Social Interaction
Social interactions are a critical element of daily life - most people have many of them everyday. Interactions are important because they allow us to meet a variety of needs. At a basic level, we use them to obtain food and shelter. As children, interactions help us to bond with family members, caregivers and peers. As we grow older, interactions allow us to develop romantic relationships, friendships, and peer groups, and to interact with colleagues and co-workers. Most people find social interactions to be pleasurable and even small interactions, such as a greeting a friend in passing or receiving a smile from a stranger, can lift one's mood. Despite their importance, we know very little about how people manage their interactions on a moment-to-moment basis.
Interactions are among the more complex activities in which humans engage. When we participate in an interaction, we process information that arrives in a number of domains or channels. These include verbal information, such as the words a conversation partner says; nonverbal auditory information, such as the tone of voice or prosody with which our partners speak; and nonverbal visual information, such as gestures, facial expressions and body language. We integrate this external information with internal information, including information we remember about how the conversation has progressed, memories of past interactions of the same type or with the same person, schemata such as beliefs about how others should behave, or knowledge of what we ourselves would mean/think/feel if we behaved in a particular way. In addition, we integrate internally generated signals such as emotions or feelings. On the basis of some or all of this information, we produce and send responses to our partners.
Although no two interactions are the same, we generally manage to respond to one another with little difficulty. The purpose of this work is to better understand how information in the social environment influences the "give-and-take" of a social interaction. One way to assess this is to ask people to interact with one another while their interactions are videotaped. Participants' behavior can then be examined to determine how people respond to the verbal and nonverbal behaviors that their conversation partners make. Research questions include:
| * How do we coordinate social interactions? |
| * How do people decode the social cues of others? |
| * What is it that makes interactions pleasurable? |
| * Do people have "social goals" during interaction and if so, are these understood by others? |
| * How does internal emotional experience contribute to social behavior? |