Development and validation of the social thermoregulation and risk avoidance questionnaire (STRAQ-1)

Attachment theory was built around the idea that infants rely on others to survive, and it is often forgotten that survival hinged on coping with environmental demands. Adult attachment reports have instead been organized around people’s subjective experience of safety and security in relationships. To resolve the gap between infant’s physical needs and adult attachment experiences, we made a first step by developing the Social Thermoregulation and Risk Avoidance Questionnaire (STRAQ-1) in 12 countries (N = 1510), providing a complementary measure to identify biological drives formative to attachment. We conjectured that co-regulatory patterns of temperature and stress are foundational to attachment styles and on this basis used a naïve bootstrapping method to find a robust solution, conducting seven exploratory factor analyses in an exploratory-confirmatory fashion. We identified 23 (out of 57) items in 4 subscales: Social Thermoregulation (Total Omega = .83), High Temperature Sensitivity (.83), Solitary Thermoregulation (.77), and Risk Avoidance (.57). In terms of external validity, we also found that the STRAQ-1 relates to emotion regulation strategies broadly and, importantly, relates to individual differences in attachment specifically, which in turn mediates the relationship with stress and health (making the scale face valid). Our approach provides a robust first effort in identifying biological mechanisms underlying attachment formation

Development and validation of the social thermoregulation and risk avoidance questionnaire (STRAQ-1)

Attachment theory was built around the idea that infants rely on others to survive, and it is often forgotten that survival hinged on coping with environmental demands. Adult attachment reports have instead been organized around people’s subjective experience of safety and security in relationships. To resolve the gap between infant’s physical needs and adult attachment experiences, we made a first step by developing the Social Thermoregulation and Risk Avoidance Questionnaire (STRAQ-1) in 12 countries (N = 1510), providing a complementary measure to identify biological drives formative to attachment. We conjectured that co-regulatory patterns of temperature and stress are foundational to attachment styles and on this basis used a naïve bootstrapping method to find a robust solution, conducting seven exploratory factor analyses in an exploratory-confirmatory fashion. We identified 23 (out of 57) items in 4 subscales: Social Thermoregulation (Total Omega = .83), High Temperature Sensitivity (.83), Solitary Thermoregulation (.77), and Risk Avoidance (.57). In terms of external validity, we also found that the STRAQ-1 relates to emotion regulation strategies broadly and, importantly, relates to individual differences in attachment specifically, which in turn mediates the relationship with stress and health (making the scale face valid). Our approach provides a robust first effort in identifying biological mechanisms underlying attachment formation

The human penguin project: climate, social integration, and core body temperature

Social thermoregulation theory posits that modern human relationships are pleisiomorphically organized around body temperature regulation. In two studies (N = 1755) designed to test the principles from this theory, we used supervised machine learning to identify social and non-social factors that relate to core body temperature. This data-driven analysis found that complex social integration (CSI), defined as the number of high-contact roles one engages in, is a critical predictor of core body temperature. We further used a cross-validation approach to show that colder climates relate to higher levels of CSI, which in turn relates to higher CBT (when climates get colder). These results suggest that despite modern affordances for regulating body temperature, people still rely on social warmth to buffer their bodies against the cold

The Human Penguin Project: Climate, Social Integration, and Core Body Temperature

Social thermoregulation theory posits that modern human relationships are pleisiomorphically organized around body temperature regulation. In two studies (N = 1755) designed to test the principles from this theory, we used supervised machine learning to identify social and non-social factors that relate to core body temperature. This data-driven analysis found that complex social integration (CSI), defined as the number of high-contact roles one engages in, is a critical predictor of core body temperature. We further used a cross-validation approach to show that colder climates relate to higher levels of CSI, which in turn relates to higher CBT (when climates get colder). These results suggest that despite modern affordances for regulating body temperature, people still rely on social warmth to buffer their bodies against the cold