The Cambridge Handbook of Personal Relationships

2193 Pages·2016·7.24 MB·English

by  Vangelisti A.L., Perlman D.(editors)

The Cambridge Handbookof Personal Relationships
The Cambridge Handbook of Personal Relationships serves as a
benchmark of the current state ofscholarship in this dynamic field,
synthesizing theextant theoretical and empirical literature, trac-ing its
historical roots, and making recommenda-tions for future directions. The
volume addressesa broad range of established and emerging
topics,including theoretical and methodological issuesthat influence the
study of personal relationships;research and theory on relationship
development;the nature and functions of personal relationships across
the life span; individual differencesand their influences on relationships;
relationshipprocesses such as cognition, emotion, and communication;
relational qualities such as satisfac-tion and commitment; environmental
influenceson personal relationships; and maintenance andrepair of
relationships. The authors are expertsfrom a variety of disciplines,
including severalsubfields of psychology, communication, familystudies,
and sociology, who have made major con-tributions to the understanding
of relationships.
Anita L. Vangelisti is a professor in the Department of Communication
Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Her work focuseson the
associations between communication andemotion in the context of close,
personal relationships. She has published numerous articles and
chapters and has edited several books.Vangelisti has served on the
editorial boardsof over a dozen scholarly journals and hasreceived
recognition for her research from theNational Communication Association
and theInternational Society for the Study of PersonalRelationships.
Daniel Perlman is an academic psychologistwith broad, applied interests
that cut acrosssocial, developmental, and clinical psychologyas focused
on the study of close relationships.He is a professor of Family Studies
and alsoteaches in the Department of Psychology at theUniversity of
British Columbia. He was presi-dent of the International Society for the
Studyof Personal Relationships and the Canadian Psy-chological
Association. He has authored morethan 5 0 articles, edited or authored
15 books,and been the editor or associate editor for fourjournals.
The Cambridge Handbookof Personal Relationships
Edited by
Anita L. VangelistiandDaniel Perlman
cambridge university press
Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, S a˜
o Paulo
Cambridge University Press40 West 20 th Street, New York, ny 10011 -
4211 , usa
www.cambridge.orgInformation on this title: www.cambridge.org/ 97805
21826174
c Cambridge University Press 2006
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exceptionand to the
provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,no reproduction of
any part may take place withoutthe written permission of Cambridge
University Press.
First published 2006
Printed in the United States of America
A catalog record for this publication is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
The Cambridge handbook of personal relationships / edited by Anita L.
Vangelisti,Daniel Perlman.p. cm.Includes bibliographical references and
index.isbn-13 : 978 - 0 - 5 21 - 82617 - 4 (hardcover)isbn-10 : 0 - 5 21 -
82617 - 9 (hardcover)isbn-13 : 978 - 0 - 5 21 - 5 3 3 5 9 - 1 (pbk.)isbn-10
: 0 - 5 21 - 5 3 3 5 9 - 7 (pbk.)1 . Interpersonal relations – Handbooks,
manuals, etc. 2 . Interpersonalcommunication – Handbooks, manuals,
etc. 3 . Social psychology –Handbooks, manuals, etc. I. Vangelisti, Anita
L. II. Perlman, Daniel.
isbn-13 978 - 0 - 5 21 - 82617 - 4 hardbackisbn-10 0 - 5 21 - 82617 - 9
hardback
isbn-13 978 - 0 - 5 21 - 5 3 3 5 9 - 1 paperbackisbn-10 0 - 5 21 - 5 3 3 5 9
- 7 paperback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility forthe persistence or
accuracy of url s for external orthird-party Internet Web sites referred to in
this publicationand does not guarantee that any content on suchWeb
sites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
Preface
For volumes that review the present stateof knowledge in dynamic,
rapidly evolv-ing fields, the label handbook seems onlymarginally
appropriate. When one thinks ofa handbook, one visualizes a person
hold-ing a plumbing manual in one hand and awrench in the other and,
after the leaky pipehas been fixed, putting the manual away foruse
another day, confident that the princi-ples of plumbing will not change
substan-tially from one year to the next or evenvery much from one
decade to the next.Relationship science, in contrast, is a largeand still
loosely organized field that continues to expand rapidly in all directions,its
momentum fueled partly by the internalcombustion provided by the
theorists andresearchers who form the core of the fieldand partly by
scholars in other fields who rec-ognize the relevance of relationship
theoryand research to their own problems. Relationship science is, in
short, a nova in theheavens of the social, behavioral, and bio-logical
sciences.Not so long ago, the future of a fielddevoted to understanding
interpersonal relationships was in doubt. As a consequence,and to be on
the safe side, many of usadopted the convention of referring to
therelationship field as “emerging,” a practicenoted with exasperation in
the late 1980 sby Steve Duck, the editor of the first relationship
handbook, the Handbook of Personal Relationships ( 1988 ). In his
introduc-tory remarks, Duck took a deep breathand dared to declare that
the field had emerged, putting its birth about 10 yearsearlier, in the late
1970 s. A second editionof that first handbook appeared 10 yearslater
(Duck, 1997 ) and only 3 years afterthat a relationship “sourcebook”
edited byClyde and Susan Hendrick ( 2 000 ) was pub-lished. In between
and since, several editedtopical “mini-handbooks” have been pub-lished,
each devoted to a subject of specialinterest to relationship researchers,
as DanPerlman and Duck note in their historicalreview chapter in this
book.The continuing high volume of activityin the relationship field places
a heavy bur-den on relationship scholars. There is toomuch to learn, and
far too little time in
ix
x
preface
which to learn it, for most of us to feel thatwe have anything but a
tenuous grasp ofthe breadth and depth of the field or morethan a dim
appreciation of its current trajec-tory. There are too many books, too
manyjournal articles, and too many conferences,preconferences, and
workshops for anyoneto take in. Hence the need for volumesthat
periodically, comprehensively, and con-cisely describe current activities
in the field –handbooks, in other words, or perhaps moreaccurately,
status reports – to help us fendoff the feelings of defeat that precede
retreatinto more settled areas of inquiry.
A Book of Bets
In addition to surveying present activitiesin areas of interest to
relationship scholars, many handbook contributors brieflydescribe the
history of the area and somealso attempt to predict its future. Histori-cal
remarks are useful to newcomers to thefield who, entering the
relationship moviemidstream, often wonder how the relationship field got
to where it is (and why it tookso long to get here). Forecasts of
profitablefuture activities are especially useful to newrecruits, many of
whom are in the process ofdeciding where they might most
profitablyinvest their scholarly efforts. A “bookmaker’sbook of bets” is, in
fact, a secondary defini-tion of the word handbook ( Webster’s Col-legiate
Dictionary, 10 th ed., p. 5 26 ). Indeed,and apart from the explicit
predictions offuture activity that some handbook contributors make, their
descriptions of current activities in a specific problem area canbe viewed
as surveys of the bets individualresearchers are currently making –
where, inother words, one’s colleagues are gamblingtheir professional
and personal resources inthe expectation that their investments willpay
off by advancing relationship knowl-edge. It perhaps does not need
saying thatin performing the triage necessary for a con-cise report, some
surveyors are better thanothers in identifying which current activities are
likely to be rewarding and which can
be omitted from their report because theypromise to be a waste of time
or, of course,that some researchers invest their resourcesmore wisely
than others. Histories of disci-plines, in fact, are simply accounts of
scholars’ bets that paid off. Lost wagers are rarelymentioned.It is to the
prediction of profitable futureactivities that I address the remainder
ofthese prefatory remarks because, like it ornot, all scholars must be
gamblers. To decidewhere to invest their time, energy, and
otherresources, they must make predictions aboutthe kinds of theoretical,
research, and serviceactivities that are the surest bets to advancethe
field. This kind of gambling is a high-stakes activity, both for the individual
andfor the field, which perhaps is why so manyscholarly conferences
devote at least one ses-sion to “future directions” or some variant onthat
theme and so many journals periodicallypublish “forecast” articles and
issues.
The Wild Cards
Making accurate predictions about a field’sfuture, especially predictions
about the specific research paths that will yield a sig-nificant payoff, is
extraordinarily difficult.It is hazardous, in fact. My thesis here isthat the
wild cards that so often trump themost carefully considered forecasts are
dealtby powerful, pervasive, and slow-movingmacroforces. Because
these forces intensifyso gradually (think of a hand in a bucket ofwater in
which the temperature is slowlyand imperceptibly increased to the
boilingpoint), they are hard to identify even as theyare exerting their
massive and inexorableinfluence on scholars’ activities. I illustratethe
point by describing some of the macroforces that, I now see in retrospect,
werebeginning to gather strength when I becameinvolved in relationship
research more thanhalf a century ago.The seeds of at least three
macroforcesthat would influence all of the social andbehavioral sciences
were beginning to ger-minate when, as an undergraduate English