Interlocutors converge on names to refer to entities. For example, a speaker might refer to a novel looking object as the jellyfish and, once identified, the listener will too. The hypothesized mechanism behind such referential precedents is a subject of debate. The common ground view claims that listeners register the object as well as the identity of the speaker who coined the label. The linguistic view claims that, once established, precedents are treated by listeners like any other linguistic unit, i.e. without needing to keep track of the speaker. To test predictions from each account, we used visual-world eyetracking, which allows observations in real time, during a standard referential communication task. Participants had to select objects based on instructions from two speakers. In the critical condition, listeners sought an object with a negative reference such as not the jellyfish. We aimed to determine the extent to which listeners rely on the linguistic input, common ground or both. We found that initial interpretations were based on linguistic processing only and that common ground considerations do emerge but only after 1000 ms. Our findings support the idea that—at least temporally—linguistic processing can be isolated from common ground.

Social thermoregulation theory posits that modern human relationships are pleisiomorphically organized around body temperature regulation. In two studies (N=1755) designed to test the principles from this theory, we used supervised machine learning to identify social and non-social factors that relate to core body temperature. This data-driven analysis found that complex social integration (CSI), defined as the number of high contact roles one engages in, is a critical predictor of core body temperature. We further used a cross-validation approach to show that colder climates relate to higher levels of CSI, which in turn relates to higher CBT (when climates get colder). These results suggest that despite modern affordances for regulating body temperature, people still rely on social warmth to buffer their bodies against the cold.

Attachment theory was built around the idea that infants rely on others to survive, and often, forgotten, that survival hinged on coping with environmental demands. Adult attachment reports have instead been organized around people’s subjective experience of safety and security in relationships. To resolve the gap between infant’s physical needs and adult attachment experiences, we made a first step, by developing the Social Thermoregulation and Risk Avoidance Questionnaire (STRAQ-1) in 12 countries (N=1510), providing a complementary measure to identify biological drives formative to attachment. We conjectured that co-regulatory patterns of temperature and stress are foundational to attachment styles and on this basis used a naïve bootstrapping method to find a robust solution, conducting seven exploratory factor analyses in an exploratory-confirmatory fashion. We identified 23 (out of 57) items in 4 subscales: Social Thermoregulation (Total Omega =.83), High Temperature Sensitivity (.83), Solitary Thermoregulation (.77), and Risk Avoidance (.57). In terms of external validity, we also found that the STRAQ-1 relates to emotion regulation strategies broadly and, importantly, relates to individual differences in attachment specifically, which in turn mediates the relationship with stress and health (making the scale face valid). Our approach provides a robust first effort in identifying biological mechanisms underlying attachment formation.

Development and Validation of the Social Thermoregulation and Risk Avoidance Questionnaire (STRAQ-1) How do interpersonal relationships form and what are they for? Bowlby's (1969) model of interpersonal relationships proposed that caregivers (early in life) and partners (later in life) serves as a secure base from which to explore. The concept of interpersonal attachments has been associated with nearly every important aspect of human psychology, ranging from individual differences in emotion regulation (Fraley, Waller, & Brennan, 2000; Sbarra & Hazan, 2008) to mental health (Schore, 2001). In the social psychological literature, individual differences of attachment are mostly assessed through self-reports that tap people's phenomenological experiences of felt safety and security in their past relationships and how these past relationships influence present appraisals of relationships. However, in the literature on self-reported differences in attachment, it is overlooked that the behavioral attachment system was originally thought to have evolved as it benefited infant survival, revolving, in most animals around the social distribution of temperature regulation (i.e., social thermoregulation) and risk avoidance (Beckes