Better off saying nothing at all?: Improving difficult social interactions by understanding fears and language use

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Humans are social beings who need to feel connected to people, and understood by others in order to thrive. When this need to belong is not met, there are serious negative consequences for physical and mental health. Indeed, loneliness puts people at as much risk of early death as smoking, and at greater risk than obesity (Holt-Lunstad, Smith & Layton, 2010). Loneliness is a widespread social issue in the UK; a recent poll conducted by the Jo Cox commission on loneliness found that "almost three-quarters of older people in the UK are lonely" (The Guardian, 2017). Given the prevalence of loneliness, and its negative consequences, it is crucial to understand the intrapersonal and situational barriers that discourage people from talking to one another, and thus constrain people from fulfilling their need to belong. An understanding of these barriers will form the basis of interventions to encourage more frequent - and more positive - interactions. People generally enjoy socializing and spend a great deal of time talking, but in certain situations they struggle to know what words to say. For example, most people find it challenging to talk to someone who is experiencing a difficult situation (e.g., a cancer diagnosis, the loss of a loved one). It is said that in times of trouble, you find out who your real friends are; the people who let you down decide they're better off to say nothing at all rather than say the "wrong" thing. What exactly are people worried about, and are there actually "wrong" things to say? This project will address these questions, and draw upon the answers to identify ways of increasing the frequency and quality of interactions, thus improving the social support people receive when they need it most.My recent research has focused on talking to strangers - another situation that finds many people at a loss for words. I have found that, although talking to strangers is generally enjoyable and makes people feel connected, people report a wide range of worries about doing it. The proposed project will build upon this work by examining not only how people feel before social interactions, but also what they say during interactions. Importantly, this project will go beyond the single situation of talking to a stranger, to test the extent to which these predictors of interaction success (i.e., how people feel and what they say) are similar across situations (e.g., talking to a person of a different ethnicity, a wheelchair user, a cancer patient). Evidence of similarities across people and situations will prove invaluable in developing interventions to improve interaction success. This project will begin by collecting descriptive information about 1) the worries people have when considering different types of social interactions ("fears"; e.g., their partner might not talk enough, or might not like them), and 2) the things people wish that others would and would not say ("phrases"; e.g., both cancer patients and people living with disability dislike it when people tell them they're "so brave"). Next, I will extract themes from these qualitative responses, and develop survey instruments to assess fears and phrase use. This will allow me to quantitatively examine the extent to which fears and phrase use vary between people (i.e., related to individual differences) and within people (i.e., related to the situation). Then I will run experiments to examine the effects of fears and phrases on interaction success in real-life social interactions, ultimately testing interventions with the goal of increasing interaction success. The research findings will be of interest to health care professionals, and a range of social organisations that work to fight loneliness, to encourage social acceptance and integration (e.g., for the disabled, for minority ethnic people), or to support people confronting difficult situations (e.g., bereavement, serious illness).