Programm

Social bonds come in a variety of qualities and quantities, stretching from early life attachment to maternal and paternal care-givers, across romantic relationships to life-long friendships. As a highly complex phenomenon, they can be understood on a social, biological and psychological level. This symposium aims at exploring various aspects of the bio-psychological intricacies of human relationships, both in the laboratory and in everyday life.

Eileen Lashani will be presenting a study on both physiological and psychological countertransference reactions to different attachment narratives. In her study, participants showed differential psychological, heart rate and skin-conductance reactivity when confronted with secure, avoidant or anxious attachment experiences.

Next, Ekaterina Schneider will report on how childhood touch experiences, current intimate touch, and attitudes toward touch relate to social relationships, mental health, and hormonal states in everyday life.

Expanding from the individual to the dyadic level, Magdalena Degering will introduce a study on empathic stress in friendships, where one dyad member faces a psychosocial stressor while the other initially observes passively before being permitted to provide help. Preliminary data on helping behavior and its determining factors will be presented.

Last, Dora Hopf will expand the social bond from the laboratory to everyday life, examining psychoneuroendocrinological synchrony in older couples. Cortisol, oxytocin and alpha-amylase dyadic covariation were investigated both in terms of their overall linkage and the potential moderation of real life events.