We propose that sharing a negative—as compared to a positive—attitude about a third party is particularly effective in promoting closeness between people. Findings from two survey studies and an experiment support this idea. In Studies 1 and 2, participants’ open-ended responses revealed a tendency to recall sharing with their closest friends more negative than positive attitudes about other pe...

This study examines the role that marital attributions play in the relationship between the occurrence of stressful life events and marital quality. Using a stress adaptation theory framework, data from 58 couples were used to test for the presence of a moderating relationship. The results supported the moderational model, indicating that the marital quality of couples who make relationship-enh...

To assess whether emotional intelligence (EI) is related to self-assessed relationship quality, an ability test of EI and measures of relationship quality were administered to 86 heterosexual couples in a university setting. Results indicated that female partners were significantly higher in EI than male partners and that EI scores were uncorrelated within couples. Two 2 2 multiple analyses of ...

Facial masculinity may be used as a cue in female mate choice, as it reflects the success of the male genotype in its developmental environment. Women may maximize reproductive success by using a conditional strategy favoring highly masculine facial features for short-term relationships and feminized facial features in men for long-term relationships. Three studies examine reactions to masculin...

Research on initial romantic attraction flourished in the 1960s and 1970s but has now been partially eclipsed by research on close relationships. The authors argue that speed dating procedures, in which participants attend an event where they experience brief ‘‘dates’’ with a series of potential romantic partners, permit researchers to ‘‘retrofit’’ the advances of close relationships research t...

This study compared the empathic accuracy of men and women who had perpetrated physical intimate partner violence with that of partners in nonviolent but distressed and nonviolent and nondistressed relationships. Examined was the empathic accuracy (a) of partners for one another’s thoughts and feelings during a relationship problem discussion in the laboratory, (b) of partners’ empathic accurac...

Sixty undergraduates at a public university in the northwest United States recorded their approach and avoidance communal (closeness), uncommunal (distance), agentic (assertion), and unagentic (submission) goals during a total of 836 naturalistic interactions with romantic partners. They also completed a self-report measure of attachment style. Secure attachment predicted more approach than avo...

Two online studies evaluated the misperception of sexual and romantic interests in established relationships and tested four hypotheses: a simple sex-difference hypothesis, a projection hypothesis, a mate value hypothesis, and a mediation hypothesis. Two hundred thirty-eight (Study 1) and 198 (Study 2) members of young adult opposite-sex friendship dyads indicated their sexual and romantic inte...

Recent decades have seen remarkable growth in research and theorizing about relationships. E. Berscheid (1999) invigorated this growth by proclaiming ‘‘The Greening of Relationship Science,’’ the emergence of a multidisciplinary science of interpersonal relationships with enormous potential to advance knowledge about human behavior and to provide an empirically informed framework for improving ...

This research investigates a proximal mechanism by which judgments of sexual intent are made: scripts. In a pilot study, scripts organized around sexual intent were elicited, with coding identifying the features of scripts relevant to casual and committed relationship encounters. Male participants and those interested in casual sexual relationships were more likely to generate the casual (vs. c...