CAREER: A Longitudinal Study of Communication and Biology in Committed Relationships

衡量人类生理和心理健康的一个关键指标是人际关系的成功与否。有效的沟通已被证明是健康关系的关键决定因素，但这在不同的社会文化群体中并不一致。研究人员承认存在一些重大挑战：抽样偏差；在人口同质样本中过度依赖使用标准化措施；以及实验室环境的局限性，在实验室环境中，夫妻在短暂的互动中被研究，作为孤立的二人组。对不同文化和亚文化背景下的人际关系进行人种学调查的人类学家一再表明，没有一种健康的方式可以维持长期的伙伴关系，进一步表明，随着时间的推移，夫妻关系可能会更好地被理解为始终处于复杂和异质的社会、历史和经济进程中，并受到其影响。然而，人种学研究直到最近才开始调查这些条件与即时生物过程之间的联系，尽管目前的工作表明，在孤立的相互作用中出现的协同调节的生理模式不一定可以概括为单一关系或作为一般类别的关系。因此，目前的研究部署了生物语言学人类学的理论和工具，这些理论和工具已经由PI及其同事以及阿拉巴马大学的研究生在试点和大规模研究中发展起来，并将人类生物学与人类学中的民族志方法相结合，以调查文化，生物学和经验在不同夫妇之间的即时互动中共同出现的方式。通过结合多尺度、纵向和以社区为基础的方法，研究结果将有助于对不同地点的日常关系意识形态范围的概括理解。随着时间的推移，该研究将通过关注和确定个体内部和夫妻内部变异的具体来源，进一步充实情感和生理协同调节和反调节科学。这些发现无疑将影响未来大规模生物语言学研究的设计，这些研究将大大扩展实验室研究的有效性，研究伴侣之间的相互作用和生理。作为一个职业发展项目，它进一步为来自代表性不足群体的研究生和本科生提供培训，使他们掌握经验、科学数据收集和分析的方法。研究产生的知识也将整合到生物语言人类学的共享教学法中；正在进行的生物语言学人类学每周研讨会；以及为UA和公众提供适合年龄的教育研讨会，包括K-12教育项目，致力于帮助孩子们学习当地社区的传播科学。在学院早期职业发展（Career）奖的支持下，研究人员将开展一个多阶段的纵向项目，调查美国和东亚100多名长期合作伙伴的日常健康关系意识。采样策略包含几个共同点，以确保可比性和概括性。具体来说，参与者的年龄必须在30到60岁之间，必须居住在中型到大型城市环境中，并且必须至少包括一个在高压力的公民参与领域全职或兼职工作的人。该项目的第一阶段包括以社区为基础的参与性方法，其中包括匿名调查和对符合这些标准且目前处于长期伙伴关系的多达100人的远程访谈。项目的这一部分评估参与者对健康关系和沟通的看法，旨在以参与者的知识和经验为基础，以确保项目的其余部分以利益相关者的利益为基础。该项目的第二阶段进一步包括深入的生物人种学调查，研究伴侣之间的即时互动与时间匹配的生理唤醒之间的关系，该研究对来自多个地区的24对夫妇进行了为期一年的深入研究。这部分研究结合了民族志数据收集；自然发生的互动录像；生理数据的收集；多个访谈;以及参与者驱动的手机人种志。人种学、视频和生理数据将在一个集成的数字平台上进行分析，以产生对具体经验和生理过程如何在多个时间尺度上与交流相遇共同发生的经验理解。结合项目第一阶段收集的数据，它将进一步深入了解参与者之间关于健康关系的共同和不同想法如何调节这种共存。这些发现不仅将丰富人类学、心理学和相关学科中关于交流、情感和健康的现有研究，而且还将有助于人类学理论和方法的转变，通过进一步发展生物语言学人类学，使其成为一种可以应用于研究多种现象的方法，研究人员试图调查文化、交流、随着时间的推移，生理调节在相互作用中共同出现。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

A critical measure of human physical and psychological health is relationship success. Effective communication has been shown to be a critical determinant of healthy relationships, but that does not translate uniformly across different sociocultural groups. Researchers acknowledge a number of significant challenges: sampling bias; an overreliance on the use of standardized measures developed among demographically homogenous samples; and the limitations of laboratory settings where couples are studied in brief interactions, and as isolated dyads. Anthropologists conducting ethnographic investigations of human relationships across diverse cultural and sub-cultural settings have repeatedly demonstrated that there is no single healthy way to engage in long-term partnerships, further showing that couples might better be understood as always embedded in and affected by complex and heterogeneous social, historical, and economic processes over time. Ethnographic research has only recently begun to investigate the linkage between such conditions and moment-to-moment biological processes, however, though current work suggests that physiological patterns of coregulation emerging in isolated interactions cannot necessarily be generalized to either a single relationship or to relationships as a general category. The current research thus deploys the theories and tools of biolinguistic anthropology, which has been developed in both pilot and large-scale studies by the PI and colleagues as well as graduate students at the University of Alabama and integrates human biology with ethnographic approaches in anthropology, in order to investigate the ways in which culture, biology, and experience co-emerge in moment-to-moment interaction among diverse couples over time. By incorporating a multi-scalar, longitudinal, and community-based approach, findings will contribute to a generalizable understanding of the range of everyday relationship ideologies across different sites. The research will further flesh out the science of emotional and physiological co- and counter-regulation by attending to and identifying specific sources of intra-individual and intra-couple variability over time. These findings will undoubtedly impact the future design of large-scale biolinguistic studies that significantly expand on the validity of laboratory studies of interaction and physiology among partners. As a CAREER project, it further provides funding for the training of both graduate and undergraduate students from underrepresented groups in methods of empirical, scientific data collection and analysis. Knowledge generated by the research will also be integrated into shareable pedagogy in biolinguistic anthropology; an ongoing, collaborative UA-wide weekly seminar in biolinguistic anthropology; and age-appropriate educational workshops for both UA and the general public, including K-12 educational programs dedicated to helping children learn about the science of communication in local communities.With the support of a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award, the researcher will conduct a multi-phase, longitudinal project investigating everyday ideologies of healthy relationships of more than 100 individuals in long-term partnerships in both the U.S. and East Asia. The sampling strategy incorporates several common denominators in order to ensure comparability and generalizability. Specifically, participants must be between the ages of 30 and 60, must live in medium to large urban environments, and must include at least one person works full- or part-time in the high-stress field of civic engagement. The first phase of the project consists of a community-based participatory approach that includes both anonymous surveys and remote interviews with up to 100 individuals who meet these criteria and are currently in a long-term partnership. This portion of the project assesses participants’ ideas about healthy relationships and communication as well as it aims to build upon the knowledge and experience of participants in order to ensure that the remainder of the project is based in stakeholder interests. The second phase of the project further includes an in-depth bio-ethnographic investigation of the ways in moment-to-moment interaction between partners is associated with time-matched physiological arousal in a year-long intensive study of 24 couples across multiple locales. This portion of the research combines ethnographic data collection; video-recording of naturally occurring interaction; collection of physiological data; multiple interviews; and participant-driven mobile ethnography over the course of a year. Ethnographic, video, and physiological data will be analyzed in an integrated digital platform to yield an empirical understanding of how embodied experience and physiological processes co-occur with communicative encounters at multiple timescales. In combination with data collected in the first phase of the project, it will further provide insight into how this co-occurrence is mediated by both shared and divergent ideas about healthy relationships among participants. Findings will not only enrich existing studies on communication, emotion, and health in anthropology, psychology, and related disciplines, but will also contribute to the transformation of theory and method in anthropology through the further development of biolinguistic anthropology as an approach that can be applied to study multiple phenomenon in which researchers seek to investigate the multi-directional, diverse, and varying processes through which culture, communication, and physiological regulation co-emerge in interaction over time.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.