William Tov is an Associate Professor of Psychology at the SMU School of Social Sciences. We managed to get a chance to ask Will a few questions about his research background and teaching interests. Read on to learn more about one of our senior faculty members!
1. Could you tell us more about your academic background?
I was always interested in the causes and underlying meaning of our emotions, so it was quite natural for me to major in psychology as an undergraduate. However, once in university, my interest expanded from the personal experience of emotion to the larger cultural and political systems that shape human psychology. So I ended up double majoring in psychology and anthropology. I really appreciated the broader perspective on human behavior that this afforded me.
2. What courses are you currently teaching? What can new SOSS students expect in your classes?
I teach Psychology Research Methods II (PSYC208) and Psychometrics and Psychological Testing (PSYC201). These are project intensive courses and require a lot of work (not just for the students but for myself as well). But the project work is essential because the best way to learn about research methods, statistics, and data analysis is by actually using them to answer a question that you have. In these classes, students have no choice but to apply what they learn—and that helps them appreciate all the hard work and decisions that need to be made when you are designing an experiment (PSYC208) or a personality scale (PSYC201).
The material I teach can be intimidating and challenging. Therefore, it’s really important to me to have a supportive, light-hearted classroom atmosphere. Having a good sense of humor is important, it helps to take some of the tension off the difficulty of the material. If we can laugh at ourselves and each other—but still be supportive—then students will be more comfortable asking questions and participating in class.
3. What are your current research interests? How did you end up getting interested in them?
I am interested in well-being, personality traits, and their interplay in daily life. I suppose these research interests developed from my natural interest in emotion. In high school, I really enjoyed listening to my friends talk about their problems and trying to help them figure out their feelings. As I learned more about scientific psychology, I realized that I was more interested in basic theoretical questions about personality and emotion than I was in counseling people.
To me, studying how personality influences our well-being in everyday life is really exciting. It moves the question from “Why are some people happy and other people unhappy?” to more process-oriented questions like “What are happy people doing from day to day that makes them happy?”
4. Are there any particular research areas or projects that you intend to focus on in the next few years?
I am currently exploring the effects of personality on social behavior—again, focusing on the context of everyday life. Social relationships are fundamental to our well-being, and so if some people are happier than others, a good question to ask is how are they managing their relationships? How much time do they spend socializing with others versus being alone? What aspects of well-being do social relationships contribute to? Well-being is more than just feeling happy, it also involves meaning and satisfaction. Does socializing enhance all of these components, or only certain ones?
I have also become in interested in mindfulness-based practices and tracking their effects on everyday well-being. A lot of research suggests that mindfulness practices help to alleviate stress and depression, but how exactly does this play out in the tiny moments of everyday life? What are those mechanisms that lead mindful people to generally feel better and more engaged with the basic fact of daily living?
5. Do you have any advice for junior faculty members and/or current undergraduates who are aspiring researchers?
You have to strike a balance between exploring and committing to a research problem. For undergraduates who are learning what their research interests are, it is good to explore different areas and work with different faculty members to see what kind of research questions are they really passionate about. Passionate doesn’t just mean you find the research question interesting, it means you want to resolve it so badly that you are thinking up ways to answer the question—actual surveys or experiments that could be done to shed light on the problem. So what an aspiring researcher needs to find is not a ‘research interest’ but a ‘research passion’.
Passion is important because eventually, you will hit a road block. Most experiments don’t work the first time. Most survey results don’t turn out the way you expect. Real data are usually very noisy and messy. This is an opportunity for you to expand your thinking and reassess not just your hypothesis, but also how you executed the study and whether there is some other factor that you failed to consider the first time you ran the study. The idea is not to abandon your hypotheses or the data too quickly just because the results didn’t turn out the way you wanted. If you pay close attention to what your data are telling you, you might find other interesting insights or phenomena that you did not anticipate; new hypotheses arise and several follow-up studies start to suggest themselves. This is one way to remain productive as a researcher,
6. Could you share with us one interesting fact about yourself?
In college, I covered all four walls of my bedroom with stick-figure drawings. It literally took me four years to complete. I was staying in an old, wooden Victorian house in Berkeley, California. My landlord said my room was a serious fire hazard, but he let me do it anyway. I really lived life on the edge those days.