The Degree of Synchrony Across Physiological and Behavioral Indicators in Aggression

University Of Southern California, Los Angeles CA

Investigators

Abstract

The Directorate of Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences offers postdoctoral research fellowships to provide opportunities for recent doctoral graduates to obtain additional training, to gain research experience under the sponsorship of established scientists, and to broaden their scientific horizons beyond their undergraduate and graduate training. Postdoctoral fellowships are further designed to assist new scientists to direct their research efforts across traditional disciplinary lines and to avail themselves of unique research resources, sites, and facilities, including at foreign locations. This postdoctoral fellowship award supports a rising scholar at the intersection of Psychology and Engineering (Dynamical Systems). In an increasingly collaborative domain of science, this project represents a unique interdisciplinary direction that should be beneficial for both the fields. The main focus of this project is dating aggression, which poses significant societal problems including the continuity of aggression into committed long-term relationships, negative future implications for parenting, and an array of physical and mental health problems. Identifying mechanisms that explain dating aggression is crucial to interrupting maladaptive patterns of communication and bolstering healthy developmental trajectories for relationships. In contrast to prior research that focuses primarily on global individual characteristics associated with dating aggression, the present study is designed to capture dynamic unfolding of moment-to-moment relational processes that ultimately may lead to aggression. This postdoctoral fellowship award supports a recent Ph.D. who aims to transform the scientific study of dating partner aggression through the interdisciplinary integration of novel technologies from psychology and electrical engineering. The focus of investigation is each partner's physiological state, which will be measured through behavioral, vocal, and physiological channels. Coordination across channels of physiological conditions -within individuals as well as between the dating partners-will be tested as putative factors in current experiences of couple aggression as well as past legacies from exposure to aggression in the dating partners' family-of-origin. Better understanding of factors associated with dating aggression-particularly modifiable factors such communication processes and accompanying physiological states can ultimately inform prevention and intervention efforts designed to reduce dating aggression. Decreasing the incidence of dating aggression as well as limiting the transmission of aggression across generations are priorities for multiple stakeholders: individuals, families, researchers, clinicians, and policy-makers. The goal of the present project is to expand what is known about dating partner aggression and its link to family-of-origin aggression by identifying patterns of interaction and of physiological conditions that are indices of risk versus resilience for couple aggression. The theoretical innovation of this proposal lies in the conceptualization and testing of synchrony versus asynchrony across different physiological indices: vocal, physiological and psychological. Young dating couples will engage in multiple emotionally-charged discussions during which behaviors, vocal qualities, and physiology (e.g., heart rate, skin conductance) are measured and recorded. Engineering-based methods of acoustic analysis and biomedical signal processing along with psychology-based human coding of behaviors and emotions will allow for the simultaneous capture of multiple regulatory processes. It is hypothesized that patterns of synchrony versus asynchrony across different channels will further knowledge of how ongoing regulatory processes contribute to relational aggression (e.g., physiological states that are not accompanied by concomitant behavioral ones may circumvent escalation). Risk and resilience for aggression, often studied as trait-like propensities, will be examined here from relational perspectives. By focusing on young adults who are in early stages of significant intimate relationships and through the application of novel technologies, this study will advance scientific inquiry on relationship aggression as well as on the continuity of aggression across generations.