If I could choose any person to be my research mentor it would be Dr. Preece. This woman has a 35 page CV online describing her incredible academic career. As early as 1975 she was working on e-learning initiatives in the UK and after completing her PhD studies in 1985 she pursued research focused on ground-breaking topics such as information systems, computer mediated communication, human?computer interaction, and online communities. She eventually moved to the USA in 1996 to lecture in the University of Maryland Baltimore County, in the Information Systems Department. Today she is the Dean of this department, supporting a long list of PhD students. Her work has taken her all around the globe, she has published hundreds of papers and authored numerous HCI books. She has achieved so much, in what had been a traditionally male dominated field. Her career is certainly something to aspire to.

The Only Real Social Media Expert

Dr. Preece’s current research focuses on the design and management of digital social media, and it’s quite possible that Dr. Preece is one of the only people qualified to call themselves an actual “social media expert”. Back in 2000 when social media was just a glint in Biz Stone and Mark Zuckerberg’s eyes Dr. Preece was hard at work bringing together the usability focus of human-computer interaction and the broader human focus of sociability. She introduced the significance of understanding the interrelationships between people’s behaviour online, sociability and usability. She illustrated how people’s interactions create online communities, and that developers can influence their success or failure by how they design software and polices. This was a novel approach that she continues to pursue today.

I would love to bump into Dr. Preece someday, but it’s not because I would love to pick her brain about all of these fascinating topics we share an interest in. Instead I would ask her to tell me her story, because I bet it’s an incredible one.

This post was written for Ada Lovelace Day – an international day of blogging to celebrate the achievements of women in technology and science.

I was ready to be a part of the next big technological breakthrough and I would be on hand to make sure it was as user friendly as possible and universal in its design and truly beneficial in its functionality. The prototypes I had project managed and been a part of during my undergrad course in Psychology Applied to I.T had all been focused on being helpful in their own little way – gadgets, websites or instructional programs that certainly weren’t playthings. With my knowledge of psychology I was prepared to take on the technology world and make it less frustrating and remove the exclusivity barrier around it. I was excited to finally be a part of an iterative design process that would actually reach the end – a product! a website! an application! anything! I wanted to be a part of something good and wholesome. I wanted to be able to stand up and say “I worked on that!” when someone was showing off their amazing new smartphone or trying out a new feature on a social networking site. I wanted to be a part of ubiquitous computing and augmented reality, to be a part of a user experience research team into the latest and greatest of what was yet to come.

I was young and naive.

In the last three years I’ve worked a steady full-time job in the civil service (that I’d give up in a heartbeat for a chance to work or intern in any usability related field) and been awarded a first in my masters in Cyberpsychology. Yet I still feel like I’m just getting older and going nowhere fast.

So for 2010 I’ve set myself a serious ultimatum.

If by August of this year I still have no work experience related to my desired career path I will uproot and move to London for a year to study at City University London. They have an incredible course there called the MSc in Human-Centred Systems which could turn me into a real usability specialist. It’s especially appealing to me because it has a 6 months work experience program, which is seemingly essential for securing an entry level position here in Ireland.

The idea of moving to London is scarier than ever with a recession in full swing. It may never pay off for me, but I’d rather try a little harder instead of failing by waiting around and hoping everything will eventually fall into place for me.

Between now and August I’ll be trying to secure myself that ever elusive Irish based internship or entry level job in usability and interaction design. If you know anyone looking for a helper monkey, please do let me know. I’m passionate and a quick learner, and will accept payment in bananas.

The Effects of Music on Personal Space Preferences: Comparing Introverts and Extraverts

The current study examined the distracting effects of music on introverts and extraverts with regard to their personal space preferences in public spaces. There has been no prior investigation into the possible link between personal space and music. The now pervasive behaviour of listening to music in public is possibly a reaction to the modern hi-density urban situations that people live in nowadays and music could be a way of easing people’s feelings of crowding. Participants in this study performed a simple personal space measure with music and without, and then completed a personality test (NEO PI-R). The research result found there was a significant reduction in personal space boundaries of the particpants when listening to music. This supports Worchel and Teddlie’s theory that distractions reduce personal space. The introvert sample were found to be most affected indicating that introverts find music more distracting, as was found by Furnham and Bradley.

I’m certain that anyone that uses public transport, especially the Luas or Dart, will agree with these results. I for one, feel a lot more uncomfortable without my earphones in. Though, if I myself had been conducting this study, I would have included a third condition – earplugs. I would be curious about the results of this, and whether any significant reduction in personal space boundaries would be at all comparable to the “with music” condition.

The Physiological Correlates of “Flow” States Within an IT Environment

Since the initial conception of the “Flow” construct a vast amount of psychological research has focused on identifying its key subjective components and investigating its supposed association with elevating human performance capacity (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990). However, the most distinguishable characteristic of this research is its complete dependency on qualitative research methods. There has been no research conducted thus far investigating the molecular concomitants of flow states. For this study 8 participants (6 males, 2 females) were requested to play a videogame (Flow TM) which was specifically designed to induce flow states (Chen, 2006). Heart rate and electro-dermal activity (EDA) were recorded during game play. An adapted FSS-2 (Flow State Scale Revised) questionnaire was then administered to measure flow levels experienced during gameplay. It is anticipated that the molecular activity associated with increased Flow levels will resemble that of deep meditation (i.e, decreases in both heart rate and skin conductance) due to their similarly described subjective state (Marr, 2001). Analysis of results is pending. Results will be discussed with reference to the methodological challenges facing future flow research and possible benefits derived from such research.

Consider the feelings you get when you’re “in the zone” and completely immersed in your computer, even forgetting to eat and being completely unaware of the passage of time (I can certainly relate!). The above piece of research hypothesized that this was similar to a meditative state. The actual results of the study did not support this hypothesis (though decreased heart rates were found) but I believe that this was due to the small scale of the study – due to time constraints, as it was only a undergraduate piece of research. If participants had been tested more than once, I believe that it would have led to a more relaxed state as they would have had no anxiety related to the equipment being used to monitor their physiological responses, and of course, would have had some experience playing the game.

I sincerely hope that someone in either IADT or another college can fund this as a long term postgraduate research study.

Coincidentally the British Psychological Society held their annual conference in Dublin this week and Jazz Biscuit has pointed out all the “tabloid fodder” studies that were discussed.

The congress is a wonderful opportunity to gather information about the current direction of Irish psychological research and based on the information from the timetable for presentations it appears that the majority of the research to be presented is coming from the traditional mainstream topics of scientific psychology. From almost 200 presentations taking place only about 10 of these are related to I.T in some way, which personally is a big disappointment, especially considering the ubiquity of communications technologies in Ireland and the number of I.T companies based here.

Applying psychological studies to technology has always been a niche in this country, which is surprising because it has so many positive and negative impacts upon Irish working life, home life, education etc. It is something that I feel passionately about, especially the importance of applying scientific methods to research in I.T – rather than the current climate of unreliable surveys and the media shaping public knowledge and ideas about how we use and interact with one another through technology.

I did however note an increase in the areas of research related to gay men and lesbians (though it is still a tiny percentage of the 200 presentations). There are of course many other areas of research that I have an interest in and below is a list of the selected presentations which I will aiming to attend.

9am Eoin Golden (NUIG) Undergraduate: Same-Sex Affection in Public: A Qualitative Study.

9.15 Sarah Kilroy (TCD) Undergraduate: Personality, rape myth beliefs and prejudiced instructions: Effects on decisions of guilt in a case of date rape.

9.30 Maccon-Fionn Macnamara (NUIG) Undergraduate: The role of attentional bias in emotional vulnerability.

9.45 Caroline Bergin-McLoughlin (NUIM) Undergraduate: Investigating the Effects of Brain Training on Spatial Memory.

10.00 Niamh Hanrahan (IADT) Undergraduate: The Effect of Humour in Advertising Stimuli on Attitude towards the Ad (Aad) and Purchase Intention (PI).

10.15 Miriam O’Gorman (MIC) Undergraduate: Background Music: a help or a hindrance?

11.00 Deirdre Delaney (UCD) Undergraduate: An assessment of quality of life in adults over 65 Years in Ireland and its relationship to anxiety and depression.

11.15 Mary Christina Joyce (UCC) Undergraduate: Gender Differences and Course Differences in Internet Attitudes amongst an Irish University Sample.

11.30 Sandra von Bergen (IADT) Undergraduate: Comparing the effectiveness of e-learning to the presentation method of teaching in a college setting.

11.45 Michael Malone (IADT) Undergraduate: The physiological correlates of ‘Flow’ states within an I.T. environment.

12.00 Anne O’ Donoghue (UCD) Undergraduate: Language and Cognition: A Study of Grammatical Gender Effects.

12.15 Claire O Driscoll (NUIG) Postgraduate: Factors influencing psychological well being and treatment outcome of couples planning or receiving in-vitro fertilisation (IVF): A self regulatory model perspective.

14.00 Ellen Brady (UCD) Undergraduate: Social Support on the Internet: A Qualitative Analysis of an Irish Parenting Website.

14.15 Geraldine Campion (MIC) Undergraduate: The potential of the dynamic medium of video instruction using the cognitive architecture of the Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning.

14.30 Colin Gallagher (IADT) Undergraduate: CHI 2008 The iPod Generation, Living in Musical Isolation?

14.30 Eoin Pluinceid (TCD) (Undergraduate): Client Satisfaction and Perception of Alliance in Online Asynchronous Counseling in a University Setting: An Exploratory Study.

14.45 Anna Burke (NUIM) Undergraduate: “Body Image, Psychosocial Well-being and Risky Sexual Behaviour: An Investigation Among Gay Men”.

15.00 Sarah Halpin (AMCD) Undergraduate: The Effects of Verbalisation on Object Recognition.

15.15 Ms Katrice Sheridan & Dr Tim Trimble (TCD) Postgraduate: Services and Supports used by Students to obtain Information about a Further Education College.

16.00 Clair O’Connor (UCC) Undergaduate: “That’s going on Bebo”: An examiniation of the relationship between Bebo use and self-reported global self esteem in Cork University students.

16.15 Áine O’ Callaghan (NUIG) Undergraduate: The Associations among Old-fashioned and Modern Prejudice and the Individual Difference Variables of Extrinsic/Intrinsic Motivation, Social Dominance Orientation, Right-wing Authoritarianism, and the Protestant Work Ethic.

16.45 Alan Forrey (MIC) Undergraduate: Sex differences in attitudes to gay men and lesbians: an Irish perspective.

17.00 Lisa Gorry, Tim Mc Nichols, Gráinne Kirwan (IADT) Undergraduate: Employers’ Implicit Theories of Intelligence
in the Recruitment of Individuals with Asperger’s Syndrome.