The Behavioral and Social Sciences Achievements and Opportunities (1988) / Chapter Skim
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2. Motivational and Social Contexts of Behavior
2. Motivational and Social Contexts of Behavior
Pages 47-82
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From page 47... ...
Motivational anc3 Social Contexts of Behavior
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From page 49... ...
Many scientific theories about familiar matters, when proven by empirical research, are deemed obvious, fully expected, and not having needed scientific verification. Yet common sense could also have deemed directly contrary findings to be obvious and fully expected.
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From page 50... ...
Among the matters now under intensive study are the social and motivational conditions that affect vulnerability to depression, cardiovascular disease, and risk of addictive behavior; the competing environmental cues and psychobiological processes that affect eating behavior and body weight; the ways that parental practices in managing children and criminal justice practices in sentencing offenders affect the course of"criminal careers," and the manner in which the social origins, size, and divisions of responsibility in a task group can affect what it produces. The research methods involved in these areas of investigation range from biophysics to cultural analysis.
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From page 51... ...
One new approach that has already proven useful involves measuring the relative tension of various facial muscles that affect the facial expression of emotions. This muscle tension can be monitored electronically by surface electrodes, and the corresponding facial expressions can be monitored by television cameras and evaluated by anatomically based coding systems.
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From page 52... ...
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From page 53... ...
Research is proceeding on how learning of this sort in childhood may contribute to the emotional capacity to cope with the stresses, complexities, and responsibilities of life. A developing mosaic of findings is beginning to yield a detailed picture of the link between a child's interaction with its parents, the child's emotional FACIAL EXPRESSION Are facial expressions of emotion entirely culture-specific, or are there some universal expressions across the human family?
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From page 54... ...
There is obvious promise as well as challenge in trying to map out the antecedents of emotional expression and discover how it operates on a fine-grained level to regulate social behavior and contribute to social competence. Emotive Circuitry and Metabolism in the Brain Researchers are beginning to gain very detailed knowledge about the nature of the different brain circuits involved in such motivational and affective processes as aggression, eating, drinking, and sexual behavior.
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From page 55... ...
For example, high-quality PET studies of brain structure use precise cyclotron targetry, mathematically advanced techniques of data reconstruction, high-purity radiopharmaceuticals, advanced diagnostic techniques, ingenious neuropharmacological strategies, and sophisticated behavioral methods and assessments. These methods make possible the discovery and analysis of detailed brain circuits that underlie normal and abnormal affective processes, the localization of receptors that are affected by psychoactive drugs, and an ever-expanding horizon of related studies in humans and animals.
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From page 56... ...
In all three domains, the immediate issue is how animals and humans settle on more or less optimally rewarding behavior. In operant conditioning, the issue is expressed in terms of how a pigeon allocates key pecks or a rat pushes on a number of different keys that distribute reinforcements (usually, access to food)
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From page 57... ...
One very important issue is the empirical assessment of the economic principle of cost-benefit maximization in comparison with an alternative principle that derives from the animal studies and some of the human research: that attention is accorded to respective activities so that each yields the same average rate of reinforcement rather than the same marginal rate. Eating must also be studied in the context of other behaviors; rather than experiments in which caged animals are given access to a food cup but little else to do, the present challenge is to design theories and experiments combining food availability with numerous other available activities (sexual behavior, caring for the young, other forms of interaction, and so on)
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From page 58... ...
BEHAVIOR AND HEALTH Although it is still common to think about health as though it were strictly a matter of human biology the research province of medical scientists, physiologists, pharmaceutical chemists—such thinking has become outdated. Until about 1940, the leading causes of death and disability in the United States were acute infectious diseases, such as pneumonia and tuberculosis; today, such diseases are not usually fatal, and the leading causes of death are illnesses that are significantly affected by behavioral and social factors, such as cigarette smoking, excessive drinking, illicit drug use, bad dietary habits, violence, stress, and refusal or inability to maintain recommended medical regimens.
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From page 59... ...
This was not the case 20 years ago, when these ideas, borrowed from social science, first began to revise the popular and scientific thinking that linked youthful smoking to the straightforward desire to emulate adults, teenage drinking to juvenile rebellion, and illicit drug initiation to predatory pushers. Since then, a phalanx of careful studies, including ethnographic investigations among drug users in and out of school, panels of adolescents followed at yearly intervals through young adulthood, and repeated national surveys of successive classes of students, have revealed a far more detailed and accurate picture, suggesting bases for selecting among and developing new approaches to treatment and, especially, prevention of problems induced or aggravated by alcohol, tobacco, or drug abuse.
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From page 60... ...
Evaluating the Effects of Interventions Research on the effectiveness of preventive intervention against early alcohol, tobacco, and drug use has advanced considerably in the past decade, yielding more detailed understandings of developmental sequences and their conditioning at crucial transitions in the contemporary life course, while offering possible ways to reduce the problem. Net positive results have been demonstrated in some research-based health education experiments that capitalize on the willingness of students to behave with appropriate self-regard in the presence of supportive peers.
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Confirmation of these findings and more details about how price changes affect participation and amount, and how different social groups respond, could be very useful in forming public policies.
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Better understanding of human sexual behavior will also substantially contribute to the study of other sensitive and powerful motivational and social factors that affect personal and health behavior. A second research area that is given added urgency by AIDS is the communication of health information.
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Other research has found that social support mechanisms can, to a remarkable degree, reduce a person's sensitivity to certain stressors and increase compliance with medical regimens. Psychological stress can markedly alter social roles and behavior patterns.
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For example, recent biobehavioral research suggests that psychophysiological responsiveness (reactivity) to emotional stress may be a marker of processes involved in the development of cardiovascular disorder.
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From page 65... ...
, was of minimal benefit. On balance, the data strongly suggested no single experiment or study can be said to prove that it would be cost-effective to improve health care by further subsidizing medical treatment for people afflicted with certain health deficiencies, but the complete removal of economic considerations in access to medical services would not be a cost-effective way to improve the health of the population.
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From page 66... ...
Regular users have much higher rates of criminal activity than nonusers or those who have discontinued use, but the directions of causality between drug use, other criminal behavior, and other age-related processes are still ambiguous. There are also important questions about the way in which the criminal justice system affects the course of criminal careers.
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From page 67... ...
Design includes the development of specialized institutional arrangements to collect, maintain, and govern access to the data and, when possible, to link such longitudinal designs to randomized field experiments involving shifts in policing or judicial operations, family-based or school-based interventions, or other changes that may affect criminal behavior (see "Experimental Design," Chapter 5~. Additionally, comparative studies of crime and criminal careers in
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From page 68... ...
The influence of family structure and dynamics during childhood on criminal behavior seems very important. In correlational studies based on regional statistics, communities with high divorce rates also have high rates of criminal activity.
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From page 69... ...
ATTRIBUTIONS AND EXPECTANCIES IN SOCIAL INTERACTION The concepts of self-esteem, social networks, and gender-based differences have been vital to research advances on emotional maturation, health risk and protection, and criminal behavior, discussed above. They have also been used
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From page 70... ...
More recently, however, the study of social interaction has shifted from the identification of particular factors implicated in certain products of social interaction a happy or unhappy marriage, a fast or slow work group, a successful or unsuccessful negotiation to an understanding of the process. The emerging paradigm is the simultaneous study of many elements, freely varying in naturalistic settings, assessed over long durations, involving participants who have both a joint history and an anticipated future together, and using multiple methods such as self-reports, observer ratings, behavioral codings, and psychophysiological measurements.
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A particularly important feature of human social interaction is that people intuitively understand many of the principles governing social processes and,
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A major line of research in social interaction focuses on the microprocesses through which information is communicated nonverbally, and sometimes unconsciously, about personality. Development of Close Relationships After years of studies restricted to individuals in isolation or to relationships between (usually)
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Some measures of the changing nature and quality of social interactions over extended periods of time are provided by research on shifts in levels of satisfaction over the course of an enduring marriage or career. For example, marital satisfaction is typically high early in marriage, decreases with the birth of the first child, reaches its nadir as the children enter adolescence, and increases as children leave the household.
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From page 74... ...
Among the new experimental methods for studying collective decision making is the simulated jury trial, in which a group of people are selected from actual jury panels to watch a videotaped trial proceeding and then, in an actual jury room, deliberate and reach a verdict while their discussions are recorded. This figure illustrates the waxing and waning of groups of jury members speaking or voting for particular verdicts across the four-hour deliberation of one such mock jury deciding a murder trial.
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From page 75... ...
In an example of such experiments, several panels of experimental jurors, selected from actual jury pools, watched a videotaped enactment of a real trial, and then met in regular jury rooms to decide on a verdict. Among other things, the group size and decision rule employed were varied from panel to panel.
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From page 76... ...
Such research on group decision making exemplifies the theoretical and p~cdcal conthhutions Tom research on social interaction. The Social Coustruchon of Gender It is becoming increasingly clear that human sexual differences are actuary composhes of Enable elements There are chromosomal differences Tar tamale and far male mammals)
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OPPORTUNITIES AND NEEDS The anatomy and control of motivational processes; the codification of emotional expression; and the understanding of eating, sexual, and other behavior in animals and humans have all been illuminated in recent years by continu
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From page 78... ...
Recent statistical innovations permit investigators of interaction and communication to examine reciprocal causation over time more readily and precisely than in the past. At the same time, advances in video technology permit more naturalistic social interactions to be recorded cheaply and preserved indefinitely so that the qualities of interpersonal relationships can be sampled over long periods, which is increasingly important as more investigators move from the study of first impressions to the study of longer-term close relationships.
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From page 79... ...
We also recommend that $3 million be committed to advanced training institutes. The value of longitudinal studies—including those with experimental components has been thoroughly proven by outstanding work in each of the research areas discussed in this chapter.
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From page 80... ...
with respect to alcohol, tobacco, and drug use and sexual and dietary patterns; the role of social networks in affecting health, particularly later in life; the development of criminal behavior in the critical period from middle childhood to young adulthood, especially in the context of family behavior and criminal justice policies; the development of close personal relationships; and the development of changes in gender roles and relationships. For this substantial agenda we recommend a new commitment of $15 million annually, which will permit approximately 10 large-scale longitudinal studies to be carried out.
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From page 81... ...
Such centers could bring together researchers who do not now communicate much, particularly those concerned with normal affective and motivational processes (principally psychologists) and those concerned with the causes and treatment of affective and motivational disorders (principally psychiatrists and neurologists)
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