Reading §
- The Nature and Importance of Intimacy
- The Nature of Intimacy:
- Intimate relationships differ from more casual associations in at least seven specific ways: knowledge, interdependence, caring, trust, responsiveness, mutuality, and commitment.
- The Need to Belong:
- Humans display a need to belong, a drive to maintain regular interaction with affectionate, intimate partners. Adverse consequences may follow if the need remains unfulfilled over time.
- The Influence of Culture:
- Fewer people are marrying than ever before, and those who do marry wait longer to do so. People routinely cohabit, and that often makes a future divorce more, not less, likely.
- Sources of Change:
- Economic changes, increasing individualism, and new technology contribute to cultural change.
- So does the sex ratio; cultures with high sex ratios are characterized by traditional roles for men and women, whereas low sex ratios are correlated with more permissive behavior.
- The Influence of Experience
- Children’s interactions with their caregivers produce different styles of attachment.
- These orientations are mostly learned.
- Thus, our beliefs about the nature and worth of close relationships are shaped by our experiences within them.
- The Influence of Individual Differences
- There’s wide variation in people’s abilities and preferences, but individual differences are usually gradual and subtle instead of abrupt.
- Sex Differences:
- Despite lay beliefs that men and women are quite different, most sex differences are quite small. The range of variation among members of a given sex is always large compared to the average difference between the sexes, and the overlap of the sexes is so substantial that many members of one sex will always score higher than the average member of the other sex. Thus, the sexes are much more similar than different on most of the topics of interest to relationship science.
- Gender Differences:
- Gender differences refer to social and psychological distinctions that are taught to people by their cultures. Men are expected to be dominant and assertive, women to be warm and emotionally expressive—but a third of us are androgynous and possess both instrumental, task-oriented skills and expressive, social and emotional talents. Men and women who adhere to traditional gender roles do not like each other, either at first meeting or later during a marriage, as much as less stereotyped, androgynous people do.
- Personality. Personality traits are stable tendencies that characterize people’s thoughts, feelings, and behavior across their whole lives:
- Open-mindedness, extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness help produce pleasant relationships, but negative emotionality undermines one’s contentment.
- Self-Esteem.
- What we think of ourselves emerges from our interactions with others: The sociometer theory argues that if others regard us positively, self-esteem is high, but if others don’t want to associate with us, self-esteem is low. People who have low self-esteem undermine and sabotage their close relationships by underestimating their partners’ love for them and overreacting to imagined threats.
- Sexual Orientation:
- Lesbians and gays experience intimacy in the same ways that heterosexuals do, but often enjoy relationships that are more satisfying; there may be advantages—greater equality, better communication, more respect—in having a partner of the same sex. Bisexuals elicit more suspicion, but they, too, prosper in loving relationships.
- The Influence of Human Nature:
- An evolutionary perspective assumes that sexual selection shapes humankind, influenced, in part, by sex differences in parental investment and paternity uncertainty. The sexes pursue different mates when they’re interested in a long, committed relationship than they do when they’re interested in a short-term affair. The evolutionary perspective also assumes that cultural influences determine whether inherited habits are still adaptive—and some of them may not be.
- The Influence of Interaction:
- Relationships result from the combinations of their participants’ histories and talents, and thus are often more than the sum of their parts. Relationships are fluid processes rather than static entities.
- The Dark Side of Relationships:
- There are potential costs, as well as rewards, to intimacy. So why take the risk? Because we are a social species, and we need each other.
- Relationship Suggestion
- Enter casual cohabitation cautiously. It tends to be less satisfying than marriage usually is.
- Put away your phone when it’s time to pay attention to your partner.
- Strive to be trusting, relaxed, and comfortable with interdependent intimacy—and seek partners who are, as well.
- Seek partners with both instrumental and expressive skills who are competent and self-reliant and warm, compassionate, and tender.
- Given a choice, choose an optimistic partner over one who is pessimistic, anxious, and fretful.
- Seek partners who deserve to like themselves and do.
Lecture §
PDF:
- Intimate Relationships
- What is an intimate relationship?
- The 7 components of intimacy
TIMRKCC
- Not all component is required
- Trust
- Expected being treated fairly and honorably
- Expected partner will respond to their needs and concerned about welfare
- Interdependence
- The extend to which intimate partners need an influence each other
- Strong, frequent, diverse, enduring
- Mutuality
- Think of themselves as “us” instead of “me”
- Recognize the overlap between their lives
- Responsiveness
- More attentive to each other’s needs
- Support each other more effectively than they do most others
- Knowledge
- Extensive personal knowledge of each other
- Share information about desires, dreams, histories and preference with each other
- Caring
- Care about each other
- Share affection and support with each other
- Commitment
- Expectation of indefinite continuity of relationships
- Invest time, effort, and resources needed
- What component makes intimate relationships hard to study?
- It is hard to capture the interdependence aspect of relationships
- Why do we form intimate relationships?
- Need to Belong
- Adaptive Trait:
Group Ancestors -> Pass on genes -> Need to Belong Today
- Why are intimate relationships important?
- Interpersonal psychoanalysis
- Attachment Theory
- Benefits for well being
- Happiness, subjective well-being, psychological well-being, mental health & physical health
- Research Methods
- What are some influences on intimate relationships?
- Culture
- Guidelines for behaviour, morals, cognitions, expectations
- Why have our patterns of intimate relationships changed?
- Increasing industrialization or socioeconomic development
- Emphasis on individualism
- Improvements in technology
- Sex ratio: shifts in values
Women > Men
- Higher divorce rate
- More “modern values”
Men > Women
- Lower divorce rate
- More traditional views
- Individual Differences
- Historical experiences
- Personality
- Sex & Gender differences
- Sex differences
- Gender differences
- Selection
- Natural Selection
- Sexual Selection
- What are important criteria for research?
-
- Reliability
- Test-retest
- Retest
consistency: >0.7
- Temporal stability: when time interval is small
- Inter-rater
- Internal consistency:
- Validity
- Construct/Content validity
- Criterion validity; Convergent (convergent/discriminant); Predictive
- Internal/External validity
- What research methods are used?
- Research Design
- Correlation Designs
- Experimental Design
- Developmental Design
- Retrospective: Participants report on events that have happened in the past
- Cross-sectional
- Longitudinal
- Setting
- Laboratory
- Natural setting
- Data
- Types of data
- Observations
- Experience sampling
- Physiological measures
- Archival materials
- Self-reports
- Informant/couple report
- Level of analysis
- Dyadic: Both individuals’ perceptions of and engagement in the relationship
- Individual: An individual’s perceptions of and engagement in the relationship
Questions §
- Does the adaptive advantage still exist for relationships?
In Class Quiz §
- Which component of intimacy was described as strong, frequent, diverse and enduring in close relationships?
- The Inclusion of Other in the Self Scale can be used to index which component of intimacy?
- Which tends to be larger? (Between-sex variability, Within-sex variability, Between-sex and within-sex variability tend to be similar)