My primary research interests concern close relationships and evolutionary psychology. To analyze these issues, I use dynamical social psychology. This paradigm is concerned not only with outcomes, but also how an individual comes to these decisions. I use the mouse paradigm, a method that allows me to capture real-time shifts in attitudes. The mouse paradigm is a flexible tool that outputs a subject’s cursor position into a text document, which is then analyzed with MatLab tools. Using this method, I am able to uncover states which a person visits frequently, and does not move away from. I am also able to analyze the variability in a person’s evaluative trajectory, and the positivity or negativity of a person’s evaluation.
Currently, these methods are being used to evaluate how young men decide on a mating strategy. Given positive or negative feedback, I can use a male’s attractor characteristics to determine whether he will adopt a short-term mating strategy or a long-term mating strategy. In the future, I will expand this line of research to shed light on female’s mating strategies.
I also use cross recurrence quantification analysis (CRQA) to analyze coupled oscillators. Within an interpersonal context, dyads are invited to the lab to describe a conflict they’ve had. I analyze their evaluative trajectories using CRQA, which gives a measure of how coupled each dyad is. I can then analyze how other aspects, such as personality measures and attractor profiles, affect the quality of their relationships. In the future, I will extend this line of research to include a more diverse sampling of participants, such as married couples, and perform a longitudinal study to examine how relationships change and are strengthened (or become less strong) over time.
Christopher Brooks 