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Embedded within the sociocultural context of romantic relationships are features such as race, culture, neighborhoods, the legal system, and governmental policy. Due to the inherent difficulties with studying large structures and systems, little work has been done at the macro level in relationship science. This volume spotlights the complex interplay between romantic relationships and these structural systems, including varied insights from experts in the field. In turn, more diverse and generalizable research programs on the social ecology of relationships can be developed, helping to facilitate advances in theory. Scholars and students of relationship science in psychology, sociology, communication, and family studies will benefit from these discussions. This title is part of the Flip it Open programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

This book answers one of the most critical questions of our time, does the vast connectivity afforded by mobile and social media lead to more personal connection with one another? It offers an evidence-based account of the role of technology in close relationships that confronts such pressing questions as where face-to-face communication belongs in this digital age, whether social media is harmful to our well-being, and how online communication spills-over into our offline communication and relationships. Each chapter explores the positive and negative influences of media on relationships, coalescing into a balanced assessment of how technological advancement has altered our connections with each other. By zeroing in on communication with the most important people in our lives and tracing the changes in computer-mediated communication over time, Relating Through Technology focuses the conversation about media on its use in our everyday lives and relationships.

Interdependence theory is a powerful and applicable theory that has shaped the study of interpersonal relationships for decades, providing foundational constructs and elucidating key assumptions within the burgeoning field of relationship science. Research guided by interdependence theory sheds light on the diverse phenomena within ongoing relationships, including the emergence of co-operation, trust, dependence, power, and relationship maintenance. At its core, interdependence theory pinpoints key elements of daily interactions that predict specific experiences and outcomes that people have in different situations. This handbook goes further to explain how interdependence theory continues to be used fruitfully in research, driving our current understanding of relational processes. We invite you to enter the world of interdependence and discover what top scholars across disciplines are discussing in their efforts to fully understand close, intimate relationships.

In a world where we have an endless number of options to swipe through, why do many of us repeatedly return to previous romantic partners? This book addresses this question by synthesizing the research on relationships that break up and renew (i.e.'on-again, off-again'relationships) from various disciplines including communication, social psychology, family studies, and sociology. It explicates the various types and trajectories of on-again, off-again relationships, and uncovers how these relationships are different from those that do not split up and reconcile. Because on-again, off-again relationships challenge traditional notions of relationship stability and highlight the fluctuating nature of relationships, alternative conceptualizations of stability are also reviewed. This book is a theoretical and practical resource for researchers, students, and professionals interested in understanding why partners repeatedly reconcile with ex-partners.

Power is an inherent feature of social interactions, yet it is hard to define and therefore understand. This book is the first to organize current interdisciplinary theorizing and research about power from leading academics in areas such as social psychology, communications, family studies, and public health. It also focuses exclusively on how power operates and affects close relationship processes, while the theoretical insights provided point the way toward new lines of research and understanding. Using specific examples to illustrate complex theoretical explanations and supplying thorough descriptions of the existing literature on power in close relationships, this book is an essential resource for researchers, professionals, students, or laypeople seeking to better understand how power operates in those relationships that are most important to us.

Few communication behaviors are more consequential to the development and maintenance of close relationships than the expression of affection. Indeed, people often use affectionate gestures to initiate or accelerate relationship development. In contrast, the absence of affection in established relationships frequently coincides with relational deterioration. This text explores the scientific research on affection exchange that has emerged from the disciplines of communication, social and clinical psychology, family studies, psychophysiology, sociology, nursing, and behavioral health. Specific points of focus include the individual and relational benefits - including health benefits - of affectionate behavior, the significant detriments associated with lacking sufficient affection, and the risks of expressing affection. It also discusses the primary social and cultural influences on affection exchange, critiques principal theories and measurement models, and offers suggestions for future empirical research.

Close relationships are a vital part of people's daily lives; thus family members, friends, and romantic partners play an integral role in people's health and well-being. Understanding the ways in which close relationships both shape and reflect people's health and wellness is an important area of inquiry. Showcasing studies from various disciplines that are on the cutting-edge of research exploring the interdependence between health and relationships, this collection highlights several relationship processes that are instrumental in the maintenance of health and the management of illness, including interpersonal influence, information management, uncertainty, social support, and communication. Although the existing health literature is rich with knowledge about individual and ecological factors that are influential in promoting certain health behaviors, the relationship scholars featured in this volume have much to contribute in terms of documenting the interpersonal dynamics that are involved in experiences of health and illness.

Health and Illness in Close Relationships provides an integrated theoretical framework for understanding the complexities of health trajectories and relationship processes. It is the first volume to review and synthesize current empirical evidence and associated theoretical constructs from the literature on health and illness in close relationships across the social and behavioral sciences. In doing so, it provides a unique cross-disciplinary understanding of how health and illness redefine relationships. The volume also maps out an explanatory framework of how the pathways and processes of close relationships pose considerations for resilience and flourishing or, on the contrary, for relational and health decline. It will appeal to researchers and students across psychology, communication, and relationship studies, as well as to health professionals who are interested in understanding how health conditions can shape or be shaped by patients'close relationships.

The Ape that Understood the Universe is the story of the strangest animal in the world: the human animal. It opens with a question: How would an alien scientist view our species? What would it make of our sex differences, our sexual behavior, our child-rearing patterns, our moral codes, our religions, our languages, and science? The book tackles these issues by drawing on ideas from two major schools of thought: evolutionary psychology and cultural evolutionary theory. The guiding assumption is that humans are animals, and that like all animals, we evolved to pass on our genes. At some point, however, we also evolved the capacity for culture - and from that moment, culture began evolving in its own right. This transformed us from a mere ape into an ape capable of reshaping the planet, travelling to other worlds, and understanding the vast universe of which we're but a tiny, fleeting fragment.

Close relationships are an important and desired aspect of the human experience; however, as individuals pursue intimacy and connection with others, they will encounter a variety of questions about the nature, status, and future of their relationships. Consequently, uncertainty is an inevitable and unavoidable element of close relationships. It can arise in response to a variety of relational circumstances and can shape the ways that partners think, feel, and act toward one another. This book summarizes the expansive body of theoretical and empirical research regarding the nature of uncertainty, the conditions that promote uncertainty about relational involvement, and the emotional, cognitive, and communicative outcomes of uncertainty for individuals and their relationships. Based on the robust accumulation of data about uncertainty in close relationships, the book also offers recommendations for coping with ambiguous relational circumstances and proposes new directions for conceptualizing and studying uncertainty in close relationships.

In popular opinion, gratitude means saying'thank you'. While politeness and appreciation are certainly important, gratitude is a larger issue. Appropriately defined, it encompasses the strengthening of human relationships and qualifies as a moral virtue. This important and timely volume provides the conceptual framework for studying the development of gratitude, with a comprehensive and international set of authors approaching the topic from philosophical, psychological, and educational perspectives. The first section provides the theoretical underpinnings for the study of gratitude as a virtue. In the next section, the authors examine the ways in which gratitude develops, including key cross-cultural variations and some possible effects of its development. The final section then considers the links between parent and child gratitude, and the ways in which parents and teachers can help to encourage gratitude, both in their everyday practices and by using literary texts.

The world of dementia care can be a difficult one for carers to navigate, posing new challenges at every stage from diagnosis to end of life. In her ground-breaking investigation, rooted in original empirical data, Rosie Harding explores the regulatory and legal dimensions of caring for a person with dementia. By exploring carers'experiences of dementia care, she critiques the limitations of current approaches to health and social care regulation. This socio-legal work is a new contribution to the study of feminist care ethics, relationality, and vulnerability theory. Duties to Care argues that by understanding the relational contexts that shape everyday experiences of regulatory structures, we will better understand where law is operating to support carers, and where it adds to the difficulties they experience. Ultimately, the challenges that dementia poses will be addressed only if we find solutions that take account of the relationality of life, dementia, and law.

Recent legal developments challenge how valid the concept of mental capacity is in determining whether individuals with impairments can make decisions about their care and treatment. Kong defends a concept of mental capacity but argues that such assessments must consider how relationships and dialogue can enable or disable the decision-making abilities of these individuals. This is thoroughly investigated using an interdisciplinary approach that combines philosophy and legal analysis of the law in England and Wales, the European Court of Human Rights, and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. By exploring key concepts underlying mental capacity, the investigation concludes that both primary relationships and capacity assessments themselves must display key competencies to ensure that autonomy skills are promoted and encouraged. This ultimately provides scope for justifiable interventions into disabling relationships and articulates the dialogical practices that help better situate, interpret, and understand the choices and actions of individuals with impairments.

Men and Sex provides a comprehensive yet accessible account of male sexuality by using the theoretical concept of the'sexual script'to illuminate different aspects of men's sexual behaviour. Graham begins by discussing different theories of sexuality, before providing a more detailed description of sexual script theory. This proposes how male sexual behaviour can be explained as a result of cultural influences modified by individual experience and personality as well as by interaction with others. Individual chapters detail the development of sexual scripts in childhood and adolescence, masturbation, cultural influences on sexuality, heterosexual behaviour, variations and problems in sexual functioning, homosexual behaviour, transsexualism, procreative sex, coercive sexual behaviour, the impact of physical and mental health problems on sexuality, and sexuality and pornography. The concluding chapter looks at the future of male sexuality. The book makes a valuable contribution to the burgeoning literature on masculinity studies.

How can we get the most out of our close relationships? Research in the area of personal relationships continues to grow, but most prior work has emphasized how to overcome negative aspects. This volume demonstrates that a good relationship is more than simply the absence of a bad relationship, and that establishing and maintaining optimal relationships entails enacting a set of processes that are distinct from merely avoiding negative or harmful behaviors. Drawing on recent relationship science to explore issues such as intimacy, attachment, passion, sacrifice, and compassionate goals, the essays in this volume emphasize the positive features that allow relationships to flourish. In doing so, they integrate several theoretical perspectives, concepts, and mechanisms that produce optimal relationships. The volume also includes a section on intensive and abbreviated interventions that have been empirically validated to be effective in promoting the positive features of close relationships.

Emotions are an elemental part of life - they imbue our existence with meaning and purpose, and influence how we engage with the world around us. But we do not just feel our own emotions; we typically express them in the presence of other people. How do our emotional expressions affect others? Moving beyond the traditional intrapersonal perspective, this is the first book dedicated to exploring the pervasive interpersonal dynamics of emotions. Integrating existing theory and research, van Kleef develops the Emotions as Social Information (EASI) theory, a groundbreaking comprehensive framework that explains how emotional expressions influence observers across all domains of life, from close relationships to group settings, conflict and negotiation, customer service, and leader-follower relations. His deeply social perspective sheds new light on the fundamental question of why we have emotions in the first place - the social influence emotions engender may very well constitute their raison d'être.

Few observers of relationship dynamics would dispute the claim of interdependence theorists that a defining feature of close relationships is the extent to which partners influence each other's thoughts, feelings, or behaviors. However, partners do not behave simply in response to each other's behavior; both partners in a given relationship bring themselves - indeed, their selves - into the relationship as well. Not only are individuals'selves enormously complex and rich in content, but so too are the multitude of personality characteristics, including traits, values, attitudes, motives, and emotions, that contribute to selves'richness. Gaines, Jr provides a major integration of research on personality with research on relationship science, and demonstrates how personality constructs can be readily incorporated into the two most influential theories of close relationships: attachment theory and interdependence theory. This study will be of value to scholars in the fields of close relationships, personality psychology, communication studies, and family studies.

Still in the early stages of development, conflict theory presents a growing interest in understanding the economic costs and benefits of conflicts. In this book, Mehrdad Vahabi analyses one type of conflict in particular: manhunting, or predation, in which a dominant power hunts down its prey and the goal of the prey is to escape and thus survive. This contrasts with traditional warfare, in which two (or more) powers enter into a conflict and the goal is to fight to win domination. The economics of escape casts light on costs and benefits of predatory activities, and explores the impact of violence as an impediment to developing countries with respect to assets structure. This book is unprecedented in its research and thought, and develops a new theory of predation in economics that makes a significant contribution to the field.

How do we choose a partner to initiate a relationship with, and what makes us stay in a given relationship over time? These questions are most often pursued by scholars with an emphasis on the internal thoughts, feelings, and motivations of individual decision-makers. Conversely, this volume highlights the importance of considering external influences on individual decision-making in close relationships. Featuring contributions from internationally renowned scholars, the volume is divided into two interrelated sections. The first section considers global and societal influences on romantic relationships and the second focuses on social network and communicative influences on romantic relationships. Taken together, this collection helps us to better understand how external factors influence the internal machinations of those involved in intimate relationships.

In the extensive literature on couples and intimacy, little has been written about knowing and not knowing as people experience and understand them. Based on intensive interviews with thirty-seven adults, this book shows that knowing and not knowing are central to couple relationships. They are entangled in love, sexual attraction, trust, commitment, caring, empathy, decision making, conflict, and many other aspects of couple life. Often the entanglement is paradoxical. For example, many interviewees revealed that they hungered to be known and yet kept secrets from their partner. Many described working hard at knowing their partner well, and yet there were also things about their partner and their partner's past that they wanted not to know. This book's qualitative, phenomenological approach builds on and adds to the largely quantitative social psychological, communications and family field literature to offer a new and accessible insight into the experience of intimacy.

Hurt feelings are universal and are present in human beings as well as in animals. These feelings are usually avoided by human beings and overlooked by the scientific and professional mental health communities. Yet, if unresolved and not shared with loved ones and professionals, they tend to fester in our bodies and effect our functioning. If not expressed and shared with caring others, anger, sadness and fear are at the bottom of mental illness. Developmentally, each of these feelings respectively gives rise to antisocial acts, depression and severe mental illness. This book suggests that instead of traditional one-on-one, face-to-face, conversation-based interventions, distance writing will allow mental health professionals to assign interactive practice exercises specifically focused on hurt feelings.

This book examines the different conceptions of the individual that have emerged in recent new approaches in economics, including behavioral economics, experimental economics, social preferences approaches, game theory, neuroeconomics, evolutionary and complexity economics, and the capability approach. These conceptions are classified according to whether they seek to revise the traditional atomist individual conception, put new emphasis on interaction and relations between individuals, account for individuals as evolving and self-organizing, and explain individuals in terms of capabilities. The method of analysis uses two identity criteria for distinguishing and re-identifying individuals to determine whether these different individual conceptions successfully identify individuals. Successful individual conceptions account for sub-personal and supra-personal bounds on single individual explanations. The former concerns the fragmentation of individuals into multiple selves; the latter concerns the dissolution of individuals into the social. The book develops an understanding of bounded individuality, seen as central to the defense of human rights.

When is language considered'impolite'? Is impolite language only used for anti-social purposes? Can impolite language be creative? What is the difference between'impoliteness'and'rudeness'? Grounded in naturally-occurring language data and drawing on findings from linguistic pragmatics and social psychology, Jonathan Culpeper provides a fascinating account of how impolite behaviour works. He examines not only its forms and functions but also people's understandings of it in both public and private contexts. He reveals, for example, the emotional consequences of impoliteness, how it shapes and is shaped by contexts, and how it is sometimes institutionalised. This book offers penetrating insights into a hitherto neglected and poorly understood phenomenon. It will be welcomed by students and researchers in linguistics and social psychology in particular.

Emerging adulthood - the period between the late teens and mid-twenties - is a unique and important developmental period during which people gain relationship experience before settling on someone to partner with. Romantic Relationships in Emerging Adulthood presents a synthesis of research and theory on this topic. Leading scholars from demography, sociology, family studies, and psychology provide original data and theoretical analyses that address the formation, nature, and significance of romantic relationships in emerging adults. Until recently, it was assumed that romantic relationships in emerging adults were not particularly important or formative. The material presented allows this assumption to be thoroughly evaluated. This volume is intended to be a resource for anyone interested in understanding romantic relationships in emerging adulthood. It is especially appropriate for classroom use in upper-level undergraduate and graduate courses in the fields of family sociology, human development and family studies, clinical and developmental psychology, and social work.

In a fast-changing world, what impact does social change have on our everyday relationships? How do modernisation processes influence our broader values, and how might these then affect our desires to marry, have a family and develop our social networks? And how do sudden events in a society - invasions, civil conflict, terrorist attacks, collapse of a political system - influence our relationship decisions and processes. In this book Goodwin critically reviews the literature on modernisation and contemporary relationships, challenging simplistic conclusions about the'end of intimacy'and the inevitable decline of personal commitment. Reviewing work from across the globe, he also contends that adaptation to rapid change is moderated by individual, social class and cultural variations, with consequently differing impacts on everyday relations. In doing so he brings together contemporary debates in psychology, sociology and the political sciences on coping with social change and its impact on personal relations.

The study of emotional expressions has a long tradition in psychology. Although research in this domain has extensively studied the social context factors that influence the expresser's facial display, the perceiver was considered passive. This 2007 book focuses on more recent developments that show that the perceiver is also subject to the same social rules and norms that guide the expresser's behavior and that knowledge of relevant emotion norms can influence how emotional expressions shown by members of different groups are perceived and interpreted. Factors such as ethnic-group membership, gender and relative status all influence not only emotional expressions but also the interpretation of emotional expressions shown by members of different groups. Specifically, the research presented asks the question of whether and why the same expressions shown by men or women, members of different ethnic groups, or individuals high and low in status are interpreted differently.

Conflict, sadly, is part of our everyday life; experienced at home, in the workplace, on our TV screens. But is it an inevitable part of the fabric of our existence? In this volume, eight experts examine conflict at many levels, from the workings of genes to the evolution of galaxies. Evolutionary biologist David Haig examines why we disagree with ourselves, and psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen asks whether differences between the average male and female mind must necessarily lead to misunderstanding. Anthropologist Richard Wrangham explores why chimpanzees and humans have evolved to kill, while archaeologist Barry Cunliffe examines the roots of warfare. Political scientist Lisa Anderson analyses conflict in the Middle East, and broadcaster Kate Adie reflects on television reporting of war. The book concludes with industrial economist William Brown's discussion of conflict in labour relations, and an exploration of the creative and destructive effects of cosmic violence by physicist P. C. W. Davies.

Few behavioral processes are more central to the development and maintenance of intimate relationships than the communication of affection. Indeed, affectionate expressions often initiate and accelerate relational development. By contrast, their absence in established relationships frequently coincides with relational deterioration. This text explores the scientific research on affection exchange to emerge from the disciplines of communication, social psychology, family studies, psychophysiology, anthropology, and nursing. Specific foci include the individual and relational benefits (including health benefits) of affectionate behavior, as well as the significant risks often associated with expressing affection. A new, comprehensive theory of human affection exchange is offered, and its merits relative to existing theories are explored.

When stresses and hassles challenge our abilities to cope, we frequently turn to family, friends, and partners for help. Yet social support from close relational partners does not uniformly benefit recipients or their relationships. By probing the communication processes that link enactments of social support to participants'reactions, this book provides new explanations for when and how receiving social support will be evaluated as helpful and relationally satisfying. The author's research addresses a variety of types of relationships and stresses, including young adult friends and romantic partners coping with the stresses of university life; adult friends, family and spouses responding to everyday hassles'and married couples coping with chronic health conditions. This innovative program of research combines qualitative and quantitative methods to develop a distinctive communication-based framework for understanding why the content, form, style, and sequence of talk matter for our evaluations of the help we receive from others.

Understanding personal relationships throughout the life course is one of the most crucial issues in the behavioral and social sciences. This book brings together perspectives from different disciplines on individual development and personal relationships across the life span. The book addresses two pertinent dimensions of personal relationships: 1) structures of relationship networks (e.g. kin vs non-kin, peripheral vs intimate, short-term vs long-term) and 2) processes (i.e. change or stability) and outcomes of personal relationships across the life span. The book stimulates discussion of personal relationships as resources for and outcomes of individual development throughout the life course. Different qualities of personal relationships serve as catalysts for individual development. At the same time, relationship qualities reflect changes of developing individuals. The book does not give exclusive priority to one phase of the human life span. Rather, each chapter addresses social development across the entire life span from childhood to later adulthood.

The Atlas of Interpersonal Situations provides a systematic theoretical account for understanding the impact of situations on patterns of social interaction. Structured around descriptions of twenty-one of the most common situations that people encounter in everyday life, the authors aim to provide readers with the tools needed to understand how those situations influence interpersonal behavior. These descriptions are intended to be freestanding, each one providing analysis, research examples, and everyday descriptions of the prototypical situation. The authors build upon the tools of interdependence theory, which stresses the manner in which people's outcomes are determined by the structure of their interaction with each other. This analysis makes clear exactly what is'social'about'social psychology'.

This edited volume draws together a wide range of exciting developments in the study of marital interaction. A significant feature of the book is its focus, not only on conflict and negative interactions but also on the processes by which couples maintain happy and constructive relationships. The chapters review and integrate the extensive literature in this area, as well as presenting important research findings. The contributors come from the disciplines of communication, social psychology and clinical psychology, and have national and international reputations for their work in this area. The findings reflect developments in theory and methodology, and have important implications for those working to strengthen and repair marital relationships.

Understanding interpersonal relationships requires understanding actors, behaviors, and contexts. This 2002 volume presents research from a variety of disciplines that examine personal relationships on all three levels. The first section focuses on the factors that influence individuals to enter, maintain, and dissolve relationships. The second section emphasizes ongoing processes that characterize relationships and focuses on issues such as arguing and sacrificing. The third and final section demonstrates that the process of stability and change are embedded in social, cultural, and historical contexts. Chapters address cultural universals as well as cross-cultural differences in relationship behaviors and outcomes. The emergence of relational forms, such as the interaction between people and computers, is also explored. Stability and Change in Relationships will be of interest to a broad range of fields, including psychology, sociology, communications, gerontology, and counselling.