CONTEXT Despite the vast amount of existing research on adolescent sexual behavior, little is known about the trajectory of social, romantic and sexual events within an adolescent's relationship. METHODS A subsample of participants in Wave 2 of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (8,438 respondents aged 12-21) provided data on the sequence of 15 social, romantic and sexual ev...

OBJECTIVE Experiencing romantic love is an important part of individual development. Here, we investigated stability and change in romantic love and psychological correlates, including mood states, anxiety, and sleep, among Iranian adolescents over a period of 8 months. METHOD Two hundred and one adolescents who had taken part in a previous study were contacted; 157 responded. Participants co...

Sociometer theory proposes that self-esteem is an adaptation which evolved to monitor and regulate interpersonal relationships. It is therefore sensitive to self-assessments in domains relevant to relational desirability. Positive relationships between self-perceived physical attractiveness and self-esteem found in previous studies may reflect the functioning of a mating sociometer, designed to...

Although sexual desire and romantic love are often experienced in concert, they are fundamentally distinct sub jective experiences with distinct neurobiological substrates. The basis for these distinctions is the evolutionary origin of each type of experience. The processes underlying sexual desire evolved in the context of sexual mating, whereas the processes underlying romantic love?or pair b...

The mechanisms through which current romantic relationship dysfunction develops in individuals with borderline personality disorder (BPD) symptoms are still unclear. One possible pathway may be childhood experiences of emotional invalidation by parents, which may result in the development of poor social problem-solving skills or cognitive responses such as splitting, which impair current romant...

This study examines the differences between two types of close relationships (friends and romantic partners) in moderating responses to mortality salience. Prior research has shown that mortality salience increases worldview defense as a mechanism for managing the terror of death. It was predicted that social support from romantic partners (but not friends) would alleviate the need to defend on...

Purpose: This study explored whether romantic lovers differ in emotion-related inhibitory control capacity from those who are single. Methods: 88 healthy undergraduate college students participated in the study. Half were currently in love and in a romantic relationship (love group, LG), and half were single and had never been in a romantic relationship (single group, SG). Based on duration of ...

Effective communication is vital to the health and functioning of romantic relationships. Technology use is becoming more pervasive, making it more important than ever to understand which forms of media enhance communication in close relationships. People differ in which communication methods they prefer, and it is important to understand how people perceive and use various media. Our study use...

The purpose of this study was to examine how social networking site (SNS) use, specifically Twitter use, influences negative interpersonal relationship outcomes. This study specifically examined the mediational effect of Twitter-related conflict on the relationship between active Twitter use and negative relationship outcomes, and how this mechanism may be contingent on the length of the romant...

In this longitudinal study, a quantitative and qualitative examination of the associations among parent-child relations, adult attachment styles, and relationship quality and theme in romantic narratives was conducted. Parenting and adult attachment style were assessed through questionnaires, whereas overall quality of romantic relationships (regard and importance), intimacy, and romantic story...