Personal relationships are often a source of comfort and support, but they can also be a source of stress and conflict. Previous laboratory and self-report research indicates that communication between partners is predictive of relational satisfaction and well-being. It also demonstrates that relational behaviors are linked to physical responses in the body that impact both short- and long-term health, and suggests that everyday emotion-laden communication between intimate partners influences physical outcomes and that, in turn, physical responses concurrently influence communication. We only have limited understanding, however, of what this relationship between communication, emotion, and the body looks like on a day-to-day basis, and on how this process differs in relation to racial, socioeconomic, and other cultural pressures influencing different couples. Therefore, understanding the multi-directional processes through which culture, communication, and physiological regulation co-emerge, outside of the laboratory and in specific emotion-laden interactions between intimate partners at home, can lead to more developed scientific understanding about how interpersonal behavior and physical wellbeing are connected. Findings from this research will provide insight into how communication between partners functions as a mediator of both intermediate and long-term effects on wellbeing. Ultimately, this research has implications for individual, relational, and societal health and wellbeing. At the University of Alabama, the project also contributes to the development of a new interdisciplinary program, and the training of both graduate and undergraduate students, including underrepresented minorities.
Drs. Sonya Pritzker, Jason DeCaro, and Joshua Pederson of the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa will develop innovative theoretical and methodological models for understanding how the human body affects and is affected by everyday communication in the context of culture. The purpose of this research is to provide evidence for the ways that regular co-constructed patterns of emotion communication relate to physiological outcomes, ultimately affecting psychosocial wellbeing among couples in everyday life. The research thus takes an ethnographic approach to the study of relating among adult partners in the Southeastern U.S., emphasizing naturalistic observation, video-recoding, in-depth interviews, and close monitoring of physiological activity over multiple days. The researchers aim to collect anthropologically sound evidence for the reciprocal ways moment-to-moment physiology is affected by and affects emotion communication in everyday life, and how this process impacts indicators of psychosocial wellbeing among partners. The overarching intellectual merit of this research is the development of theoretical frameworks and methodological tools for innovative research programs examining intersections between language, culture, and the human body in multiple settings. This project thus brings together disparate subfields of anthropology and related disciplines, contributes to psychological understandings about the dynamics of emotions, and provides unprecedented insight into the ways in which everyday communication among intimate partners is linked to physiological processes. Building on the findings from laboratory studies, this project further addresses the complex layers of culture and communication in relationships within everyday lived experiences.
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.
