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

人类是社会性的生物，需要感受到与他人的联系，需要被他人理解才能茁壮成长。如果这种归属需要得不到满足，就会对身心健康产生严重的负面影响。事实上，孤独会让人们面临和吸烟一样多的早逝风险，甚至比肥胖更大的风险（Holt-Lunstad, Smith & Layton, 2010）。孤独在英国是一个普遍的社会问题；乔·考克斯孤独委员会最近进行的一项民意调查发现，“英国近四分之三的老年人孤独”（《卫报》，2017年）。考虑到孤独的普遍性及其负面后果，理解阻碍人们彼此交谈的人际和情境障碍是至关重要的，从而限制了人们满足他们的归属需求。了解这些障碍将成为鼓励更频繁和更积极互动的干预措施的基础。人们通常喜欢社交，花很多时间交谈，但在某些情况下，他们不知道该说什么。例如，大多数人发现与正在经历困境的人交谈是一件很有挑战性的事情（例如，癌症诊断，失去亲人）。据说在困难的时候，你会发现谁是你真正的朋友；那些让你失望的人决定他们最好什么都不说，而不是说“错误”的话。人们到底在担心什么，是否真的有“错误”的话要说？本项目将解决这些问题，并根据答案确定提高互动频率和质量的方法，从而在人们最需要的时候改善他们获得的社会支持。我最近的研究集中在与陌生人交谈上——这是另一种发现许多人不知道该说什么的情况。我发现，尽管与陌生人交谈通常是一件令人愉快的事情，而且让人们感到有联系，但人们对这样做有各种各样的担忧。拟议中的项目将以这项工作为基础，不仅研究人们在社交互动之前的感受，还研究他们在互动过程中所说的话。重要的是，这个项目将超越与陌生人交谈的单一情况，以测试这些互动成功的预测因素（即，人们的感受和他们所说的话）在不同情况下的相似程度（例如，与不同种族的人交谈，轮椅使用者，癌症患者）。人与人之间和情况之间的相似性的证据将证明在开发干预措施以提高互动成功方面是无价的。这个项目将从收集以下描述性信息开始：1)人们在考虑不同类型的社交互动时的担忧（“恐惧”，例如，他们的伴侣可能不会说足够多的话，或者可能不喜欢他们）；2)人们希望别人说的话和不想说的话（“短语”，例如，癌症患者和残疾人都不喜欢别人对他们说他们“很勇敢”）。接下来，我将从这些定性回答中提取主题，并开发调查工具来评估恐惧和短语的使用。这将使我能够定量地检查人与人之间（即与个体差异有关）和人与人之间（即与情况有关）的恐惧和短语使用的差异程度。然后，我将进行实验，检验恐惧和短语对现实社会互动中互动成功的影响，最终测试以增加互动成功为目标的干预措施。研究结果将引起保健专业人员和一系列社会组织的兴趣，这些组织致力于消除孤独，鼓励社会接受和融合（例如，残疾人，少数民族人民），或支持面临困难情况的人（例如，丧亲之痛，严重疾病）。

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).