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The Cambridge Handbook of Personal Relationships PDF

2193 Pages·2016·7.24 MB·English
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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

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