Journal of Social and Personal Relationships最新文献

Sibling relationships are an important, but often understudied, close relationship. To examine how siblings have been studied over the past four decades in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, a leading international and multidisciplinary outlet for the study of interpersonal relationships, a search was conducted of the 2,151 articles published since the journal's inception in 1984. A total of 41 articles were identified that examined siblings among human populations, which was 2.4% of all articles published. Topics and historical trends were identified by examining the full text of these 41 articles using a topic modeling approach, Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). A total of six topics representing two thematic clusters were identified. The first three topics represented specific groups studied in sibling research, including emerging adults, family systems, and twins. The second set of three topics captured content areas, specifically, connectedness, behaviors, and other interpersonal relationships as they are connected to sibling relationships. Historical trends revealed variation in the salience of topics at different timepoints over the past four decades. Discussion interprets themes and trends and offers future directions in sibling research.

Social motives, such as social admiration, prosocial behavior, and sociability, become increasingly important for emerging adults as they transition into adulthood and must establish their identity and relationships with others. Sibling relationships may assist in this process as closeness between siblings can improve emerging adults' abilities to problem solve, which serves as a useful skill in social settings. Sibling birth order may also influence how emerging adults perceive their sibling relationships and its effect on their social experiences. This study (N=189) examined sibling problem solving as a mediator between closeness with a younger sibling and later social motives, while accounting for parent and peer closeness. Closeness with younger siblings predicted better sibling problem-solving skills, which predicted social admiration, prosocial, but not sociability motives. Results differed between eldest and middle-born siblings. Findings suggest that continued relationships with younger siblings in emerging adulthood may improve social motives, such that constructive and close relationships with siblings should be encouraged to support later social development.

Despite the role friendship can play in the physical and mental health of adults, little is known about its relationship with suicidality. To address this gap, we conducted a scoping review on adult friendship and suicidality in Medline, PsycInfo, and the Cochrane Library from inception to April 9, 2024. We used a combination of keywords and MeSH terms to find studies reporting on the themes of suicidality and adult friendship. We summarized key findings on the association between friendship and suicidality. We identified only 43 studies on adult friendship and suicidality. The study designs, goals, measurements, and populations were highly heterogeneous, and friendship was not measured consistently. Nevertheless, most studies (60.5% or 26 out of 43 unique studies) found friendship was protective against suicidality. This review highlights the inconsistent measurement of friendship and lack of conceptualization of friendship. Yet, friendship appears to be protective against suicidality. Further study is needed to understand the relationship between friendship and suicide.

Adolescent friendships offer a crucial context for learning to seek social support. Through repeated social support encounters, adolescents take in social information and shape their own development. The current study characterizes adolescents' support-seeking discussion topics with close friends, how the topics are influenced by adolescent age and gender, and how they are related to interpersonal processes in close friendships. A community sample of 184 adolescents (85 boys, 99 girls; 58% white, 29% Black, 13% other identity groups) participated annually from age 13 to 18. Through these six waves of data collection, participants completed a total of 859 support-seeking interactions, from which 10 thematic codes were identified. Support-seeking about socially oriented topics (e.g., conflicts with peers, romantic interests) appeared consistently across adolescence, while participants increasingly discussed future-oriented topics (e.g., considering college or work plans) with their friends as they aged. Selection of socially oriented topics was more common among female dyads and was associated with higher friendship quality, self-disclosure, and emotional support in conversations between adolescent close friends.

Individuals in couple relationships often use pornography. Previous findings are inconsistent regarding how pornography use may affect couples and tend to focus on overall use and broad retrospective indicators of relationship functioning (e.g., relationship satisfaction). No research has considered the motivations behind pornography use and how they relate to daily dynamics between partners. Yet, the approach-avoidance sexual motivation theory suggests that approach motivations to engage in a sexual activity (e.g., for sexual pleasure) are associated with positive relational outcomes whereas avoidance motivations (e.g., to avoid a conflict) are related to negative relational outcomes. This study bridges these gaps by examining the associations between pornography use motivations and daily positive (e.g., listening to the partner) and negative (e.g., getting angry at the partner) behaviors among couples using a dyadic daily diary design. A convenience sample of 327 couples (50.6% women; M _age = 31.5) completed daily self-report measures over 35 days. Multilevel actor-partner interdependence models showed that on days when a person used pornography for stress reduction, they reported fewer positive behaviors toward their partner. Similarly, on days when a person used pornography for emotional distraction, they reported fewer positive behaviors and greater negative behaviors toward their partner. On days when a person used pornography for partner-related motivation, they reported greater positive behaviors toward their partner, and on days when a person used pornography for sexual pleasure, they reported fewer negative behaviors toward the partner. For most motivations, on days when a person used pornography, their partner reported fewer positive behaviors toward them that day. Our results are in line with the approach-avoidance sexual motivation theory and support the need to consider motivations underlying pornography use for a better understanding of its associations with same-day couple dynamics.

Online dating is widely assumed to enhance the overall efficiency of relationship formation through expanding the pool of potential partners. Yet little is known about how this presumed efficiency plays out beyond the initial search stage. Although temporal compression (i.e., saving time) is considered central to the notion of efficiency, individuals' lived realities of time and efficiency in online dating remain understudied. Adopting a grounded theory approach to analyzing 31 in-depth interviews with heterosexual Chinese immigrant online daters in Canada, we reveal how time-related expectations and experiences shaped their perceptions of (in)efficiency throughout different stages of online dating. Specifically, our participants started with an efficiency expectation of temporal compression, expecting online dating to save time. As the dating process unfolded, however, they experienced inefficiency through diverse temporalities, including temporal suspension and simultaneity in mediated communication and temporal reconfiguration during modality switching. These experiences contradicted our participants' initial efficiency expectation, prompting some to reevaluate their expectation and develop a preference for temporal slowdown in dating. Our findings highlight an "efficiency paradox" whereby the promise of efficiency not only runs counter to online daters' lived realities but also amplifies perceptions of inefficiency. Foregrounding the voices of racial minority immigrants, our study challenges the commonly envisioned efficiency of online dating and provides new insights into how digital technologies mediate intimate lives through shaping individuals' temporal experiences.

Communication within the parent-child relationship plays a key role in children's well-being, particularly children's disordered eating behaviors and body image. Given the critical role of parental communication and beliefs in children's socialization, the current study tested a model in which parental weight talk may facilitate children's diet culture-related beliefs, which may further affect children's disordered eating and positive body image. Surveys were completed by 199 parent-child dyads, and structural equation modeling was employed to test the hypothesized model. Results provide support for diet culture socialization within the parent-child relationship via parental weight talk, with disordered eating as a key outcome. However, children's diet culture beliefs were not found to be directly associated with positive body image. Implications for future research on the parent-child relationship and children's well-being are discussed.

Interracial relationships have been on the rise and face unique relational challenges but are underrepresented in relationship science which has relied heavily on studies of same-race White couples. Existing research has shown that individuals in interracial relationships experience greater jealousy than those in same-race relationships, but these studies were underpowered or relied on binary measures of jealousy. In a large sample of individuals in interracial (N = 196) and same-race relationships (N = 198) from the United States and Canada, we found that individuals in interracial relationships reported experiencing jealousy more frequently and intensely (general jealousy), had greater worries about potential romantic rivals (rival-directed cognitive jealousy), and felt more distrust and anger toward rivals (rival-directed emotional jealousy). However, there were no differences in the extent to which they derogated the rival and displayed their relationship in front of the rival (rival-directed behavioral jealousy), and the findings for general and cognitive jealousy became nonsignificant when controlling for attachment anxiety. Finally, having a stronger couple identity attenuated the negative effects of having higher general jealousy and cognitive jealousy on relationship satisfaction for individuals in interracial (but not same-race) relationships. Future research should explore the development of attachment anxiety in interracial relationships and explore strategies in addition to having a stronger couple identity that can help interracial couples navigate third-party threats more effectively.

The present study explores how family relationship quality is associated with psychological and cognitive health among grandparents who had primary responsibility in raising their grandchildren and examines whether co-residence with adult children moderates this relationship. The study uses data from 589 grandparents who completed the Midlife Development in the United States (MIDUS) survey. Latent profile analysis (LPA) is used to identify grandparent-family relationship types. Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression models are used to estimate the association between relationship types and psychological and cognitive health (i.e., psychological distress, psychological well-being, episodic memory, and executive function). LPA identified four grandparent-family relationship types: amicable, ambivalent, neutral, and disharmonious. Compared to grandparents with amicable family relationships, those with ambivalent family relationships had significantly higher levels of psychological distress, reduced psychological well-being, and poorer episodic memory. Further, the association between ambivalent relationships and episodic memory was stronger among respondents who co-resided with their adult children. Emotional closeness with family is essential for grandparents who are raising their grandchildren. This study contributes to a more detailed understanding of the role of relationships with family and suggests that emotional and instrumental support from family is important for increasing grandparent caregivers' psychological and cognitive well-being.

Despite the overwhelming support for the importance of sexual communication to intimate relationships, there is limited information about what motivates someone to engage in or avoid sexual communication. Motivational frameworks have been applied to various aspects of intimate relationships, serving as strong predictors of different behavioural processes and playing a crucial role in facilitating behavioural change. As such, we aimed to elucidate the motivations for sexual communication and explore how they relate to other aspects of the process of sexual communication. A total of 373 participants were recruited from online crowdsourcing websites across two studies, and they completed online questionnaires using a mixed methods approach. In Study 1, open-ended responses regarding participants' motivations for sexual communication were inductively coded and aligned with the Regulatory Focus Theory, which describes two distinct modes of goal pursuit depending on if the person is focused on growth and advancement (i.e., promotion-focused) or safety and security (prevention-focused). This coding structure was replicated in Study 2, and we expanded the results to examine the predictive ability of the coded motivations. We found that those higher in attachment avoidance were more likely to have prevention-focused motivations, and those with relationship-oriented promotion-focused motivations reported more depth of both sexual and nonsexual communication as well as more relationship and sexual satisfaction. The implications of these findings are discussed.