Doctoral Dissertation Research: Structure and Sentiment: A Multivariate Study of the Affective Bases of Social Relationships

在Daniel M.T. Fessler博士的指导下，加州大学洛杉矶分校的博士生Matthew Gervais将研究情感在男性社会关系中的作用。社会关系是人类适应的基石，越来越多的证据表明，情感是社会行为适应性调节的组成部分。然而，情感结构的理论治疗仍然缺乏现实世界的数据，控制行为实验很少应用于小规模社会中建立的二元关系。本研究将包括基于人种学、神经科学和进化考虑的社会影响模型的第一个实证评估。要研究的关系可以在相对有限和小规模的社会背景下最清楚地看到。因此，这项研究将在斐济Yasawa岛的一个渔业园艺社区进行。研究人员将整合来自不同学科的系统方法——包括文化领域分析、内隐态度测量和一系列经济博弈——将关系态度和情感映射到个人特征和资源、关系历史和测量的关系行为上。这种多变量建模方法将揭示这些变量之间的因果关系，重点关注社会态度在中介个体和二元变量对关系中行为的影响中的作用。本研究具有广泛的理论意义。它有望阐明社会关系的情感基础和结构，以及当代人类学、心理学、神经科学和经济学争论的核心话题。该研究还将引入一些方法上的创新，以促进情感和面对面社会关系的跨文化比较。除了支持社会科学家的教育外，这项研究还将培训一个代表性不足的群体的成员，即太平洋岛民，学习研究方法和数据管理技术。它还将扩大对处于市场一体化初期阶段的区域的规范和社会行为进行长期研究的研究基础设施。

Doctoral student Matthew Gervais (University of California, Los Angeles), under the guidance of Dr. Daniel M.T. Fessler, will investigate the functions of affect within male social relationships. Social relationships are the cornerstone of human adaptation, and converging lines of evidence suggest that affect is integral to the adaptive regulation of social behavior. Yet theoretical treatments of the structure of affect remain impoverished of real world data, and controlled behavioral experiments have rarely been applied to established dyadic relationships in a small-scale society. This study will comprise the first empirical evaluation of a model of social affect grounded in ethnographic, neuroscientific, and evolutionary considerations.The relationships to be studied can be viewed most clearly in a relatively circumscribed and small-scale social context. Accordingly, the research will be carried out in a fishing-horticultural community on Yasawa Island, Fiji. The researcher will integrate systematic methods from diverse disciplines -- including cultural domain analysis, an implicit attitude measure, and a series of economic games -- to map relational attitudes and emotions onto individual traits and resources, relationship histories, and measured relationship behavior. This multivariate modeling approach will shed light on the causal links among these variables, with a focus on the role of social attitudes in mediating the effects of individual and dyadic variables on behavior within relationships.This research has broad theoretical significance. It promises to illuminate the affective bases and structure of social relationships, topics central to contemporary debates in anthropology, psychology, neuroscience, and economics. The research also will introduce several methodological innovations that will facilitate the cross-cultural comparison of affect and face-to-face social relationships. In addition to supporting the education of a social scientist, this research will train a member of an underrepresented group, a Pacific Islander, in research methods and data management techniques. It will also extend the research infrastructure of a long-term study of norms and social behavior in a region experiencing the initial stages of market integration.