Rough Draft Research Paper Zack Larmer

Zack Larmer

Exposition and Argumentation: Section HM
Erin Kelley
1 Nov 2016

Research Proposal Final Draft 1: The Modern Relationship and Social Media

The topic of this paper is essentially the ideas of “love”, or “an intense feeling of deep affection” and the ways in which modern technology - specifically social media, or “websites and applications that enable users to create and share content or to participate in social networking” - can affect the ways in which we give and receive it through the “relationships” (primarily “serious intimate relationships” or relationships involving physical or emotional intimacy which have been ongoing for several years) which social media affects. This topic will cover the common held beliefs about “love” and will describe it as something  much simpler than the “butterflies in your chest, warm feeling” that people often think of “love” as by looking at the idea of “love” and the reasons why we form certain bonds with certain people from a scientific standpoint, focusing primarily on biology and psychology. My paper will also expand on social media and the ways in which it can impact our idea of “love” and whom we give it to.  Essentially, my essay will probe the question, how has social media redefined our understanding of love and relationships (again, primarily in regards to “serious intimate relationships), with one another and the ways - both positive and negative - in which it can affect existing relationships between us? A secondary question which my paper may focus on is how does social media affect the ways in which we sexually identify ourselves? That part may be added later on depending on the amount of data I’m able to find regarding my primary and that secondary topic
            The biggest controversy here is the idea of “love” in itself. “Love” is often romanticized and made exclusive to one or two “special people” in your life, but looking at the idea of “love” from a scientific standpoint, one which focuses specifically on the psychological and biological processes that create this feeling, I will take a side that refutes these common held beliefs regarding “love” and discuss how the very thing we think we make exclusive to one or two people in our lives is actually something which we display to almost everyone we regularly interact with, including those we interact with through social media. This leads to the hypothesis of how this very uncontrollable, unpredictable, yet very prevalent emotion can not only allow us to form relationships with others which can become intimate and last several years (hence, becoming “serious intimate relationships”), but can also damage the relationships we already have established and that social media can be a contributor to either of those ideas.

The way in which I will address these ideas is first by understanding the biological processes that control the emotion in question and psychological aspects regarding the emotion shown in children, and the means through which they contribute to our making of relationships. The essay, “Love 2.0: How Our Supreme Emotion Affects Everything We Feel, Think, Do, and Become” by Barbara Fredrickson discusses these biological processes by examining three main contributors to this emotion - oxytocin, your vaus nerve (both of which will be described later in the essay), and the human brain.  “Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other” by Sherry Turkle discusses the psychological effects of digital programs and machines designed to act life-like on humans, specifically children, by analyzing the way in which children interact with different toys and what they deem as “living” or “nonliving”. This will be used to describe how a desire for affirmation can be overwhelming to some who will look anywhere to find that sense of safety and social media parallels this idea of finding affirmation in nonliving bots and has implications for the future of relationships. I will additionally refer to outside sources such as the Health Hormone Network, Nature, statistics presented by the Pew Research Center regarding online dating and social media, sources to be determined which contradict my own ideas for a sense of contrast within the essay, as well as other sources yet to be determined, all of which will ultimately support my own ideas.

            Both Barbara Fredrickson and Sherry Turkle discuss what causes the emotional aspects of relationships, but from different viewpoints. Fredrickson analyzes the biological aspects which create the feeling of “love”, contributing this emotion to a combination of a chemical in our brain known as oxytocin, a specific nerve known as the vagus nerve, and the brain itself.

            Oxytocin, is a chemical “produced by the hypothalamus and secreted by pituitary gland” which plays an important role not only in childbirth, but also plays roles in “human behaviors and social interaction” such as “recognition, sexual arousal, trust, anxiety, and even stress levels” (What Does Oxytocin Do?). While oxytocin plays a role in all of these things, it’s not constantly at a high level in your body. Oxytocin fluctuates in concentration within your body over time and thus affects your decision making and behavior per situation. An experiment described by Fredrickson and published by Nature utilized an oxytocin nasal spray and a placebo nasal spray to affect how much money investors would give to trustees with the chance of not getting any money in return at all or of receiving back a higher amount than they gave. According to this experiment, “trustees [those who received money from investors and had the option to keep all of it or send some back] given oxytocin do not show more trustworthy behaviour [than the placebo groups]” but,  “oxytocin specifically affects the trusting behaviour of investors [those who chose how much money to give to the trustees]” (Oxytocin Increases Trust in Humans). Additionally, the more trusting we are, the more oxytocin our bodies produce - it’s a positive feedback loop of sorts. Oxytocin, however, does not create a sort of “blind trust” within us, but rather largely controls our “fight-or-flight” response and the capacity of our trust which we’re willing to give. According to Fredrickson, “[oxytocin] heightens your attunement to cues that signal whether others are sincere or not. Through eye contact and close attention to all manner of smiles-and the embodied simulations such visual intake triggers-your gut instincts about whom to trust and whom not to trust become more reliable...oxytocin helps you pick up on cues that signal another person’s goodwill and guides you to approach them with your own” (Fredrickson 116). Oxytocin can essentially sharpen your ability to tell whether someone is being genuine or not and help you evaluate how to act in different situations as a result of those feelings it inspires. Oxytocin plays a key role in determining whether or not we can trust someone, but it’s not the only biological factor affecting our ability to build relationships with one another.

The second biological factor mentioned by Fredrickson which controls the “love” we have for one another is the vagus nerve. The main functions of your vagus nerve, according to Fredrickson, include helping you make better eye contact with the person with whom you’re speaking, it allows you to time different facial expressions in conjunction with the other person, and even shifts your ears slightly so you can hear someone better. In essence, your vagus nerve controls how socially flexible and adaptable you are through something called your vagal tone. Vagal tone is a sign of how well your vagus nerve works, as determined “by tracking your heart rate with your breathing rate” (Fredrickson 118). The higher your vagal tone, the more adaptable you are in social situations, the more control you have over your emotions, and it also results in a “higher loving potential” (Fredrickson 119). Your vagal tone is important for successful social interactions and building relationships with others, but your brain is also a large contributor to this success.

An experiment described by Fredrickson studied how brain activity between a speaker and listener can resemble one another with a slight delay, and how the listener’s brain can even make anticipatory decisions of which areas the speaker’s brain will be active in the next coming second or two to successfully mirror and synchronize with it. The synchronization of brain activity – between speaker and listener – is known as “neural coupling” and the more synchronized the activity of your brains, the more attuned to the other person you are. The abstract, published by Harvard Business Review, describes how a story told by a student within an fMRI machine (functional magnetic resonance imaging machine used to make detailed images of your organs and tissues) which tracked the storyteller’s brain activity was later played back for listeners who also had their brain activity monitored. After hearing the story, those who had more synchronized brain activity with the brain activity of the speaker, were able to recall more details from the story than those who had less synchronization. The more the listener’s brain activity synchronized with the speaker’s, the more they “clicked”, and the more the listener enjoyed the story. While Fredrickson primarily concerns herself with the biological functions that create the unique feeling of love we’ve all experienced, Turkle concerns herself primarily with the psychological effects love has on us.

Turkle begins her essay with a personal anecdote of the mid 1970’s when she spent studying under, and later co-teaching with a Joseph Weizenbaum. They worked with computer bots – or programs that were designed to act life-like. The bot they primarily worked with, ELIZA, was able to recognize strings of words and spit out a response based on those words. “To ‘My mother is making me angry,’ the program might respond, ‘Tell me more about your mother,’ or perhaps, ‘Why do you feel so negatively about your mother?’” (Turkle 458). Being a computer program, ELIZA didn’t actually understand relationships, emotions and titles such as “mother” or “angry”, but it still managed to seem lifelike enough that students soon began to use ELIZA as a method of venting, describing incidents that happened in their life that are worrying them or that upset them. Despite ELIZA not being human, it’s ability to analyze words and produce a response, which may seem genuine coming from a real human being, students felt connected to it. Fredrickson would hold that even though a bot can’t have brain activity, the results of its responses resemble the aforementioned story-telling experiment that studied neural coupling. By getting a sort of affirmation from something that seems just life-like enough, the students’ brains were active in areas that would be active had they been talking to another real person. Additionally, this sort of affirmation and venting could increase levels of oxytocin within the students to help them calm down and momentarily forget some of their troubles because as mentioned before, the more trusting we are, the more oxytocin our bodies produce and since oxytocin in part regulates our stress levels, venting to a computer could have a positive impact on the emotional state of the students venting at that very moment. In essence, the students were creating an emotional bond with ELIZA – they were showing signs of love for a computer.