Search Results

This chapter offers a summary of the previous sixteen chapters. It also indicates the need for cultural recognition of varying relationship models without a presumption of the superiority or morality of monogamy. This chapter concludes that multiple sexual social scripts and multiple models of relationships should co-exist as equally viable and moral relationship types. Yet, this possibility is currently nullified by the hegemonic control monogamy maintains. Hopefully this research will help ameliorate this problem of monogamy.

In both modern humans and non-human primates, time and cognitive constraints place an upper bound on the number of social relationships an individual can maintain at a given level of intensity. Similar constraints are likely to have operated throughout hominin evolution, shaping the size and structure of social networks. One of the key trends in human evolution, alongside an increase in brain size, is likely to have been an increase in group size, resulting in a larger number of social relationships that would have to be maintained over time. The network approach demonstrates that relationships should not be viewed as dyadic ties between two individuals, but as embedded within a larger network of ties between network members. Together with relationships based on kinship, this may have allowed for larger groups to be maintained among hominins than would be possible if such networks were based purely on dyadic ties between individuals.

Cohesion may be based primarily on interpersonal ties or rely instead on the connection between member and group, while groups may cohere temporarily based on the immediate alignment of interests among members or may be tied together more permanently by socio-emotional bonds. Together, these characteristics define four prototypical group types. Cliques and coalitions are based primarily on dyadic ties. Groups of comrades or colleagues rely instead on the connection of members to the group for cohesion, which reduces the marginal cost of increasing group size. The strong glue of socio-emotional cohesion binds cliques and comrades, while coalitions and groups of colleagues are often based on weaker forms of cohesion. The mix of strong and weak adhesives and the greater scalability offered by the member-group bond provide the building blocks for assembling very large societies without overtaxing the social brain.

This chapter presents a model problem for scattering by a buried object. The ground is modeled by a two-layered medium (the air and the earth) with a planar interface. For the two-layered medium, it is possible to derive the dyadic Green’s function using Hertz potentials as in Sommerfeld’s book. This Green’s function can then be used to implement a finite element method for the scattering problem using the method of Hazard and Lenoir. In particular, the scatterer is surrounded by an artificial boundary (not necessarily a sphere). Inside the artificial boundary, finite elements are used to represent the solution. Outside the scatterer, the Stratton-Chu formula provides a representation in terms of unknown fields on the surface of the scatterer. This representation is then used to provide a boundary condition on the artificial boundary. The resulting method has great flexibility in the choice of the artificial boundary. The applications of this method to a bounded scatterer in half-space with perfectly conducting boundary, and to scattering by a bounded scatterer in an infinite inhomogeneous background are discussed. Error estimates are proven.

This chapter discusses the main alternatives to the property theory of content. The first section discusses the triadic view of belief. On this view, to believe something is to stand in a triadic relation to a proposition and some other kind of thing (sometimes called a belief state or guise). The second section argues that the triadic view and the property theory are genuine rival theories of psychological content. In the third section, dyadic propositionalism — the view that belief is ultimately just a dyadic relation between a person and a proposition — is reconsidered. Along the way, other theories are discussed, and the property theory is shown to be preferable to each alternative.

Behaviors involving others, whether in their initiation, their enactment, or their consequences, are of particular interest to social psychologists. Not surprisingly, behaviors featuring the intertwining of outcomes of actors can be a theoretical and measurement challenge. This chapter introduces a section of the book containing a number of chapters that focus on behavior, both broadly and specifically defined, and inter-individual processes. This section provides readers with a thorough sense of the many ways in which behavior is considered in social psychological theory and research. Each of the chapters highlights the complexities and the challenges inherent in the study of inter-individual behavior. At the same time, each reflects the genuine enthusiasm of those whose own scholarly motivation and actions push us closer to a more complete understanding of the underpinnings and nuances of behavior in its various forms.

In this chapter, the authors challenge the field to overcome its focus on internal states and behavioral precursors as a substitute for behavior, and offer instead a method for studying behavior in everyday contexts. Using marital conflict as a specific instantiation of an important social behavior, the authors describe the utility of daily diaries as a tool for the assessment of these behaviors. They argue that studying variability in behavior is as essential to understanding behavior as studying mean levels, and offer possibilities for statistical analysis of diary data that focus on such variability. The authors report a reanalysis of couples’ diary data originally published in Bolger et al. (1989) that focuses on questions of variability in marital conflict and reactions to those conflicts. The authors describe how this analysis of variability led to insight about couple conflict that was not apparent from their original analyses.

This chapter shows how researchers can collect network data from randomly drawn samples. The data only represent the respondent personal network, usually from the respondent's perspective. The chapter then details the various measures derived from personal network data and the research questions and hypotheses that have been tested. Personal network exposure, concurrency, and tie strength hypotheses are discussed. A comparison between ego-centric and sociometric data is presented. The chapter discussed how to convert egocentric data to a dyadic dataset thus facilitating analysis and testing of certain hypotheses. Although ego centric data are somewhat limited, they still provide powerful measures of interpersonal influence that are strongly predictive of behavior. The chapter closed with a discussion of the application of snowball sampling including network recruitment.

Chapter 4 presents the second part of the book’s analytical framework and shifts the focus to the institutionalization of social pacts. The chapter begins by using quantitative evidence to analyse the number and diffusion of social pacts over time and across countries, distinguished by type, scope, and content, before considering the difficulties involved in social pact institutionalization. The chapter compares social pacts with collective labour agreements, considers the differences between dyadic and triadic relationships, and traces the instability of social pacts in part to their discretionary as compared to rules-based character. The chapter presents five key hypotheses—derived from the functionalist, utilitarian, normative, and power-distributive approaches found in new institutionalist analysis—as to how, and via what kinds of mechanisms, social pact institutionalization may occur. Finally, the chapter considers why particular combinations of mechanisms are more likely than others.

This chapter reviews research on the effects of partner support on coping with stress. The authors argue that support from the spouse plays a key role in both promoting adaptive coping and discouraging maladaptive ways of coping. In addition, they review evidence that support from the spouse both enhances coping effectiveness and mitigates the negative effects of maladaptive coping strategies. A dyadic coping framework is used to examine the social context of coping, with a focus on the role of the spouse in rumination, catastrophizing, emotional expression, and positive reappraisal as responses to family stress, pain, and chronic illness.

This chapter describes the method that the author and his colleagues developed to study the influence of personality characteristics on people's naturally occurring social interactions. This method, the unstructured dyadic interaction paradigm, has been used in psychological research for more than three decades. The dyad members' personal traits and characteristics are typically assessed by means of a research survey that takes place before they are scheduled to participate in a laboratory session. During the laboratory session, the dyad members' initial interaction in a “waiting room” is videotaped unobtrusively, without their knowledge. The resulting tapes are then coded for the frequency and duration of interaction behaviors such as interpersonal distance, body orientation, initiating conversation, talking, asking questions, acknowledging, gazing, mutual gazing, and smiling/laughing.

Clinicians describe joint attention difficulties such as a lack of gaze-following, pointing, and showing as the most significant problems that are seen in children with autism. What psychological impairment prevents these behaviours from appearing? This chapter takes one kind of joint attention difficulty — the lack of gaze-following in children with autism — and outlines the proposal that this impairment arises from an orienting impairment that arises early in development. It argues that despite an ability to orient, shift, and disengage attention to objects, children with autism have a very basic difficulty in dyadic orienting to other people that has impact on predictive gaze-following ability and on the development of subsequent symbolic skills.

This chapter introduces a new model of infant-mother interaction — the ‘Dyadic States of Consciousness’ (DSC). In an infant-mother interaction, each individual communicates their affective evaluation of the state of what is going on in the interaction. In response to the induction of meaning in the other, infants and mothers adjust their behaviour to maintain coordinated dyadic state. When the mutual induction is successful, a DSC is formed, meanings from the other' state of consciousness (SOC) are incorporated, and their SOCs gain coherence and complexity.

Linear vector functions of vectors, and the related dyadic notation, are important in the study of rigid body motion and the covariant formulations of relativistic mechanics. These functions have a rich structure, with up to nine independent parameters needed to characterise them, and vector outputs that need not even have the same directions as the vector inputs. The subject of linear vector operators merits a chapter to itself not only for its importance in analytical mechanics, but also because study of it will help the reader to master the operator formalism of quantum mechanics. This chapter defines linear operators and discusses operators and matrices as well as special operators, dyadics, resolution of unity, complex vectors and operators, real and complex inner products, eigenvectors and eigenvalues, eigenvectors of real symmetric operator, eigenvectors of real anti-symmetric operator, normal operators, determinant and trace of normal operator, eigen-dyadic expansion of normal operator, functions of normal operators, exponential function, and Dirac notation.

This chapter develops techniques that allow relativistically covariant calculations to be done in an elegant manner and introduces what are known as fourvectors. Fourvectors are analogous to the familiar vectors in three-dimensional Cartesian space (termed threevectors), except that, in additional to the three spatial components, fourvectors will have an additional zeroth component associated with time. This additional component allows us to deal with the fact that the Lorentz transformation of special relativity transforms time as well as spatial coordinates. The theory of fourvectors and operators is presented using an invariant notation. The concept of fourvectors and tensors is discussed in the simple context of special relativity, as well as the choice of metric, relativistic interval, space-time diagram, general fourvectors and construction of new fourvectors, covariant and contravariant components, general Lorentz transformations, transformation of components, examples of Lorentz transformations, gradient fourvector, manifest covariance, formal covariance, fourvector operators, fourvector dyadics, wedge products, and manifestly covariant form of Maxwell’s equations.

The purpose of this chapter is to explain how the author came to critically examine the pervasive, hegemonic understandings of sexual relationships that condemn cheating while holding monogamy as a moral ideal. This chapter highlights how multiple factors in the relational and cultural context influence how young men view monogamy, open sexual relationships, and cheating; why they cheat and how they rectify their cheating in relation with their esteem for monogamy. It also provides a brief description of the theories utilized, including the dyadic dissonance theory.

The premise of this chapter is that much of men’s cheating is rational. Cheating emerges as a rational response to the irrational social expectations of monogamy. In order to theoretically explain how it is that we live in a culture in which people of all sexual orientations desire sexual fidelity and loath cheating, but nonetheless end up doing both, the author develops a multidisciplinary model of human relationships, the dyadic dissonance theory. It lays the theoretical groundwork for the book, drawing on empirical research in sociology, psychology, evolutionary psychology, biology, and neuroscience to explicate the dyadic dissonance theory through qualitative sociological research