Open Day: Lab. Experience

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# Open Day: Lab. Experience
### Dr. Thomas Pollet (<span class="citation">@tvpollet</span>), Northumbria University
### 2019-02-22 | <a href="http://tvpollet.github.io/disclaimer">disclaimer</a>

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## Survey.

Please complete our survey:
<a href="http://gensi.cocolab.org" target="_blank">here</a>!

Everybody can take part!

Please carefully read the instructions.

Please complete it individually.

Connor will be around if you run into problems.

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## What did you just do?

* Personality questionnaire. (Introversion/Extraversion)

* Social network questionnaire.

* Loneliness questionnaire.

But:

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## Let's take a big, big step back.

* Species vary in whether they are group-living or not.

* Our primate 'cousins'.

.pull-left[
<img src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4d/Agilegibbon.jpg" width="600px" style="display: block; margin: auto;" />
]
.pull-right[
<img src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a5/Vervet_monkeys_grooming.JPG" width="600px" style="display: block; margin: auto;" />
]

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## Dunbar's Number.

* 'Natural' limits to the number of people we can know. **Time** + **Cognition**

* 150 number.

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## How do we know this (Dunbar 2008)?

* Anthropological / Archeological data. (Village sizes of Yanomami (Brazil/Venezuela), Aborginal Clans, Archeological findings)

* Religious communities (Hutterites)

* Social network studies / Surveys (e.g., Christmas cards, Hill & Dunbar, 2003)

--> 'applications': Goretex.

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## Social network: Not homogenous.

* Diagram by Barbara Guidi.
<img src="Dunbars-circles.png" width="600px" style="display: block; margin: auto;" />

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## Support clique / Sympathy group.

* Dunbar (2016) argues for +/- (max.) 5 for the support clique (support group) and around max. 15 for the sympathy group.

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## What does Personality have to do with this?

* Big 5 / Big 6 (HEXACO): Honesty/Humility - Emotionality - eXtraversion - Agreeableness - Conscientiousness - Openness to Experience.

* One dimension: Introversion/Extraversion.

* Stable individual differences.

--> Do people who are extraverted have more friends, also at these inner layers?

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## Previous research on Extraversion and 'offline' networks.

* Roberts et al. (2008) -  extraversion positively associated support group but not sympathy group size (N=168)

* Pollet et al. (2011) - extraversion positively associated support group, sympathy group size and outer layer (N=117)

* Molho et al. (2016) - extraversion positively associated with support group size but not sympathy group size. (N=525)

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## Personality and Facebook networks.

* Brown et al. (in preparation). - Extraversion associated with Facebook Network size (and number of clusters). No effects on Facebook structures

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## Social network structure

--> These studies did not examine the *structure* of these layers. What you completed will allow us to look at this more closely.

Illustration by Lee et al. (2013)

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## Final component: Loneliness (Russell et al. 1996)

* Emotional and social isolation.

* Research shows that Introverts tend to report more loneliness (e.g., Saklofske & Yackulic, 1989) but we do not know how it relates to support group size? Is it the same for introverts versus extroverts? How does it relate to structure?

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## Why does this matter?

* Loneliness equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day (Holt-Lunstad et al., 2010)

* National campaign to end loneliness.

* If we want to tackle loneliness, we need to understand it better. First step for developing interventions?

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## Example of research-led teaching.

* An example of Connor's research.

* You will conduct your own research in labs. For example, on body image, memory. Some of these will include surveys. But also qualitative research, observations, experiments, etc.

* Your very own student project!

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## Future work. Perhaps even your project?

* Does Instagram help to reduce loneliness?

* How do relationships form when people like yourself move to university? How do they relate to loneliness and living on vs. off campus?

* Loneliness in the elderly. Is it a matter of _any_ contact or specific contacts? Can we use Facetime/Skype to alleviate loneliness?

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## Any Questions?

[http://tvpollet.github.io](http://tvpollet.github.io)

Twitter: @tvpollet