Social Psychology Network

Maintained by Scott Plous, Wesleyan University

Matthias Mehl

Matthias Mehl

I am a social and personality psychologist with three broad areas of interest. First, I am interested in naturalistic person-environment interactions. What do people do over the course of a day? To what extent can people’s personalities, gender, and cultural backgrounds account for the different lives they live? I address these questions by analyzing snippets of ambient sounds sampled from people’s momentary environments. Second, I am interested in stress, emotion regulation and coping. My research looks at how psychological responses to upheaval unfold over time, and how social interactions facilitate coping. Finally, I am interested in developing alternative assessment methods that can complement psychology’s long-standing reliance on self-reports. My work in this area has focused on the unobtrusive observation of daily life, quantitative text analysis, and physiological measurement.

Primary Interests:

  • Communication, Language
  • Culture and Ethnicity
  • Health Psychology
  • Life Satisfaction, Well-Being
  • Person Perception
  • Personality, Individual Differences
  • Research Methods, Assessment

Note from the Network: The holder of this profile has certified having all necessary rights, licenses, and authorization to post the files listed below. Visitors are welcome to copy or use any files for noncommercial or journalistic purposes provided they credit the profile holder and cite this page as the source.

Image Gallery

Books:

Journal Articles:

  • Cohn, M. A., Mehl, M. R., & Pennebaker, J. W. (2004). Linguistic indicators of psychological change after September 11, 2001. Psychological Science, 15, 687-693.
  • Holleran, S. E., Whitehead, J., Schmader, T., & Mehl, M. R. (2011). Talking shop and shooting the breeze: A study of workplace conversations and job disengagement among STEM faculty. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 2, 65-71.
  • Holtzman, N. S., Vazire, S., & Mehl, M. R. (2010). Sounds like a narcissist: Behavioral manifestations of narcissism in everyday life. Journal of Research in Personality, 44, 478-484.
  • Lyons, E. J., Mehl, M. R., & Pennebaker, J. W. (2006). Pro-anorexics and recovering anorexics differ in their linguistic Internet self-presentation. Journal of Psychosomatic Research, 60, 253-256.
  • Mason, A. E., Sbarra, D. A., & Mehl, M. R. (2010). Thin-slicing divorce: Thirty seconds of information predict changes in psychological adjustment over ninety days. Psychological Science, 21, 1420-1422.
  • Mehl, M. R. (2007). Eavesdropping on health: A naturalistic observation approach for social-health research. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 1, 359-380.
  • Mehl, M. R. (2006). The lay assessment of subclinical depression in daily life. Psychological Assessment, 18, 340-345.
  • Mehl, M. R., Gosling, S. D., & Pennebaker, J. W. (2006). Personality in its natural habitat: Manifestations and implicit folk theories of personality in daily life. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 90, 862-877.
  • Mehl, M. R., & Holleran, S. E. (2007). An empirical analysis of the obtrusiveness of and participants' compliance with the Electronically Activated Recorder (EAR). European Journal of Psychological Assessment, 23, 248-257.
  • Mehl, M. R., & Pennebaker, J. W. (2003). The social dynamics of a cultural upheaval: Social interactions surrounding September 11, 2001. Psychological Science, 14, 579-585.
  • Mehl, M. R., & Pennebaker, J. W. (2003). The sounds of social life: A psychometric analysis of students’ daily social environments and natural conversations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84, 857-870.
  • Mehl, M. R., Pennebaker, J. W., Crow, M. D., Dabbs, J., & Price, J. H. (2001). The Electronically Activated Recorder (EAR): A device for sampling naturalistic daily activities and conver­sations. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, and Computers, 33, 517-523.
  • Mehl, M. R., Vazire, S., Holleran, S. E., & Clark, C. S. (2010). Eavesdropping on happiness: Well-being is related to having less small talk and more substantive conversations. Psychological Science, 21, 539 - 541.
  • Mehl, M. R., Vazire, S., Ramirez-Esparza, N., Slatcher, R. B., & Pennebaker, J. W. (2007). Are women really more talkative than men? Science, 317, 82.
  • Pennebaker, J. W., Mehl, M. R., & Niederhoffer, K. (2003). Psychological aspects of natural language use: Our words, our selves. Annual Review of Psychology, 54, 547-577.
  • Robbins, M. L., Mehl, M. R., Holleran, S. E., & Kasle, S. (2011). Naturalistically observed sighing and depression in rheumatoid arthritis patients: A preliminary study. Health Psychology, 30, 129-133.
  • Vazire, S., & Mehl, M. R. (2008). Knowing me, knowing you: The relative accuracy and unique predictive validity of self- and other ratings of daily behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 95, 1202-1216.

Other Publications:

  • Mehl, M. R. (2005). Quantitative text analysis. In M. Eid & E. Diener (Eds.), Handbook of multimethod measurement in psychology (pp.141-156). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
  • Mehl, M. R., & Gill, A. J. (2010). Automatic text analysis. In S. D. Gosling & J. A. Johnson (Eds.), Advanced methods for conducting online behavioral research (pp. 109-127). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

Matthias Mehl
Department of Psychology
University of Arizona
Tucson, Arizona 85721
United States of America

  • Phone: (520) 626-2374
  • Fax: (520) 621-9306

Send a message to Matthias Mehl

Note: You will be emailed a copy of your message.

Psychology Headlines

From Around the World

News Feed (35,797 subscribers)