May 13: Jennifer Arter, "You can pick your friends..." An evolutionary framework for human friendship

Jennifer Arter, Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Psychology, will present her research: Abstract: Many species employ conditional strategies for reproduction or survival. In other words, each individual “chooses” one of several possible phenotypes in order to maximize survival or reproductive advantage given the specific ecological niche (e.g., Moran, 1992). Can conditional strategies explain individual variation in humans’ selection of their friends? Evidence suggests that individuals are sensitive to characteristics of the self, friend, and environmental conditions when choosing friends (Fehr, 1996; Rose, 1985; Verbrugge, 1977), and that a person’s economic, social, and environmental circumstances influence how they form and organize their friendships (Adams & Allan, 1998; Feld & Carter, 1998). In this dissertation I hypothesized that humans have evolved a definable range of conditional friendship strategies, and that an individual’s strategy will relate to her traits and to features of her social and non-social environment. I also hypothesized that individuals would be able to perceive and detect reliable signals (Cronk, 2005; Searcy & Nowicki, 2005; Smith, 1994) of these strategies in others, enabling them to choose friends whose traits are most desirable to them. Results partly supported these hypotheses; individuals do seem to have a reliable range of friendship preferences which relate to their own traits, and they do seem able to pick up on others’ signals of these strategies, but it is not clear whether preferences for others’ signals are more global or vary more by individual. The studies in this dissertation propose and begin to test a novel theoretical framework for studying human friendship, and they suggest avenues for future work that should capitalize on the framework of evolutionary social psychology described here. 3105 Tolman Hall 12:00-1:30pm

May 6: Development on the Streets: Research with Homeless Children and Youth in San Francisco, CA & Kisumu, Kenya

Colette Auerswald, MD, MS, is an Associate Professor at the University of California at San Francisco School of Medicine and the University of California, Berkeley School of Public Health. She is a pediatrician specialized in adolescent medicine and principal investigator of the Youth in Social Environments Group (Y-SE). She has been engaged in community-based research regarding the health of homeless youth in San Francisco for sixteen years. Her research interests include the study of the contribution of cultural and social factors to HIV and STD-related behaviors in marginalized youth populations (including homeless youth, low-income youth of color, and LGBTQ youth in San Francisco, and street children in East Africa); the sampling of hard-to-reach populations; the role of social networks in adolescent health; and the use of mixed qualitative and quantitative methods in adolescent health research. She is currently interested in the role of stigma in the lived of marginalized youth and developing structural interventions to address stigma in their lives.