Close relationships
Close Relationships
Bonds with family, friends, and/or romantic partners that ties two or more people over an extended time
- Psychological health: happier, higher self-satisfaction
- Physical health: less get sick, less overall health vulnerabilities, lower risk of heart disease, live long
Related Study Harlow’s Monkey
Need to belong
Need to Belong
Human emotional need to affiliate with and be accepted by others
Evolutionary basis
- Human exist today because ancestors have close relationships can ensures infants are protected and pass on the genes
- Need to belong is universal - across all cultures
- Desire to belong should be satiable - need that can be fulfilled
- People tend to need around 6 friends (when this number is met, people’s desire to get friends can decrease)
- If unmet, human will suffer profound negative consequences (proof: interview with prisoners that are confide in war)
Attachment Theory ★
- Attachment to caregivers helps babies to survive
- Parents offer a sense of security that allows babies to explore
- Babies use this relationship to develop working models of how their own relationship with function
- Attachment styles from early can last the rest of human’s lives
Related Experiment: Strange Situation
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Attachment types: secure, anxious, avoidant
- Attachment styles influences thought, emotions, and behaviors in romantic relationships
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Why different type of attachment
- Anxious & avoidant people are more adaptive to their environments
- Problems with romantic relationships
- No bad or wrong, just the best for the given situation (adaptive to Context)
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Airport Study- Avoidant partners sough less physical contact
- Anxious partners reported more fear & sadness
Romantic relationships
The 2 Types of Romantic relationships
Type 1: Passionate Love
- Feeling intense longing with physiological arousal
- Reciprocated: well fulfillment & ecstasy
- When not: feel despair
- TREND: real high, then decrease, to below the bottom, then back to normal
- Passionate love are strong motivation for decision, but can lead to infidelity
- Associated with the ”loving drive” in ted talk Why We Love
Type 2: Companionate Love
- Feelings and intimacy and affection one feel for another person they care
- TREND: increase stability with time
- Lasts longer: “best friend”, “like my spouse as a person”
- Associated with the attachment theory
Investment Model of Commitment
(1) Satisfaction (2) Investments (3) Alternatives => commitment => Stay or leave
- Satisfaction - how happy that person is in the relationship
- Investment - what much one has put into the relationship
- Pro: enable couple to weather the inevitable stormy times
- Con: trap people in unhealthy relationships
- Alternatives - how happy the person is with other relationship, or alone
- Commitment - the desire for relationship to last, feeling attached
- Committed partners:
- Used more plural pronouns
- More willing to make scarifies
- More willing to forgive
- Derogate tempting alternatives (Proof: Photo Study)
- Committed partners:
Top predictors of divorce:
- Partnering with neurotic personality
- Partnering with someone highly sensitive to rejection
- Marrying at a young age
- Undergoing financial stress
4 Horsemen of the Apocalypse
- The 4 red-flags in relationships
- By [John Gottman]
- He brought couple to discuss a contentious issue (fight), recorded, and recorded their physical reactions
- Criticism
- Highlight their partner’s personality “defects” (attack person)
- Antidotes: complain without blame (focus on specific behavior)
- Defensiveness
- Warding off criticism through counter attack (blaming their partner)
- Antidotes: accept responsibility
- Contempt
- Speaking “down” to their partner (superiority)
- Greatest predictor of divorce
- Antidotes: build a culture of appreciation and respect (don’t contempt)
- Stonewalling
- Ignoring or shutting out the partner (withdrawing)
- Antidotes: practice physiological self-soothing (I need to take a moment)
Other Relationship Topics
Consensual non-monogamy
- Polygamy - a form of marriage consisting of more than two persons
- Open relationships - based on a primary couple who are “open” to sexual contact with others
- Polyamory - allows people to openly conduct multiple sexual and/or romantic relationships simultaneously, with the knowledge and consent of all involved in or affected by the relationships
- Polyfidelity - closed relationship style that requires sexual and emotional fidelity to an intimate group that is larger than two
Same-sex relationship
- Very similar correlates for relationships quality
- Lesbian relationships
- More intimacy, more autonomy, more equality, more frequent relationship dissolution
- Gay relationships
- More autonomy, fewer barriers to leaving, more frequent relationship dissolution
Attraction
Proximity
Westgate Housing Study- How do people become friends
- Campus was close, and people when they come in are all strangers
- Increased opportunity to meet people who live close to each other
- People tend to like novel stimuli more after, people have been repeatedly exposed to them - [connect to Mere Exposure Effect]
Mere Exposure Effect- The tendency for novel (new) stimuli to be liked more after people have been repeatedly exposed to something/someone
- This is an correlational effect, therefore hard to tell if likeness => exposure, or exposure => likeness
Similarity
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People tend to select pets that “looked similar” to themselves
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A
studyincluded 1000 sets of couples, and did a survey with 88 characteristics.- Found out that couples have similarities then random paired people
- More similarity on demographic and health characteristics
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Why
- Similarity fluency in interactions
- Similar people have characteristics people like about themselves
- Similarity triggers social validation
Physical attractiveness
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Qualities that predict physical attractiveness
- People tend to rate the ”average” face more attractive
- Facial symmetry tend to to correlates with higher physical attractiveness
- These characteristics are cross cultural
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Early benefits of higher physical attractiveness
- Nurses are more responsive to “cuter” babies
- Attractive babies receive more attention from their mother
- More popular in preschool
- Elementary teachers assume attractive children are more intelligent
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Later benefits
- More attractive people tend to have a higher income
- Physically attractive people are more socially skilled
- Develop good social interaction skills and report more satisfying interactions (they get more experience)
- Are treated differently (receive positive reactions)
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Halo Effect- belief that attractive people possess a host of positive qualities belong their physical appearance -
Closing-Time Effect- Done in 1979
- Men and women rated other people’s attractiveness at 3 different times (21:00, 20:30, 00:00)
- Participants rated the opposite sex are the same around (21:00- 22:30)
- Then rated the opposite sex as the night gets further on (running our of the time)
- This is the power of situation
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The gender difference between choosiness
- Biologically female would invest more in an relationship (more choosy)
- Men tend to seek out for more partners have more offspring
- Women tend are more choosy with the best partner
- Men favor younger & physically attractive
- The average age partner that men prefers tends to stay at 20-24
- Women seek older mates with good financial prospects, high status, slightly older & ambition
- The average age partner that women prefer goes along their own ages
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Critique about the evolutionary gender differences perspective
- Women pair with higher status men because they are often more attractive (based on similarity)
- Since women are caregivers, they select the opposite sex based on their resources to meet their own needs
- Evolutionary perspective too for from now
Physical arousal
Bridge Study- After men cross one the two bridges (safe vs scary), they are approached by a attractive female with her phone number
- Results: about >10% of the men in the safe bridges called the experimenter, whereas 50% of the men in the scary Bridge called the experimenter