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

衡量人类身心健康的一个重要指标是恋爱成功。有效的沟通已被证明是健康关系的关键决定因素，但这并不能在不同的社会文化群体中统一转化。研究人员承认存在一些重大挑战：抽样偏差；过度依赖在人口统计上均一的样本中开发的标准化测量方法；以及实验室环境的局限性，即在短暂的互动中研究夫妇，并将其作为孤立的二联体进行研究。人类学家对不同文化和亚文化背景下的人际关系进行了人种学调查，一再证明，没有唯一健康的方式来建立长期的伙伴关系，进一步表明，随着时间的推移，夫妻可能更好地被理解为总是嵌入复杂和不同的社会、历史和经济过程并受到其影响。然而，人种学研究直到最近才开始调查这些条件和时刻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推广到单一的关系或作为一个一般类别的关系。因此，目前的研究运用了生物语言学人类学的理论和工具，该理论和工具是由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的，并将人类学中的人类生物学与人种学方法相结合，以调查随着时间的推移，不同夫妇之间的时刻互动中文化、生物学和经验共同出现的方式。通过结合多标量、纵向和基于社区的方法，发现将有助于对不同网站上的日常关系意识形态的范围进行概括性的理解。这项研究将通过关注和识别个体内和夫妻内随时间变化的特定来源，进一步充实情绪和生理协同调节和反调节的科学。这些发现无疑将影响未来大规模生物语言学研究的设计，这些研究将显着扩大关于伴侣之间互动和生理的实验室研究的有效性。作为一个职业项目，它还为来自代表性不足群体的研究生和本科生在经验、科学数据收集和分析方法方面的培训提供资金。研究产生的知识还将被整合到生物语言人类学的可分享教育学中；正在进行的、在全美范围内合作的生物语言人类学每周研讨会；以及为加州大学和普通公众举办的适合年龄的教育研讨会，包括致力于帮助儿童学习当地社区传播科学的K-12教育计划。在教师早期职业发展(职业)奖的支持下，研究人员将实施一个多阶段的纵向项目，调查美国和东亚地区100多名长期合作伙伴的日常健康关系意识形态。抽样战略纳入了几个共同点，以确保可比性和概括性。具体而言，参与者必须在30岁到60岁之间，必须生活在大中型城市环境中，并且必须包括至少一名在公民参与的高压力领域全职或兼职工作的人。该项目的第一阶段包括一种以社区为基础的参与性办法，包括匿名调查和对100名符合这些标准并目前处于长期伙伴关系中的个人进行远程访谈。该项目的这一部分评估了参与者对健康关系和沟通的看法，其目的是以参与者的知识和经验为基础，以确保项目的其余部分是基于利益攸关方的利益。该项目的第二阶段还包括一项深入的生物人种学调查，通过对多个地点的24对夫妇进行为期一年的深入研究，了解伴侣之间时刻互动的方式与时间匹配的生理唤醒有关。研究的这一部分结合了人种学数据收集；自然发生的互动的视频记录；生理数据收集；多次访谈；以及一年中参与者驱动的移动人种学。人种学、视频和生理数据将在一个集成的数字平台中进行分析，以产生对具体化体验和生理过程如何在多个时间尺度上与交流接触共存的经验理解。结合项目第一阶段收集的数据，它将进一步深入了解这种共同发生是如何受到参与者之间关于健康关系的共同和不同观点的影响的。这些发现不仅将丰富人类学、心理学和相关学科中关于沟通、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，通过生物语言学人类学的进一步发展，作为一种可以应用于研究多种现象的方法，研究人员寻求调查文化、沟通和生理调节随着时间的推移共同出现的多方向、多样和变化的过程。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势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.