The Dark Side of Close Relationships II

William R. Cupach, Brian H. Spitzberg, William R. Cupach, Brian H. Spitzberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781135221140
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sprachen & Linguistik
• Subtopic: Kommunikationswissenschaften

The Dark Side of Close Relationships II is a completely new and up-to-date version of the original volume published in 1998, featuring new topics and authors. The volume showcases cutting-edge work on important topics by prominent scholars in multiple disciplines. It sheds light on the paradoxical, dialectical, and mystifying facets of human interaction, not merely to elucidate dysfunctional relationship phenomena, but to help readers explore and understand it in relation to a broader understanding about relationships. As previous Dark Side investigations have revealed, negative or dysfunctional outcomes can occur in relationships even though positive and functional ones are expected, and at the same time, positive silver linings are often found in some dark relational clouds. Such nuanced approaches are needed to better account for the complexity of close relationships. A unique and provocative collection, this volume will appeal to relationship researchers in communication, social psychology, family studies, and sociology.

1
Overview of the Dark Side of Relationships Research

Daniel Perlman and Rodrigo J. Carcedo

Relational life can be nasty, brutish, and short.

Steve Duck (1994, p. 4)

Paul Shaffer’s movie, Amadeus, centers on the relationship between two noted musicians, Antonio Salieri and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. In the film, Salieri, the older of the central figures, is a rather staid, pious individual. Mozart, in contrast, is a musical genius who is boastful, immature, and lusty.

Salieri was the court composer to Emperor Josef of Austria. In that position, he was the most famous, most successful composer in Europe— until Mozart arrived in Vienna. Once Mozart arrived, Salieri’s place in the musical limelight was diminished as Mozart and his music grew more popular. At first Salieri tolerated Mozart. Music was everything to Salieri, and he recognized that Mozart produced music filled with “the voice of God.” When, however, he discovered that Mozart committed adultery with a beautiful opera singer, Salieri’s righteousness triggered disdain for Mozart. It galled Salieri that a “giggling, dirty-minded creature” would be chosen by the Almighty to produce such wonderful music. Salieri asked God to give him greater talents but Mozart still outshone him. Salieri could not understand why God favored Mozart, such a vulgar creature, to be his instrument.

Salieri’s hatred grew until he ultimately vowed to ruin Mozart. He made fun of Mozart’s personality. He wheedled so that Mozart no longer got pupils and watched passively as Mozart sank into poverty, unable to care for his family. At the end of his life, Mozart was reduced to performing in what today would be local, working-class bars. Alas, Mozart’s performances were unpopular with these audiences so proprietors quickly terminated Mozart’s engagements. While the other patrons scoffed at Mozart’s compositions, Salieri himself immediately recognized the genius of these works.

In the end, which comes at the beginning of this movie, Salieri is a dying man in a mental hospital, mad. He confesses to a priest that he has murdered Mozart out of envy. He is racked with guilt. By cutting his own throat, Salieri tries to end his own life. Both his own and his adversary’s lives are ruined because of their rivalry. Not every relationship goes as far afoul as Salieri’s and Mozart’s, but many relationships do have negative, foreboding facets.

Social scientists have been concerned with the negative aspects of relationships for some time. For example, Finkelhor, Gelles, Hotaling, and Straus (1983) published a book on The Dark Side of Families: Current Family Violence Research. Social psychologists such as Stanley Milgram were concerned with evil and destructive obedience (e.g., when people follow orders against their will that hurt another person, see Miller, 2004). Their efforts, however, were scattered, and not conceptualized as related to one another’s.

William Cupach and Brian Spitzberg’s 1994 book, The Dark Side of Interpersonal Communication, was a turning point in this work. It brought together several previously disconnected lines of investigation and set them out as an area of study. Cupach and Spitzberg labeled and legitimated the dark side of relationships as a topic. Their book fostered more work, much of it published in journals and some in books (e.g., Fox & Spector, 2005; Goodwin & Cramer, 2002; Griffin & O’Leary-Kelly, 2004; Harden Fritz & Omdahl, 2006; Kirkpatrick, Duck, & Foley, 2006; Segrin, 2001; Shermer, 2004). But, Cupach and Spitzberg have retained a special place in the literature on the dark side of relationships. In particular, they have edited or authored five books (including the current one) that have reflected on and been central in the area’s development. The earlier books are:

(1) The Dark Side of Interpersonal Communication (Cupach & Spitzberg, 1994);

(2) The Dark Side of Close Relationships (Spitzberg & Cupach, 1998);

(3) The Dark Side of Relationship Pursuit: From Attraction To Obsession and Stalking (Cupach & Spitzberg, 2004); and

(4) The Dark Side of Interpersonal Communication (2nd ed.) (Spitzberg & Cupach, 2007a).

Using these books as a key reference point, we want to reflect on the development and status of research on the dark side of relationships. The first part of the chapter will focus on the concept itself: How has it been defined and characterized? What specific topics have been most extensively studied? Are there different types of darkness in relationships? What is the relationship between darkness and non-dark aspects of relationships? Does it qualify as a scientific concept? Why is darkness important? Then we will reflect on theories used to understand dark aspects of relationships, and methods used to investigate darkness. We will conclude with some suggestions on how to advance the development of this field.

CONCEPTUALIZATION OF THE DARK SIDE

What is Meant by the Concept of the Dark Side?

A starting point in many areas of research is developing an appropriate definition and/or description of the key construct. Several attempts to characterize the dark side of relationships have been offered. Cupach and Spitzberg (1994, p. vii) initially depicted the dark side as an “interaction that is difficult, problematic, challenging, distressing, and disruptive.” In their second volume, these authors offered a broad description with seven main characteristics (Spitzberg & Cupach, 1998):

(1) the dysfunctional, distressing, destructive aspects of human action;

(2) deviance, betrayal, transgressions, and violations, including awkward, rude, and disruptive features of human behavior;

(3) exploitation of victims;

(4) the unfulfilled, the unpotentiated, underestimated, and unappreciated aspects of human endeavor, in other words, the worlds we wished we had created but did not;

(5) the unattractive, socially isolated, unwanted, and repulsive;

(6) objectification or treating a person as a thing; and

(7) the paradoxical, mystifying aspects of life that things are seldom what they seem to be.

These aspects emphasize the behavioral aspects of the dark side. From this vantage point, the dark side becomes largely synonymous with a set of aversive interpersonal behaviors, a notion that Kowalski (1997, 2001) has used. Kowalski (1997, p. 217) pointed out that “social behaviors are determined to be aversive when they either deprive people of valued outcomes or impose undesired outcomes.” Later, supporting a more subjective approach, she also defined them as “behaviors by another individual encoded by a target (i.e., victim) as stressful” (Kowalski, 2000, p. 7). People may be led to feel this stress as a matter of behaviors that:

(1) connote relational devaluation of the target;

(2) inform the target about uncomfortable characteristics of him/ herself; and

(3) disrupt ongoing interactions.

More recently, Spitzberg and Cupach (2007b) reflect back on their writing saying “we have to date restrained from formally defining the dark side” (p. 4). Instead, they describe the dark side as a perspective or way of asking questions that accepts that social processes typically involve losses. (See pp. 8–9 for more on Spitzberg and Cupach’s 2007b view).

Beyond determining what social scientists consider as the dark side, we believe it would be valuable to know what the general population designates as “darkness” in relationships. The study of lay perception (e.g., prototypes) has been a profitable line of research in the close relationships area (e.g., Fehr, 1988, 2005). People’s prototypes influence what they remember about relationships and the judgments they make of how in love partners are. Presumably these processes influence the stability of ongoing relationships; that is, whether partners stay together or break up.

There are some studies of laypersons’ perceptions of relational problems. For example, in their classic scale development work, Holmes and Rahe (1967) have shown that the death of a spouse partner and divorce are life events that people judge to require maximal social adjustment. There are also studies that look at lay conceptions of specific dark aspects of relationships such as anger, hate, and jealousy (Fitness & Fletcher, 1993). In the 1980s Horowitz and his associates (1980, 1982) explored prototypes as an integrating concept for interpersonal problems and showed that the frequency with which people experience semantically related problems (e.g., various difficulties being sociable) are positively correlated. To the best of our knowledge, however, there are no studies that examine laypersons’ definitions and views of the dark side of relationships as a broad, multifaceted concept. Work along these lines is warranted.

Which Aspects of the Dark Side are Most Frequently Studied?

Another way of depicting the domain of the dark side of relationships is simply to identify the main topics that have been studied. To achieve this, we used the summary of aspects treated as the dark side by Spitzberg and Cupach (2007b, pp. 9–13) and Perlman (2000). These authors pointed out different aspects or contents (e.g., violence, loneliness, hurt, etc.) included by them as part of the dark side. We decided to investigate the number of times that these words appeared in the different books of the dark side collection, selecting each book separately in the Google Books website and including these terms in the search tool. We counted how many times these words appeared in each book and we sum it up for the four books, obtaining a total frequency. This method may not give an exact solution (e.g., compound words may have less probability of being found than single words and these counts include words in reference lists as well as the text), but it is a reasonable start to obtain an idea of what has been considered as the dark side (see Table 1.1). The most frequently identified topics include both behaviors (e.g., violence, threats, stalking) and emotions (e.g., anger, hurt, depression).

TABLE 1.1 Aspects of Darkness Found in the Dark Side Collection

Taxonomies of Darkness: What Types are There?

Once concepts are defined, there is often a search for different varieties of the phenomenon. Duck (1994) and Perlman (2000) have each presented taxonomies or ideas about the ways the phenomena subsumed within the dark side can be further classified into different sub-categories. Spitzberg and Cupach (2007b) have also presented a scheme for delineating varieties of darkness. We will delay discussion of their scheme because it is not exclusively a taxonomy of darkness and because it addresses the relationship between darkness and light that we will consider in the next section of this chapter. Although not discussed further, other taxonomies have also been offered for selected aspects of the dark side including social allergens (Cunningham, Barbee, & Druen, 1997), the negative functions of relationships (Rook & Pietromonaco, 1987), and dysfunctional, negative self-presentation behavior (Gardner & Martinko, 1998; Vonk, 2001).

Duck (1994) has offered a typology of dark relational forms involving four categories (see Figure 1.1). First there are negative types of relationships such as those between enemies. Second, there are attempts to sabotage relations...