I was so happy and overwhelmed by prof. Antonella Delle Fave's invitation to join the editorial team of one of my favorite journals -  Journal of Happiness Studies. This invitation came out of a sudden during my visit to San Francisco. And now, when I think about this, this was indeed one of my favorite moments in San Francisco! Ten years ago, as a post-doc, I hoped to publish in JOHS someday. And here I am taking the responsibility of helping the journal continue its mission to publish top-notch methodology papers on the human pursuit of happiness. I'll do my best!

Below is a list of articles I published in JOHS as the first author or senior author over the years. The 2016 paper on happiness and looks was particularly well-received and generated considerable internet buzz. Due to their psychophysiological measures, I love the 2021 capitalization paper that showed how easy it is to change the responding style in partners. I also like my PhD student's (Jolanta Enko) 2020 paper where we asked participants to express gratitude to their friends by sending short text messages from the lab. Seeing how the body responds to social stimuli dramatically extends our understanding of psychological interventions' effects.

Kaczmarek, L.D., Kashdan, T.B., Behnke, M.,  Matuła, E., Dziekan, M., Enko, J., Kosakowski, M., Guzik, P., (2021). Positive emotions boost enthusiastic responsiveness to capitalization attempts. Dissecting self-report, physiology, and behavior. Journal of Happiness Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10902-021-00389-y  

Enko, J., Behnke, M., Dziekan, M., Kosakowski, M., Kaczmarek, L. D. (2020). Gratitude texting touches the heart: challenge/threat cardiovascular responses to gratitude expression predict self-initiation of gratitude interventions in daily life. Journal of Happiness Studies.

Kaczmarek, L. D., Enko, J., Awdziejczyk, M., Hoffmann, N., Białobrzeska, N., Mielniczuk, P., Dombrowski, S. (2016). Would you be happier if you looked better? A focusing illusion. Journal of Happiness Studies, 17, 357-365.

Kaczmarek, L. D., Bujacz, A, Eid, M.. (2014). Comparative latent state-trait analysis of satisfaction with life measures: The Steen Happiness Index and the Satisfaction with Life Scale. Journal of Happiness Studies.

In collaboration with James Gross's psychophysiology lab, my lab has just published a shocker in the field o psychophysiology (Autonomic Nervous System Acitivity During Positive Emotions: A Meta-Analytic Review).

There has been a long debate about what specific physiological changes occur to the body during various positive emotions. And there are so many positive emotions in our life: awe, contentment, craving, excitement, gratitude, kama muta, pride, or sexual desire. We scrutinized the available literature and found nothing exciting. Nothing congruent. A myriad of different responses mostly weak difficult to synthesize conclusively. Many of them insignificant. The only, albeit weak promiss for stenic action-related emotions such as enthusiasm. This spine-chiller will surely be a call to change what we think about the physiology of positive emotions.

Moreover, we present that many studies focused on some positive emotions (mostly amusement) and some physiological responses (mainly heart rate and blood pressure)—few covered other areas of human experience. So let's give up watching funny cats and get down in our labs to a more profound positive experience! I firmly believe that despite these null results, there are positive things to be discovered in the field of positive emotions' physiology.

As I am somewhat sentimental, this text is also important because it is a very distant result and a particular milestone - of what we started doing here in 2003 with Prof. Helena Sęk, when we got interested in the physiology of positive emotions inspired by Barbara Fredrickson's work. This subject has become the main focus of my lab over the last dozen years, and hopefully, it will be so over the following decades.

Grab the paper as it is open-access!

In 2005, at the encouragement of Prof. Jerzy Brzezinski, as a first-year doctoral student under the supervision of Prof. Helena Sęk, I applied for a research grant for my Ph.D. thesis. It was to be an attempt to reactivate laboratory experiments in our department. This type of research had not been conducted at our department since the 1960s. With the funds, I bought a simple psychophysiological apparatus and carried out three experiments on the effect of positive emotions on the stress response. These were difficult beginnings full of mistakes, sweat, and tears. Nevertheless, the youthful sense of accomplishment was priceless, resulting from the impression that "this is really happening!" In our region, psychophysiological research was being produced - as if from one of the international journals that we all read and cited.

After completing my Ph.D., I submitted another grant proposal to continue research on the psychophysiology of positive emotions and purchased better equipment. This was followed by a third application for research going one step further - positive emotions among people in love supporting each other in a task situation. More and more laboratory research began to emerge around us with the appearance of dr David Wiener and Prof. Grzegorz Króliczak at our department. I conducted my research thanks to the kindness of Prof. Grzegorz Króliczak, who made his laboratory space available to me and supported me emotionally as well as technically. To my great joy, Prof. Jerzy Brzezinski (then head of the Institute of Psychology) assigned our "flying laboratory" its own space and allocated considerable funds to adapt it for research purposes.

In 2013, we received another grant from the National Science Center. The best available equipment for psychophysiological research was purchased. Mainly from the companies ADInstruments and Finapres. The Health Psychophysiology Lab (as we called ourselves) began to attract graduate students and postdocs who helped with the research by learning how to conduct their own. With this grant, I established a partnership with the Medical University and cardiologist Prof. Przemyslaw Guzik, who brought to our research not only excellent subject matter expertise but also an attitude of courage and a desire to push the boundaries.

In 2015 we managed to win another grant from the National Science Center. Another highly rated application allowed us to expand our laboratory with the second set of apparatus. Thus, we were able to start research in so-called social psychophysiology at the highest possible level. Plus, new methods of behavior analysis (head and leg movements) and some other data analyses not used anywhere else, such as heart rate asymmetry.

Papers from our research began to appear in top-tier journals such as Psychophysiology, Emotion, Emotion Review, and Scientific Data. The symbolic culmination of the hard road was establishing a collaboration with the Stanford University Psychophysiology Laboratory - project work and academic exchange.

Our team contributed its brick to the psychophysiology of positive emotions. We have researched to understand the physiology and beneficial function of positive emotions, including the functioning of romantic couples in task situations or esports players. I hope that we have become a team that is beginning to be recognized internationally as an ambitious and creative group in psychophysiology and the psychology of emotions.

A couple of weeks ago we published a paper about the influence of challenge and threat appraisal on performance of gamers (Counter-Strike: Global Offensive). One important thing that we found was that the best players are more self-confident and achieve higher scores because they are able to achieve high physiological arousal compared to weaker players.

We feel so fortunate to receive enormous positive feedback from the gaming community, media, and other researchers. We seriously think that there is a need for League of Esports & Gaming Scientists (LEGS) that would unite the efforts of scholars who believe that a wide range of research on gaming is needed that goes beyond the typical problems of addiction and aggression related to gaming. We would be very happy to get in touch with everyone who has a similarly open-minded approach towards esports and gaming. We believe that such an initiative has LEGS ;)

Please find below a short summary from Polish Press Agency that covers our research.

"A lot of negative stereotypes have grown up about e-sports and gamers, which obscure positive aspects of gaming such as teamwork. Research on e-sports has been conducted by scientists from the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, who will study the influence of emotions on gamers and the effectiveness of their performance.

Research on esports with the participation of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and football video game FIFA players, in the Health Psychophysiology Laboratory has been conducted by Maciej Behnke, a graduate of the Academy of Physical Education, and his PhD supervisor interested in the psychophysiology of emotions, Prof. Lukasz Kaczmarek, privately - a fan of video games. The research is financed from the funds of the Department of Psychology and Cognitive Science of Adam Mickiewicz University and a grant from the National Science Centre.

For research on esports, scientists use a complex methodology of psychophysiological laboratory experiments. Apart from the game results (e.g., number of goals scored), physiological signals (e.g., heart rate or blood flow), facial expression or motor activity of the body are recorded.

Behnke and Kaczmarek believe that universities should play a much greater role in the developing world of esports. As they emphasize, stereotypical thinking about gamers dominates. These stereotypes concern addiction and aggression that are related to gaming. Such stereotypes obscure obvious positive effects of playing games, such as building new social relations, learning teamwork, setting long-term goals, or simply enjoyable and relaxing leisure time.

As psychologists argue, video games are becoming more and more popular as a form of entertainment and cultural phenomenon, and scientists must study their possible negative and positive consequences. "The gaming situation creates excellent, controllable conditions for testing many general psychological problems. Research on gamers allows us to show general mechanisms that influence human behavior, such as the influence of emotions on the effectiveness of action. Scientific research should inform how to make the best use of games in the future, e.g. for shaping effective methods of regulating emotions – suggest researchers from Poznań."
 
(PAP - Science in Poland), translated automatically with DeepL

You can record a macro in LabChart for repeated parts of the data analysis. It is a great way to reduce your time for analyses. In fact, it is the only way to process physiological data without losing your mind if you have more than, say, 10 cases to analyze.

However... If you want to push the limit even further, you can use a simple subroutine that I wrote. Just copy the Sub DoBlock into your macro, and then used this command:

DoBlock "a", 20, "Forwards", 10

For the first parameter (here: a), enter the comment that you want to find.
For the second parameter (here: 20), enter how long selection you need.
For the third parameter, enter forwards (or just f), if you want the selection to be marked forward relative to the comment.
For the fourth parameter, enter how long chunks you want to transfer to data pad.

In the above example, LabChart will search for the comment "a," select 20 seconds after this comment, and transfer two blocks 10-sec long into Data Pada.

I found using such subroutine extremely useful to keep the macro clean when you need to process several parts of the signal.


Copy this to your macro:

Sub DoBlock(name, seconds, selectionDirection, chunks)

    'go to the beginning
    ' Begin Find
    ChannelIndex = 3
    SetAction = kSetPeriod
    SelectMode = kSelectAfter
    SelectTime = 0
    DataDisplayMode = kViewDataVisible
    SelectAll = True
    Direction = kSearchForward
    FindType = "Start of file"
    FindData = ""
    Call Doc.Find (ChannelIndex, SetAction, SelectMode, SelectTime, DataDisplayMode, SelectAll, Direction, FindType, FindData)
    ' End Find

    If selectionDirection = "forward"_
    OR selectionDirection = "forwards"_
    OR selectionDirection = "Forward"_
    OR selectionDirection = "Forwards"_
    OR selectionDirection = "f"_
    OR selectionDirection = "F" Then
        SelectMode = 0
    ElseIf selectionDirection = "backward"_
    OR selectionDirection = "backwards"_
    OR selectionDirection = "back"_
    OR selectionDirection = "Back"_
    OR selectionDirection = "Backward"_
    OR selectionDirection = "Backwards"_
    OR selectionDirection = "b"_
    OR selectionDirection = "B" Then
        SelectMode = 2
    ElseIf selectionDirection = "around"_
    OR selectionDirection = "Around"_
    OR selectionDirection = "a"_
    OR selectionDirection = "A" Then
        SelectMode = 1
    End if
    
    'select
    ' Begin Find
    ChannelIndex = 3
    SetAction = kSetPeriod
    'SelectMode = selectionDirection '
    SelectTime = seconds
    DataDisplayMode = kViewDataVisible
    SelectAll = True
    Direction = kSearchForward
    FindType = "Search for comment"
    FindData = "JustThisChannel=0;WhatToLookFor="+name+";"
    Call Doc.Find (ChannelIndex, SetAction, SelectMode, SelectTime, DataDisplayMode, SelectAll, Direction, FindType, FindData)
    ' End Find

    'add to datapad
    ' Begin MultipleAddToDataPad_Time
    TimeSecs = chunks
    EveryChecked = True
    EverySecs = chunks
    IntegralSelection = True
    SelectScope = kWithinSelection
    Call Doc.MultipleAddToDataPad_Time (TimeSecs, EveryChecked, EverySecs, IntegralSelection, SelectScope)
    ' End MultipleAddToDataPad_Time
End Sub


DISCLAIMER: Before you start processing your data with this macro, please make sure that it is doing what it is supposed to do with your data. You can compare the results with manual processing of a couple of files.

   I was very happy to attend the Spring School of Evolutionary Psychology, It was an educational event for young scholars where I was invited to teach psychophysiological and observational methods. It was organized on May 4-6, 2018 in Poland by the Polish Society for Human and Evolution Studies and the Institue of Psychology at the University of Wroclaw. Piotr Sorokowski and Agnieszka Sorokowska were the primary facilitators.
   I presented a practical introduction to well-established and some new methods for the measurement of emotions via peripheral and behavioral responses. My impression was that the audience was the most responsive to the facial expression analysis via computer software (namely, Xpress Engine that we have used in our laboratory successfully). Many people were interested in facial expression analysis. I was very happy to hear it because I have a very strong impression that facial expression analysis has been a greatly undervalued and overlooked method.
  I much enjoyed this meeting despite the fact that I do not consider myself an evolutionary psychologist. In fact, I do not consider myself any type of a psychologist. I find myself just a psychologist - a scientist that is eager to integrate various subdisciplines in psychology that are often studied separately. I think that it is important to start integrating after decades of differentiation among psychologists. However, what is always important to me is using objective methods to study subjective phenomena. This is very much in line with W. Wundt's view; an approach that resulted in the emerge of psychology as a discipline aspiring to be a part of the natural science rather than the product of solely philosophical reasoning.