GRADUATE APPLICANTS: Dr. Shiota is accepting graduate student applications for Fall 2012. Potential graduate students interested primarily in the SPLAT Lab should apply to the ASU Social Psychology program; students wishing to matriculate into the Clinical Psychology program are welcome in the lab, but should also seek a primary advisor within the Clinical area faculty.

UNDERGRADUATE RAs: We review applications from new volunteer research assistants each semester.  Minimum requirements for joining the SPLAT lab team are:

• Minimum commitment of one academic year/two semesters
• For the first year, 399/499 enrollment at 10 hours/week
• Attendance of weekly lab meetings, Wednesdays 4:30-6:00pm

Undergraduate RAs in the SPLAT lab contribute to every step of the scientific process, from discussion of emotion theory to hypothesis generation, study design, data collection and processing, and interpretation of study findings. Research assistants have a wide range of duties, all of which provide training in the varied methods used in emotion research. Dr. Shiota and the graduate students in the lab rotate all RAs through these duties in order to ensure that each student gets broad exposure to the research process, and to tailor the RA experience to each student’s particular interests. Duties include:

• Attending weekly lab meetings that include discussion of emotion theory, methodological training, study design and pilot testing, and practice for presentations such as thesis defenses, conference talks, and job talks.  
• Data collection: “hookup” of participants to physiological recording sensors; interacting with participants during the session; monitoring audio/visual recordings during the session; and managing computer-based protocols.
• Processing data from emotion tasks, including "cleaning" and "reducing" physiological data and coding facial expressions of emotion (senior RAs have the opportunity to learn Ekman and Friesen's Facial Action Coding or "FACS" system, under Dr. Shiota's supervision)       
• Coding participants’ written or spoken answers to free-response questions, creativity tests, or other measures that require consistent application of a coding system
  
• Entering questionnaire data, by hand or using an optical scanner
• Transcribing interviews and participant speech during experimental sessions

TO APPLY FOR A RESEARCH ASSISTANT POSITION please email Beth Osborne at Elizabeth.A.Osborne@asu.edu