An affect in its own right: Investigating the case for the independence of social safeness from PA and NA
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Social safeness is the warm soothing affect system that is theorized to motivate and reinforce social connection and attachment processes (Gilbert et al., 2008). Together with positive and negative affect (PA and NA), it comprises Gilbert’s tripartite model of affect (Gilbert et al., 2008). This three-dimensional model stands in contrast to two-dimensional models including the model from which PA and NA were derived (Watson et al., 1988). The independence of social safeness from and precise relationships with PA and NA are not well established. The aim of the present work was to investigate the precise relationship of social safeness with PA and NA using a variety of designs and populations.Article One investigated the independence of social safeness from PA and NA in three samples. Sample One was a cross-sectional community study (N = 1889) recruited using the online tool Mechanical Turk. Samples Two (N = 93) and Three (N = 99) were daily diary studies that recruited university students who completed the study both in the lab and online. The independence of safeness from PA and NA was examined first factorially using exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis. Second, safeness was regressed on PA and NA in a structural equation model (SEM) to determine whether its reliable variance could be fully explained by PA and/or NA. Third, in Samples Two and Three, the unique relationships of social safeness with theoretically relevant constructs were examined in multi-level SEM. These constructs included perceived stress; perceived, received and given social support; and self-reassurance. Social safeness was found to be factorially distinct in every sample. While PA and NA did predict substantial variance in social safeness, they were by no means able to fully account for safeness’s reliable variance. Social safeness had significant bivariate relationships with virtually all stress, support, and reassurance indicators. It showed unique relationships with all indicators at the within-person level and with stress and perceived support at the between-persons level. In summary, social safeness showed strong evidence of independence in all three sets of analyses.Article Two aimed to further investigate the independence of social safeness from PA and NA while also examining its unique relationships with clinical symptom change. This study was conducted with 92 participants recruited from 18 Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR: Kabat-Zinn, 1982) groups, 65 of whom completed the program. MBSR is a seven-week program of meditation and mindfulness training. The sample had elevated levels of both anxiety and depressive symptoms at intake. This study replicated the analyses from Article One supporting the independence of social safeness from PA and NA factorially and in variance explained. Social safeness predicted several clinically relevant personality constructs: mindfulness, self-reassurance, self-criticism, and life satisfaction. It predicted changes in anxiety and depressive symptoms over the course of the group intervention. All analyses were conducted with and without controlling for PA and NA. Social safeness had a bivariate relationship with all study variables except the acceptance subscale of mindfulness. It uniquely predicted self-reassurance, self-criticism, and life satisfaction. Safeness uniquely predicted change in anxiety but not depressive symptoms.Taken together, Articles One and Two strongly supported the independence of social safeness from PA and NA, implying that two-factor models are insufficient to fully describe self-reported affect, and a third factor, social safeness, is required. The present work provided important empirical support for the relationship of safeness with support processes related to attachment. The relationships of safeness with clinical symptomology and personality variables supported its clinical utility and the conceptual framework underlying Compassion Focused Therapy (Gilbert, 2014)
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".