Humans are people, too: nurturing an appreciation for nature in communication research

A growing literature illuminates the biological and evolutionary antecedents, consequences, and correlates of communication behavior. With few exceptions, however, the research is conducted outside of the communication discipline and remains unknown within the communication field. This essay offers illustrative literature reviews for several communicative behaviors and argues that the communication discipline should embrace, rather than ignore, the bioevolutionary factors involved in human social behavior

Affectionate communication, health, and relationships

A robust body of research attests to the mental and physical health correlates and consequences of affectionate communication. Like much research on personal relationships, however, this work may overrepresent certain portions of the population, may underrepresent others, and may not effectively account for intersections of identities. We define intersectionality as comprising the unique effects of two or more social identities interacting with each other. To assess this literature with an eye toward intersectionality and representation, the present article reports a systematic review of 86 individual empirical studies representing 26,013 participants. The review concludes that there is no explicit or implicit attention to intersectionality in the existing research on affectionate communication and health, and that U.S. Americans, women, younger individuals, white individuals, and students are overrepresented in research samples. The review ends with future directions to encourage more inclusive research on this topic

Kissing in Marital and Cohabiting Relationships: Effects on Blood Lipids, Stress, and Relationship Satisfaction

Affection exchange theory and previous research suggest that affectionate behavior has stress-ameliorating effects. On this basis, we hypothesized that increasing affectionate behavior would effect improvements in physical and psychological conditions known to be exacerbated by stress. This study tested this proposition by examining the effects of increased romantic kissing on blood lipids, perceived stress, depression, and relationship satisfaction. Fifty-two healthy adults who were in marital or cohabiting romantic relationships provided self-report data for psychological outcomes and blood samples for hematological tests, and were then randomly assigned to experimental and control groups for a 6-week trial. Those in the experimental group were instructed to increase the frequency of romantic kissing in their relationships; those in the control group received no such instructions. After 6 weeks, psychological and hematological tests were repeated. Relative to the control group, the experimental group experienced improvements in perceived stress, relationship satisfaction, and total serum cholesterol

Automatic analysis of facilitated taste-liking

This paper focuses on: (i) Automatic recognition of taste-liking from facial videos by comparatively training and evaluating models with engineered features and state-of-the-art deep learning architectures, and (ii) analysing the classification results along the aspects of facilitator type, and the gender, ethnicity, and personality of the participants. To this aim, a new beverage tasting dataset acquired under different conditions (human vs. robot facilitator and priming vs. non-priming facilitation) is utilised. The experimental results show that: (i) The deep spatiotemporal architectures provide better classification results than the engineered feature models; (ii) the classification results for all three classes of liking, neutral and disliking reach F1 scores in the range of 71%-91%; (iii) the personality-aware network that fuses participants’ personality information with that of facial reaction features provides improved classification performance; and (iv) classification results vary across participant gender, but not across facilitator type and participant ethnicity.EPSR

Evaluative and behavioral responses to nonverbal liking behavior

An intuitive notion regarding the communication of liking is that it is consistently associated with positive relational outcomes. An alternative possibility is that when expressions of liking comprise a negative violation of expectancies, they produce outcomes that are actually more negative than those produced by the absence of such expressions. The current experiment tests this prediction with respect to evaluative and behavioral responses to nonverbal expressions of liking. Ninety-six adults were paired with same-sex strangers and induced to expect the strangers either to like or dislike them and to desire that the strangers either like or dislike them. The strangers, who were trained confederates, enacted nonverbal behaviors associated either with liking or disliking during a short experimental interaction with participants. Participants' evaluations of confederates were most favorable when confederates' behaviors matched participants' desires, whether the desire was to be liked or disliked. Behaviorally, participants matched desired behavior from confederates and reacted with complementarity to undesired behavior. These results suggest the counterintuitive notion that expressions of liking are not consistently associated with positive relational outcomes, but that factors such as receivers' desires and expectations largely determine what outcomes will be produced. The results also raise important issues for how expectations are conceptually and operationally defined

Communication matters

xxx, 381 p. ; 27 cm

Lipidemic Effects of Kissing are Mediated by Stress: Results from a National Probability Sample

Previous studies have identified associations between affectionate communication and blood lipid levels but been limited by small, homogenous samples and failed replication attempts. Moreover, no study has tested the prediction derived from affection exchange theory that stress mediates the association between affectionate behavior and health. Using secondary analyses of data from the Midlife in the United States (MIDUS) Refresher study Biomarker Project, this paper remedies these limitations by testing the prediction that stress mediates the association between kissing and serum levels of triglycerides, high-density lipoproteins, and low-density lipoproteins using a large probability sample of U.S. American adults (N = 863). Results indicate significant indirect effects of kissing frequency on triglycerides and high-density lipoproteins for participants who reported kissing seven or more times in the previous month.18 month embargo; published online: 14 March 2022This item from the UA Faculty Publications collection is made available by the University of Arizona with support from the University of Arizona Libraries. If you have questions, please contact us at [email protected]

Imagen Wiik 2019-02: Putting people first in business communication

Evento Imagen Wiik 2019-02. Kory Floyd, PhD, Professor of Communication, University of Arizona (USA)El ponente nos habla sobre modelos de comunicación como el "TEAM", Trust, Empathy, Altruism, Motivation y los beneficios de una comunicación prosocial que beneficie a tu entorno

Affection Deprivation Is Associated With Physical Pain and Poor Sleep Quality

Social bonds are necessary for human survival and affectionate communication is paramount for their formation and maintenance. Consequently, affection deprivation -the condition of receiving less affectionate communication than desired-is associated with social pain, and contemporary research indicates that social pain has substantial neurological overlap with physical pain. Thus, it was proposed that affection deprivation would be associated with the sensation of physical pain as well as with poor-quality sleep. Three studies involving a total of 1,368 adults from nearly all U.S. states and several foreign countries revealed significant associations between affection deprivation, physical pain, and multiple facets of disturbed sleep.18 month embargo.This item from the UA Faculty Publications collection is made available by the University of Arizona with support from the University of Arizona Libraries. If you have questions, please contact us at [email protected]

Affectionate Communication Moderates the Effect of Adverse Childhood Experience on Mental Well-Being

Affectionate communication is a prosocial behavior that exhibits a stress-buffering effect, ameliorating the influence of stressors on stress reactivity. Whereas previous research has demonstrated such an effect on physiological and health-related reactions to acute stressors, the current study explores the ability of affectionate communication to moderate the influence of early childhood adversity on adult mental well-being. Using a Census-matched probability sample of U.S. American adults (N = 727), this study documents that both depressive symptoms and stress are inversely related to trait affectionate communication and that trait affectionate communication moderates the effect of adverse childhood experiences on these outcomes.18 month embargo; first published 22 January 2023This item from the UA Faculty Publications collection is made available by the University of Arizona with support from the University of Arizona Libraries. If you have questions, please contact us at [email protected]