Civil Unions
Let's get serious: Communicating commitment in romantic relationships
Joshua Ackerman, Vladas Griskevicius & Norman Li
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Are men or women more likely to confess love first in romantic relationships? And how do men and women feel when their partners say "I love you"? An evolutionary-economics perspective contends that women and men incur different potential costs and gain different potential benefits from confessing love. Across 6 studies testing current and former romantic relationships, we found that although people think that women are the first to confess love and feel happier when they receive such confessions, it is actually men who confess love first and feel happier when receiving confessions. Consistent with predictions from our model, additional studies have shown that men's and women's reactions to love confessions differ in important ways depending on whether the couple has engaged in sexual activity. These studies have demonstrated that saying and hearing "I love you" has different meanings depending on who is doing the confessing and when the confession is being made. Beyond romantic relationships, an evolutionary-economics perspective suggests that displays of commitment in other types of relationships-and reactions to these displays-will be influenced by specific, functional biases.
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Rethinking Families and Community: The Color, Class, and Centrality of Extended Kin Ties
Naomi Gerstel
Sociological Forum, March 2011, Pages 1-20
Abstract:
Although a focus on marriage and the nuclear family characterizes much sociological research and social commentary, this article suggests that this focus ignores the familial experiences of many Americans, particularly those on the lower end of the economic spectrum for whom extended kin are central. African Americans and Latinos/as are more involved with kin than whites, but class trumps race in this regard: African Americans, Latinos/as, and whites with fewer economic resources rely more on extended kin than do those more affluent. The emphasis on marriage and the nuclear family may actually promulgate a vision of family life that dismisses the very social resources and community ties that are critical to the survival strategies of those in need. In contrast to those who have argued that marriage is the foundation of the community or even, in that overused phrase, the "basic unit of society," this article suggests that marriage actually detracts from social ties to broader communities just as an emphasis on marriage and the nuclear family, to the exclusion of the extended family, distorts and reduces the power and reach of social policy.
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Angela Bryan, Gregory Webster & Amanda Mahaffey
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, March 2011, Pages 365-382
Abstract:
Dominance is a key feature on which romantic partners are evaluated, yet there is no clear consensus on its definition. In Study 1 (N = 305), the authors developed scales to measure three putatively distinct dimensions of dominance: social, financial, and physical. In Study 2 (N = 308), the authors used their scales in a mate-selection paradigm and found that women perceived physical dominance to be related to both attractiveness and social dominance. For both sexes, attractiveness predicted desirability for a one-night stand, whereas attractiveness and agreeableness were predictors of desirability for a serious relationship. In Study 3 (N = 124), the authors surveyed romantic partners in monogamous relationships and found that although aspects of a partner's dominance - financial for women and social for men - played a bivariate role in relationship satisfaction, agreeableness was the strongest predictor of current and future relationship satisfaction and the only significant predictor of relationship dissolution.
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Adrienne Banny et al.
Developmental Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Two longitudinal studies examined associations between relational aggression and friendship quality during adolescence. In Study 1, 62 adolescents in Grades 6 (25.8%), 7 (32.3%), and 8 (41.9%) completed assessments of friendship affiliations, relational and overt aggression, and friendship quality at 2 time points, 1 year apart. Results using actor partner interdependence modeling indicated that high levels of relational aggression predicted increases in self-reported positive friendship quality 1 year later. In Study 2, 56 adolescents in Grades 9 (66.7%) and 10 (33.3%) attended a laboratory session with a friend in which their conversations were videotaped and coded for relationally aggressive talk. Target adolescents completed measures of positive and negative friendship quality during the laboratory session and during a follow-up phone call 6 months later. Analyses revealed that high levels of relationally aggressive talk at Time 1 predicted increases in negative friendship quality 6 months later. In addition, among adolescents involved in a reciprocal best friendship, high levels of observed relationally aggressive talk predicted increases in positive friendship quality over time. Taken together, these studies provide support for the idea that relational aggression may be associated with adaptive as well as maladaptive outcomes within the dyadic context of adolescent friendship.
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Recovering From Conflict in Romantic Relationships: A Developmental Perspective
Jessica Salvatore et al.
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
This study adopted a developmental perspective on recovery from conflict in romantic relationships. Participants were 73 young adults (target participants), studied since birth, and their romantic partners. A novel observational coding scheme was used to evaluate each participant's degree of conflict recovery, operationalized as the extent to which the participant disengaged from conflict during a 4-min "cool-down" task immediately following a 10-min conflict discussion. Conflict recovery was systematically associated with developmental and dyadic processes. Targets who were rated as securely attached more times in infancy recovered from conflict better, as did their romantic partners. Concurrently, having a romantic partner who displayed better recovery predicted more positive relationship emotions and greater relationship satisfaction. Prospectively, target participants' early attachment security and their partners' degree of conflict recovery interacted to predict relationship stability 2 years later, such that having a partner who recovered from conflict better buffered targets with insecure histories.
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Gaining while giving: An fMRI study of the rewards of family assistance among White and Latino youth
Eva Telzer et al.
Social Neuroscience, October 2010, Pages 508-518
Abstract:
Family assistance is an important aspect of family relationships for adolescents across many cultures and contexts. Motivations to help family members may be driven by both cultural factors and early family experiences. Here, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to examine (1) cultural differences in neural reward activity among White and Latino youth during online experiences of family assistance and (2) how prior family experiences related to neural reward activity when helping the family. Participants were scanned as they made decisions to contribute money to their family and themselves. Latino and White participants showed similar behavioral levels of helping but distinct patterns of neural activity within the mesolimbic reward system. Whereas Latino participants showed more reward activity when contributing to their family, White participants showed more reward activity when gaining cash for themselves. In addition, participants who felt more identified with their family and who derived greater fulfillment from helping their family two years prior to the scan showed increased reward system activation when contributing to their family. These results suggest that family assistance may be guided, in part, by the personal rewards one attains from that assistance, and that this sense of reward may be modulated by cultural influences and prior family experiences.
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I Feel Like I Know You: Sharing Negative Attitudes of Others Promotes Feelings of Familiarity
Jonathan Weaver & Jennifer Bosson
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, forthcoming
Abstract:
Holding similar negative - versus positive - attitudes toward a third party has been shown to predict increased closeness to a stranger. Here, the authors examined whether this effect is mediated by the heightened feelings of familiarity engendered by shared negative attitudes. In Study 1, participants who shared with a (bogus) stranger a negative attitude of a professor subsequently reported knowing more about the stranger than those who shared a positive attitude, but only when they did not feel strongly about the attitude. In Study 2, a familiarity manipulation produced high levels of closeness among participants who believed they had a lot of information about a stranger. Among those who believed they knew little about the stranger, closeness was facilitated by sharing a weakly held, negative attitude of a professor. Discussion considers the relevance of these findings to the interpersonal attraction literature.
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Whose Voices Are Heard? Gender, Sexual Orientation, and Newspaper Sources
Joseph Schwartz
Sex Roles, February 2011, Pages 265-275
Abstract:
A content analysis of 243 U.S. newspaper articles about same-sex marriage from the Boston Globe, the Plain Dealer, the Oklahoman, and the San Francisco Chronicle was conducted. Hypotheses predicted that male sources would outnumber female sources; that gay male sources would outnumber lesbian sources; and that male sources would express more negative views toward same-sex marriage than female sources. Results showed that male sources were over three times as common as female sources. Gay male and lesbian sources were found at near-equal rates in the Boston Globe and the San Francisco Chronicle, but were almost absent from the Plain Dealer and the Oklahoman. Male sources expressed negative views toward same-sex marriage more frequently than female sources.
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Divorce Property Division Laws and the Decision to Marry or Cohabit
Hayley Fisher
Journal of Law, Economics, & Organization, forthcoming
Abstract:
This article presents a model of the choice between marriage and cohabitation that is used to analyze the implications of changing from a title-based division of property on divorce to an equal sharing regime. There are two opposing effects. In line with popular expectations, the change to equal sharing discourages some wealthy individuals from marrying since they risk losing half of their assets in the event of divorce. Offsetting this, equal sharing property division induces efficient investment in marriage, increasing the value of marriage relative to cohabitation for some couples. Overall, the impact on the number of marriages relative to cohabitations is ambiguous, although there will be more marriages where it is more difficult to invest, and where couples are more similar to each other.
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Matthew Lee, Laurie Chassin & David MacKinnon
Psychology of Addictive Behaviors, December 2010, Pages 712-718
Abstract:
This study tested the effect of marriage on young adult heavy drinking and tested whether this effect was mediated by involvement in social activities, religiosity, and self-control reasons for limiting drinking. The sample of 508 young adults was taken from an ongoing longitudinal study of familial alcoholism that over-sampled children of alcoholics (Chassin, Rogosch, & Barrera, 1991). In order to distinguish role socialization effects of marriage from confounding effects of role selection into marriage, analyses used both the analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) method and the change score method of adjusting for pre-marriage levels of heavy drinking and the mediators. Results showed role socialization effects of marriage on post-marriage declines in heavy drinking. This effect was mediated by involvement in social activities such that marriage predicted decreased involvement in social activities, which in turn predicted decreased heavy drinking. There were no statistically significant mediated effects of religiosity. The mediated effect of self-control reasons for limiting drinking was supported by the ANCOVA method only, and further investigation suggested that this result was detected erroneously due to violation of an assumption of the ANCOVA method that is not shared by the change score method. Findings from this study offer an explanation for the maturing out of heavy drinking that takes place for some individuals over the course of young adulthood. Methodologically, results suggest that the ANCOVA method should be employed with caution, and that the change score method is a viable approach to confirming results from the ANCOVA method.
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If Momma Ain't Happy: Explaining Declines in Marital Satisfaction Among New Mothers
Jeffrey Dew & Bradford Wilcox
Journal of Marriage and Family, February 2011, Pages 1-12
Abstract:
This study tests competing explanations for the link between the transition to motherhood and declines in wives' marital satisfaction. Using data from the first and second waves of the National Survey of Families and Households (N = 569), we found that new mothers' marital satisfaction declines could be attributed to reductions in wives' quality time spent with their husbands and to increases in perceptions of unfairness in housework. Family role traditionalization in the wake of the birth of a child did not directly explain marital satisfaction declines but was linked to perceptions of marital unfairness. Attendance at religious worship services did not moderate the association between the transition to motherhood and marital satisfaction changes.
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Sexual Double Standards: Bias in Perceptions of Cyber-Infidelity
J. Hackathorn & R. Harvey
Sexuality & Culture, March 2011, Pages 100-113
Abstract:
The current study compared the predictions of two socio-cultural theories, shifting standards and intergroup bias, to predict sexual double standards that occur in reactions to computer-mediated infidelity. Shifting standards theory (Biernat In The shifting standards model: Implications of stereotype accuracy for social judgment, APA, Washington DC, 1995) suggests that individuals will judge female targets more harshly than male targets, based on culturally ingrained stereotypes regarding sexual behavior. On the contrary, intergroup bias theory (Brewer In Psychol Bull 86:307-324, 1979) predicts that individuals will judge outgroup targets, or members of the opposite sex, more harshly than ingroup targets, or members of the same sex. Participants were shown a hard copy of presumable evidence that extradyadic computer-mediated behavior had occurred, engaged in by one of two members of a couple. The two groups differed only by the sex of the target, the female "Colleen" or the male "Bill". Then participants reported their attitudes toward the target's behavior, resulting distress, and likelihood to terminate the relationship. Results showed support for the intergroup bias theory, suggesting that individuals altered their attitudes toward the behavior based on whether the target was an ingroup or outgroup member.
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Household Responsibilities, Income, and Ambulatory Blood Pressure Among Working Men and Women
Rebecca Thurston et al.
Psychosomatic Medicine, February 2011, Pages 200-205
Objective: To test the hypothesis that a greater perceived responsibility for household tasks and a greater number of hours spent doing these tasks would be associated with elevated ambulatory systolic (SBP) and diastolic blood pressure (DBP). The connection between job characteristics and cardiovascular outcomes has been widely studied. However, less is known about links between household work characteristics and cardiovascular health.
Methods: A total of 113 employed unmedicated hypertensive men and women underwent 1 day of ambulatory blood pressure (ABP) monitoring. Participants provided information on 1) the number of hours spent doing; and 2) their degree of responsibility for seven household tasks (child care; pet care; caring for ill/elderly; household chores; house/car repair; yard work; finances). Associations between task hours and responsibility ratings in relation to SBP and DBP were estimated, using generalized estimating equations, with covariates age, race, gender, body mass index, location, and posture. Interactions with gender and socioeconomic position were assessed.
Results: A greater perceived responsibility for household tasks, but not the hours spent doing these tasks, was associated with higher ambulatory SBP (b (95% confidence interval [CI]), 0.93 (0.29-1.56), p = .004) and DBP (b (95% CI), 0.30 (0.10-0.51), p = .003). Significant interactions with income indicated that associations between household responsibilities and ABP were most pronounced among low income participants (SBP: b (95% CI), 1.40 (0.58-2.21), p < .001; DBP: b (95% CI), 0.48 (0.18-0.78), p < .01). The task associated most strongly with BP was household chores. No interactions with gender were observed.
Conclusions: Greater perceived responsibility for household tasks was associated with elevated ABP, particularly for lower income participants. Household obligations may have important implications for cardiovascular health, meriting further empirical attention.
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Homogamy and Intermarriage of Japanese and Japanese Americans With Whites Surrounding World War II
Hiromi Ono & Justin Berg
Journal of Marriage and Family, October 2010, Pages 1249-1262
Abstract:
Although some sociologists have suggested that Japanese Americans quickly assimilated into mainstream America, scholars of Japanese America have highlighted the heightened exclusion that the group experienced. This study tracked historical shifts in the exclusion level of Japanese and Japanese Americans in the United States surrounding World War II with homogamy and intermarriage with Whites for the prewar (1930-1940) and resettlement (1946-1966) marriage cohorts. The authors applied log-linear models to census microsamples (N = 1,590,416) to estimate the odds ratios of homogamy versus intermarriage. The unadjusted odds ratios of Japanese Americans declined between cohorts and appeared to be consistent with the assimilation hypothesis. Once compositional influences and educational pairing patterns were adjusted, however, the odds ratios increased and supported the heightened exclusion hypothesis.