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

博士生Matthew热尔韦（加州大学，洛杉矶），在丹尼尔博士的指导下，Fessler将研究男性社会关系中情感的功能。社会关系是人类适应性的基石，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，对情感结构的理论研究仍然缺乏真实的世界数据，而受控的行为实验也很少被应用于小规模社会中已建立的二元关系。 本研究将首次对基于民族志、神经科学和进化论的社会情感模型进行实证评估，在一个相对有限的小规模社会背景下，可以最清楚地看到所研究的关系。因此，这项研究将在斐济亚萨瓦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游戏-将关系态度和情绪映射到个人特质和资源，关系历史和测量的关系行为。这种多变量建模方法将揭示这些变量之间的因果关系，重点是社会态度在调解个人和二元变量对关系内行为的影响中的作用，该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，这些主题是当代人类学，心理学，神经科学和经济学辩论的中心。该研究还将介绍几种方法的创新，这将有助于跨文化的影响和面对面的社会关系的比较。除了支持社会科学家的教育外，这项研究还将在研究方法和数据管理技术方面培训一个代表性不足的群体-一名太平洋岛民。它还将扩展对经历市场一体化初始阶段的地区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.