SAGE Journal Articles
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Abstract: It is well established that individuals who engage in more positive social interactions report a broad array of benefit relative to those with fewer positive social interactions. Yet less is known about how, within individuals, naturally occurring social interactions in daily life relate to momentary indicators of health (e.g., mood, psychological, and physiological stress). The current study used ecological momentary assessment (EMA) to examine these within-person relationships, as well as complementary between-person relationships, among 115 adults (75% female; Mage = 41.21). Participants completed six EMA surveys per day for 3 days to report on whether they experienced any social interactions and whether the interactions were pleasant as well as on their mood, pain, tiredness, interest, and perceived stress; they also provided a salivary cortisol sample after each EMA survey. Multilevel modeling analyses showed that individuals felt more happiness and interest, and less sadness, tiredness, and pain, during moments when they were engaged in a social interaction versus when they were not. Individuals also reported less stress during more pleasant versus less pleasant social interactions. When examining between-person effects, we found evidence that people who gave more pleasant interactions generally reported more positive outcomes. This study presents evidence for intraindividual links between social interactions and momentary health indicators in daily life.
Journal Article 2: Hample, D. (2016). A theory of interpersonal goals and situations. Communication Research, 43, 344–371.
Abstract: This article tests a resolution of the difficulties in specifying how goals and situations relate to one another. The new theory suggests a distinction among situational features. “Reasonably apparent” features are those that are fairly obvious at the start of an interaction. “Subjective” features are emergent and depend on a participant’s experience of the interaction. The proposed theory is that reasonably apparent situation features cause primary goals, which cause subjective situational characteristics, which in turn activate secondary goals. In Study 1 (n = 461), results of analysis of open-ended situational descriptions were consistent with this new theory. The difficulties in testing complex causal relations with categorical data led to Study 2 (n = 1,435), which also supported the new theory.
Abstract: Many questions within the relationship literature are concerned with the similarity between individuals or the agreement of perceptions. There are a number of different methods used to assess these questions (e.g., correlation, profile correlation, and squared difference scores), and there are special considerations that need to be included when analyzing data of this sort (e.g., correction for mean levels). We provide an overview of when these different methods are most appropriate and recommendations for applying the different statistical techniques. We also include an example data set to demonstrate how these analyses should be performed and how results may differ based on the techniques used.
Journal Article 4: Yilmaz, G. (2016). What you do and how you speak matter. Journal of Language & Social Psychology, 35, 76–97. doi:10.1177/0261927X15575772
Abstract: The primary goal of the present study is to investigate complex relationships among interpersonal behaviors, language use, and group performance in short-term virtual teams. Thirty-four, four-person groups completed a decision-making task in real time using an online chat program. The findings suggest that having a negatively communicating collaborator in the group is associated with higher group performance compared with having a positively communicating collaborator. Also, linguistic style matching is a stronger predictor of group performance for groups with a positively communicating confederate compared with groups with a negatively communicating confederate. The findings are discussed within the theoretical framework of shared mental models, minority influence, and communication accommodation theory.