New Directions in the Psychology of Close Relationships

Dominik Schoebi, Belinda Campos

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781351136242
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Social Psychology
• Index: Psychology

What makes for strong and enduring relationships? It is a question of increasing scientific and popular interest as it has become clear that relationships can make life happier, healthier, and longer. In this collection, the reader will find an overview of state-of-the-art research on this question and a glimpse of the new directions that will define the future of this field of study.

With contributions from leading scholars in the field, the book offers cutting-edge perspectives on the factors and processes that contribute to strong, thriving, and resilient close relationships. Split into three parts, the first part discusses important factors and processes contributing to strong relational bonds in the form of different types of relationships. The second part spotlights contexts such as culture and gender as the domain for future advances in this area of research. Finally, the last part covers data analytic techniques and future directions. Offering a unique perspective on each topic covered, the authors highlight the promising next steps which will inspire advances in the field in the years to come.

Bringing together important trends from different areas of research, this text will make a significant contribution to social psychology and is essential for students and academics interested in the psychology of relationships.

PART I

Thriving relationships across the life-span

Factors and processes

1

RELATIONSHIP FORMATION AND EARLY ROMANTIC RELATIONSHIPS

Andrea L. Meltzer and James K. McNulty

Romantic relationships are critical to well-being. Not only are they the primary source of reproduction, they strongly predict physical and mental health (Holt-Lunstad, Smith, & Layton, 2010; Proulx, Helms, & Buehler, 2007; Robles, Slatcher, Trombello, & McGinn, 2014). Indeed, whereas relationship dissolution poses significant health risks (Liu & Umberson, 2008), merely being married reduces mortality risk (House, Landis, & Umberson, 1988). In fact, the effect of poor relationship quality on mortality is as strong as the effects of better-known risk factors, such as smoking and alcohol use, and even stronger than other important factors, such as sedentariness and obesity (Holt-Lunstad etal., 2010). In this chapter, we review recent research on the early stages of these important relationships.

There are many important questions one could ask regarding the early stages of relationships. What do people look for in a partner? Do such preferences affect people’s mate choices? Do they affect how they feel about their choices? Relationship scientists have been addressing these and other questions for decades, and they have made substantial progress in providing some answers to them. Unfortunately, though, as this chapter will reveal, the answers are not always easy to discern, nor are they straightforward or certain. Thus, we conclude our review with suggestions for novel measures and methods for studying these issues that we hope will help offer better insights.

A historical perspective of research examining partner preferences

Much of the early work on relationships focused on issues related to initial attraction, including what factors people are attracted to and thus seek in a mate, also referred to as partner preferences. In psychology, this early work on partner preferences was guided by two rather independent perspectives: a social-psychological perspective and an evolutionary perspective.

Although research on interpersonal attraction dates back to the early part of the last century (e.g., Terman, Buttenwieser, Ferguson, Johnson, & Wilson, 1938), it was not until the late 1950s and 1960s that the science of interpersonal attraction began to flourish in psychology. Two early summaries of the literature were pivotal. In 1969, Berscheid and Walster published a book, Interpersonal Attraction, and, in 1973, Byrne and Griffitt authored the first-ever chapter on attraction for the Annual Review of Psychology. In reviewing this literature, we were struck by how much these early works focused on attitudes. For example, Berscheid and Walster (1969) began their book with a long discussion of the concept and measurement of attitudes. Likewise, although Byrne and Griffitt (1973) did not refer specifically to attitudes, they devoted ample space to Clore and Byrne’s (1974; also see Byrne & Clore, 1970) model of attraction that conceptualizes the development of attraction as “an implicit affective response which is assumed to fall along a subjective continuum that is characterized as pleasant—unpleasant” (p. 328). Their model describes attraction in a manner that parallels the modern definition of an attitude—a summary association between an object and one’s evaluation of that object (see Fazio, 2007). Modern research has tended to move away from considering the role of attitudes in relationships, and we believe there is a lot of value in returning a bit to this way of thinking about attraction. Not only does the study of attitudes offer a large theoretical and empirical literature upon which to draw (see Cooper, Blackman, & Keller, 2015), considering these elements highlights the affective nature of attraction (see Zajonc, 1980). We return to this issue toward the end of this chapter.

Over the subsequent decades, social psychologists organized the literature on attraction into five key factors: physical attractiveness, similarity, proximity, familiarity, and reciprocity. That is, we are attracted to others who are (a) physically attractive, (b) hold similar attitudes, (c) are easily accessible, (d) are familiar, and (e) like us. Berscheid summarized this early work in the first chapter on attraction for the Handbook of Social Psychology (1985), then in its third edition, added the notion of rewards—that is, we like others who have rewarding characteristics (i.e., attractiveness and similarity), can grant us access to such characteristics (i.e., are easily accessible and familiar), and who are willing to give us such access (i.e., like us).

It is notable that much of this research did not focus exclusively on mixed-sex attraction but instead focused on why people like one another generally. For example, the idea that familiarity breeds attraction drew from work on mere exposure (e.g., Pliner, 1982; Zajonc, 1968), some of which was based on inanimate objects such as juices and Chinese characters. Much of the work on similarity drew from work on same-sex friendships (e.g., Izard, 1960; Newcomb, 1956). Even much of the work on physical attractiveness was based on liking that occurred between same-sex others (e.g., Cash, Begley, McCown, & Weise, 1975; Dion, Berscheid, & Walster, 1972) or evaluations of children (e.g., Clifford & Walster, 1973; Dion & Berscheid, 1974). One exception was a classic demonstration that physical attractiveness predicted wanting to see an opposite-sex date again (Walster, Aronson, Abrahams, & Rottman, 1966). The fact that early theories of attraction drew so heavily from research on non-romantic relationships likely stems from the fact that the study of interpersonal attraction was new and novel; there was much more research on non-romantic relationships from which to draw. Accordingly, this early work focused on general aspects of the social environment, including norms and pressures stemming from culture that shapes such preferences. The work seldom focused on sex differences in partner preferences (for an exception, see Stroebe, Insko, Thompson, & Layton, 1971), although early research did highlight one notable sex difference in the domain of similarity: women demonstrated a preference for older men whereas men demonstrated a preference for younger women (Bolig, Stein, & McKenry, 1984; Harrison & Saeed, 1977).

Shortly after this social-psychological perspective emerged, but somewhat independently of it, other scholars used an evolutionarily oriented perspective to understand partner preferences and explore potential sex-differentiated preferences. This perspective was guided by the field of evolutionary biology, and most notably, Robert Trivers’ (1972) parental investment theory. According to parental investment theory, a theory informed by Darwin’s (1871) sexual selection theory, males and females of any given sexual species require different minimal investments to successfully reproduce, and those minimal investments directly impact their reproductive strategies. Among humans, for example, women are obligated to contribute more time and energy to successfully reproduce a single offspring—at a minimum, they invest 40 weeks for gestation followed by up to several years of lactation—whereas men are obligated to contribute far less time and energy to successfully reproduce a single offspring—at a minimum, they invest mere minutes for copulation. Although men can (and often do) contribute much more time and energy than their required minimal investment, parental investment theory could be used to argue that women’s (versus men’s) greater minimum obligatory investment leads women to be more selective when choosing their reproductive partners. Moreover, these differential investments lead men and women to face different adaptive problems and thus, to some extent, seek different qualities in their partners.

David Buss and Douglas Kenrick are two of the most notable social psychologists who adopted this evolutionary perspective to address romantic relationships. In one of the earliest applications, Buss and Barnes (1986) provided evidence demonstrating that although both men and women prefer partners who are kind, exciting, and intelligent, other partner preferences are sex differentiated. Specifically, this work provided evidence that men and women differentially prefer partner physical attractiveness and partner earning potential, with men more than women preferring partners who are physically attractive and women more than men preferring partners who demonstrate good earning potential. Buss (1989) also demonstrated that these sex-differentiated partner preferences emerged across 37 cultures, suggesting their universality and thereby providing some evidence that such differences do not emerge from social structural sources alone.

Importantly, however, this work should not be taken to mean that such sex-differentiated preferences are not susceptible to the influence of context. Not too much later, Buss and Schmitt (1993) developed sexual strategies theory and Kenrick and his colleagues (Kenrick, Groth, Trost, & Sadalla, 1993) developed their own contextual perspective regarding the nature of sex-differentiated partner preferences. Both perspectives independently suggested that men’s and women’s partner preferences stem from the adaptive challenges they faced when choosing partners in the ancestral environment, which vary depending on the extent to which people are seeking long-term versus short-term relationships. Among other nuances, for example, both perspectives posit that sex-differentiated preferences are more pronounced among those individuals seeking long-term partners and more attenuated among those individuals seeking short-term partners (also see Li, Bailey, Kenrick, & Linsenmeier, 2002). What is important to realize about these perspectives is that although such adaptations likely developed in response to conditions in our ancestral environments, and although the biological sources of these differences may be stable, they continue to interact with modern conditions that are the same as, or merely resemble, the conditions that shaped their development (e.g., Makhanova, McNulty, & Maner, 2017; see Kenrick, Griskevicius, Neuberg, & Schaller, 2010; Li, van Vugt, & Colarelli, 2018). For example, although sports cars, gold watches, and dollar bills did not exist in the ancestral environment, people likely respond to them today because these stimuli are cognitively associated with a partner quality that people (especially women) evolved to prefer—status. Likewise, although make-up did not exist in the ancestral environment, men may respond to it because it enhances a partner quality men evolved to prefer—youth.

Some scholars have challenged these evolutionary underpinnings of sex-differentiated partner preferences, though not necessarily the preferences that men and women equally prefer (e.g., Brehm, 1985; Cameron, Oskamp, & Sparks, 1977; Eagly & Wood, 1999). Such challengers, for example, have argued that sex-differentiated preferences follow more directly from socialization pressures that differ between men and women rather than from evolutionary pressures. In one of the more notable social-psychological criticisms, Eagly and Wood (1999) reanalyzed Buss’s (1989) cross-cultural study to suggest that women’s relatively stronger preference for partner earning potential could alternatively be explained in terms of social structure—more specifically, gender inequality. Notably, men’s relatively stronger preference for partner physical attractiveness appeared not to be susceptible to such inequality.

We do not highlight these social and evolutionary perspectives, their independence, and these disagreements to imply that they are intrinsically incompatible, however. Not only do both perspectives emphasize resource exchange and often times imply the same or similar predictions, both perspectives highlight the importance of immediate contextual circumstances to relationships—even the more biologically oriented evolutionary perspective. Indeed, Buss and Barnes (1986) acknowledged early on that, “mate characteristics that lead to marital happiness and survival may be precisely those that correlate with reproductive (including parental) investment” (p. 568). Kenrick and Keefe (1992) similarly noted that, “an evolutionary approach is not incompatible with the approaches typically taken by [social] psychologists” (p. 91). We believe recognizing the role of context, as well as the idea we highlighted earlier that attraction may resemble an attitude, will go a long way to resolving some of the recent controversies and mixed findings we highlight in the next section.

Contemporary developments on partner preferences, mate choice, and early relationships

Partner choice

Recently, there has been greater crossover between these social and biological perspectives (e.g., Durante, Eastwick, Finkel, Gangestad, & Simpson, 2016), and such work has provided mixed results. Coinciding with this crossover was the advent of a novel methodology for studying attraction—speed-dating paradigms—that has been used to examine the extent to which people’s stated mate preferences predict their actual mate choices. In one of the more notable, comprehensive, and early speed-dating studies, Eastwick and Finkel (2008) recruited 163 heterosexual undergraduate students at Northwestern University to state their partner preferences, participate in a speed-dating session where they interacted with up to 13 opposite-sex targets, and, following the session, indicate whether they would like to meet each target again. Results, surprisingly, demonstrated that although men stated stronger preferences for partner physical attractiveness than did women, targets’ physical attractiveness did not differentially impact the extent to which men and women actually wanted to further interact with the targets. Likewise, ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Contributors
• About the Book
• A Brief Introduction
• Part I Thriving Relationships Across the Life-Span: Factors and Processes
• Part II Promising Directions from Studying Relationships in Different Contexts
• Part III Taking the Next Steps
• Index