
The project is based on a research collaboration in the area of study of oral verbal communication and of analysis of the relationship between communication and personality processes. Within the fame of this collaboration, relevant features of English and Czech oral communication and it psychosocial aspects will be compared and analysed.
For this purpose, two research datasets will be used: (1) Data from American population gained in the project EAR (M. R. Mehl, University of Arizona) and (2) data from Czech population gained in the project CPACT (D. Kucera, University of South Bohemia). In both of these researches, recordings of interviews and audio recordings of spontaneous communication (real-life observational data) were collected. Their content will be subject to extensive computational analysis. At the same time, psychological data will be processed in the form of diagnostic test outputs, which will enable to look for relationships between communication parameters and personality characteristics of both populations. The results of the analyses and comparisons will be interpreted within the frame of current psychological-linguistic discourse and prepared for publication in scientific journals.
The merit of the project is not only in sharing and enriching knowledge and practices between the American and Czech partners, in linking two large national studies whose principles will be further developed, but also in analysing unique data from naturalistic electronically activated recordings (EAR) and in trans-linguistic perspective of the research. The outcomes be of use not only in psychology and linguistics, but also in sociology, education or medicine as well as other disciplines where interpretations of human communication with respect to the characteristics of the communicating person are of key importance.
More information on Fulbright grants: ww.fulbright.cz