Social relationships are often seen as the most important aspect of many people's lives. Furthermore, those with high quality or quantity of social networks have been shown to have a decreased risk ...of mortality. However, social support does not always protect against negative outcomes, which may, in part, be a result of relationship quality; wholly supportive ties may be more protective than ambivalent ties—those with elements of both positivity and negativity. Additionally, support recipients' expectations of their friends may be at play. In this study, participants were randomly assigned to bring either a supportive or an ambivalent friend to the lab, where they either were given instructions that included no explicit expectations or a more explicit expectation for their friend to provide support during a stressful conversation task. We measured perceptions of stress and support, cardiovascular reactivity measures of heart rate and blood pressure (HR & BP), and coded behavior. Analyses of behavior of the friend revealed marginal main effects for both expectation and relationship type such that there were more emotionally supportive behaviors when participants were expecting support or interacting with a supportive friend. There was also a significant interaction between support and expectation, such that supportive friends whose partners were expecting support exhibited the greatest number of emotionally supportive behaviors. Ambivalent friends also exhibited significantly more negative behaviors. Analyses of physiological data revealed a trend for a marginal SBP reactivity main effect for relationship type, where those with a supportive friend had lower reactivity. There was also a trend towards a main effect for expectation, where those expecting support had higher reactivity. Of particular importance, we found a marginally significant epoch by relationship type interaction, which is consistent with our prior work, and suggests that the differences between supportive and ambivalent ties are most evident during stressful situations. There was no evidence that behavior or perceptions of friends mediated the link between relationship type and SBP reactivity. This study replicates and extends prior work on ambivalent ties, particularly by outlining objective behavioral differences, and also suggests that expectation may serve to enhance the support process. Implications, limitations, and future directions are discussed.
Cancer impacts the quality of life of those diagnosed as well as their spouse caregivers, in addition to potentially influencing their day-to-day behaviors. There is evidence that effective ...communication between spouses can improve well-being related to cancer but it is difficult to efficiently evaluate the quality of daily life interactions using manual annotation frameworks. Automated recognition of behaviors based on the interaction cues of speakers can help analyze interactions in such couples and identify behaviors which are beneficial for effective communication. In this paper, we present and detail a dataset of dyadic interactions in 85 real-life cancer-afflicted couples and a set of observational behavior codes pertaining to interpersonal communication attributes. We describe and employ neural network-based systems for classifying these behaviors based on turn-level acoustic and lexical speech patterns. Furthermore, we investigate the effect of controlling for factors such as gender, patient/caregiver role and conversation content on behavior classification. Analysis of our preliminary results indicates the challenges in this task due to the nature of the targeted behaviors and suggests that techniques incorporating contextual processing might be better suited to tackle this problem.
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