What with the interdisciplinary thing, I know some delightful and interesting people in quite disparate fields. Starter for 10 is a semi-regular (fortnightly) series of peer interviews, with questions both serious and trivial for your edification.
This week’s interview is with Dr Disa Sauter, who works three doors down from me at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. Disa and I both did PhDs at UCL in London, but it took us moving to the Netherlands to bump into one another!
1. In the little space for “occupation” on immigration cards at airports, what do you write?
I’m actually a little stumped by this every time – you’d think I’d have decided on a word to summarize what I do by now! So I alternate between researcher, scientist, and psychologist.
2. Give me your conference tea-break pitch: ” … and what do you work on?”
I work on emotions and the ways that we communicate to others how we feel using facial expressions and vocalisations. I’m especially interested in whether emotions and expressions are the same or different depending on people’s cultural backgrounds. [FJ: Disa has done field work with the Himba people in Namibia, and is currently working with a Mayan group in Mexico]
3. What’s your origin story – how did you end up in your field? Was there a defining moment, or person, or something else that steered you?
I was always interested in the human mind, but torn between philosophy of mind and psychology. Having done my final year school project in philosophy, I decided to focus on psychology instead… Doing a PhD on emotions with Sophie Scott at UCL made me want to continue in research for as long as I can.
4. Journalists reckon that scientists “discover” things. Tell me the coolest thing you’ve “discovered” in your career so far.
In a study published earlier this year, me and my colleagues showed that some sounds that we make to express emotions, like growls and sobs, are shared by people with dramatically different cultural backgrounds, suggesting that they are part of the common human heritage. But while quite a few negative emotions were signalled in the same way across the groups, the sounds used to express many positive emotions were different – the exception to this was laughter, which had the same meaning across cultures.
5. I hear you’re Swedish. In the interests of cultural understanding, tell me something about Swedish language or culture that doesn’t really have an English equivalent.
‘Lagom’ is a Swedish word and concept that doesn’t have a good equivalent in other languages. The best translation I think would be ‘just right’, like for example neither too much nor too little – but it can be applied in pretty much any domain, size, temperature, satiation etc. Unlike ‘perfekt’ (perfect), ‘lagom’ is not particularly celebratory, it’s more a matter-of-fact statement, which is what makes it so Swedish. [FJ: this brilliant word has its own wikipedia entry, it’s so useful]
6. For a month, you get to do a job-swap outside of academia. What would you do?
I’d be an apprentice in the kitchen of a fancy vegetarian restaurant. [FJ: Mmmm, good choice with the transferable skills!]
7. Too much time, money and intellect has been wasted researching what?
The neural correlates of poorly understood and badly operationalized psychological phenomena.
8. Recommend for me (a) a good pop-science book (b) a good history/philosophy/politics book and (c) a poem.
a) Bad Science by Ben Goldacre
b) Happiness: Lessons from a New Science by Richard Layard
c) The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost
9. Who’s your favourite fictional scientist?
Dexter Morgan. [FJ: I am hiding the sharp objects in the canteen]
10. What science-y thing did you do yesterday?
I submitted a paper and started revising another.
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Disa’s publications and research interests are listed at her website, including a recent review of positive emotions and how they’re a bit more complex than just “happy”. The media covered her cross-cultural emotion work earlier this year, you can see some of the write-ups here and here.