The Close Relationships Laboratory at the University of Georgia explores the science of relationships
Having close relationships with others is a central human experience. Many of life’s ups and downs, the activities people engage in, and the goals they set for themselves are in one way or another linked to the initiation, development and maintenance of social relationships. Understanding psychological and social processes in close relationships and their impact on health and well-being is the central focus our lab’s research.
How do smartphones, social media, and emerging technologies impact people and their relationships?
A key goal of our lab’s research is trying to understand the role of technology in shaping our social relationships and, in turn, our health and well-being. In a paper published in Perspectives in Psychological Science in 2019, David Sbarra and my student Julia Briskin and I outlined the case for an evolutionary mismatch between smartphones and the social behaviors that help form and maintain close social relationships. As psychological adaptations that enhance human survival and inclusive fitness, self-disclosure and responsiveness evolved in the context of small kin networks to facilitate social bonds, to promote trust, and to enhance cooperation. We argue that smartphones and their affordances, while highly beneficial in many circumstances, cue our evolved needs for self-disclosure and responsiveness across broad virtual networks and, in turn, have the potential to undermine immediate interpersonal interactions via “technoference,” defined as the ways in which smartphone use may interfere with or intrude into everyday social interactions (either between couples or within families). Preliminary findings from experimental work in my lab indicate that smartphones can negatively impact well-being primarily because they lessen our ability to be responsive in our face-to-face social interactions. In addition, we are examining a number of other related topics, including the role of ghosting in relationships, online dating, zoom fatigue, and much more in the years to come.
Learn more:
Smartphones and Close Relationships: The Case for an Evolutionary Mismatch
Sbarra, D.A., Briskin, J.L., & Slatcher, R.B. (2019). Perspectives on Psychological Science, 14, 596–618.
How and under what conditions do people feel close to one another?
Much of our work is grounded in what has been called the Interpersonal Process Model of Intimacy (Reis & Shaver, 1988), examining how self-disclosure and partner responsiveness affect personal and relationship outcomes. Our early work in this area showed how couples’ writing about their deepest thoughts and feelings about their relationship helped them become more disclosing with their partners, in turn strengthening their relationships. We have conducted several investigations of the role of self-disclosure in promoting friendships between couples, which then benefits the couples themselves. Couples with more couple friends appear to be happier in their relationships, remain more passionately in love with their partners and feel closer to them. Much remains to be discovered about how and why couple friendships are beneficial.
We also have examined the role of intimacy processes in health. For example, we showed that work stress only appears to negatively affect women’s stress biology among those who are either unhappy in their marriage and/or are low in self-disclosure to their spouses. More recently, we discovered that there are long-term associations between perceived partner responsiveness and diurnal cortisol (an important marker of stress and disease) and sleep over a 10-year period. Most remarkably, we found that partner responsiveness is associated with lower levels of mortality 20 years down the road.
Learn more:
The Roles of Testosterone and Cortisol in Friendship Formation (PDF)
Ketay, S., Welker, K.M., & Slatcher, R.B. (2017). Psychoneuroendocrinology, 76, 88-96.
Effects of Self-Disclosure and Responsiveness Between Couples on Passionate Love Within Couples (PDF)
Welker, K.M., Baker, L., Padilla, A., Holmes, H., Aron, A., & Slatcher, R.B. (2014). Personal Relationships, 21, 692-708.
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How do intimate relationships “get under the skin” to impact health and well-being?
Over 30 years ago, James House and his colleagues at the University of Michigan demonstrated that stronger social ties are associated with lower levels of mortality (House, Landis, & Umberson, Science, 1988). Since then, there has been a groundswell of research on the links between social relationships and health. Yet a critical question remains: How do social relationships “get under the skin” to impact health, both from a psychological perspective and a biological one? Much of the research in our lab—which is grounded in basic social psychology—seeks to answer this question.
The most important social bond that most humans form in adulthood is marriage. A meta-analysis of the links between marital quality and health that my colleagues and I conducted showed links between how satisfied people are in their marriage and how physically healthy they are over time. However, that meta-analysis also revealed how little is known about the specific aspects of marriage that matter most for physical health—positive aspects (e.g., warmth, understanding), negative aspects (e.g., conflict, hostility), or both. Our “Strength and Strain” model emerged out of this need to define and clarify the social psychological processes through which close relationships can impact health.
Learn more:
A Social Psychological Perspective on the Links Between Close Relationships and Health (PDF)
Slatcher, R.B., & Selcuk, E. (2017). Current Directions in Psychological Science, 26, 16-21.
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How does culture shape our relationships?
Clearly there are a number of evolved and universal behaviors that guide people’s thoughts and behaviors in their relationships. But that is only part of the story. What role does culture play in shaping our relationships? Take, for example, partner responsiveness. Although the evidence is clear that perceived partner responsiveness is a central relationship process that predicts health and well-being in Western contexts, little is known about whether this association generalizes to other cultures. We recently showed that the predictive role of perceived partner responsiveness in well-being differs across the United States and Japan—two contexts with contrasting views on how the self is conceptualized in relation to the social group. Partner responsiveness positively predicted hedonic well-being (the kind of well-being associated with feeling good and happy) and eudaimonic well-being (the kind of well-being that is driven by finding meaning and purpose in life) both in the U.S. and in Japan. However, partner responsiveness more strongly predicted both types of well-being in the United States compared with Japan. By showing that the role of partner responsiveness in well-being may be influenced by cultural context, our findings contribute to achieving a more nuanced picture of the role of relationships in personal well-being.
Learn more:
Patterns of Perceived Partner Responsiveness and Well-Being in Japan and the United States (PDF)
Tasfiliz, D., Selcuk, E., Gunaydin, G., Slatcher, R.B., Corriero, E., & Ong, A.D. (2018). Journal of Family Psychology, 32, 355–365.
How do family relationships impact health and well-being?
Although many relationship researchers have been influenced by developmental attachment theory, work on childhood and romantic attachment have progressed relatively separately from each other. Integration of these fields can help us better understand lifespan effects of relationships on health and well-being. Early life stress, particularly unresponsive caregiving, is associated with insecure attachment, which in turn affects developing stress neurobiology and health. Growing evidence shows that these early effects extend well into adulthood. A key question is whether romantic attachment experiences, in turn, affect offspring care and health. To help bridge this gap, our lab examines the implications of adult attachment style and responsiveness for the health of offspring. For instance, we found that mothers’ avoidant attachment to their partner is negatively associated with maternal responsiveness toward their adolescent children. Notably, maternal responsiveness, in turn, predicts greater (i.e., “healthier”) glucocorticoid receptor gene expression in youth with asthma, showing how responsiveness may affect not only one’s own health-related biology but also that of one’s offspring.
In much of our work, we use the Electronically Activated Recorder (EAR) to assess behaviors in close relationships to provide a window into the ordinary daily flow and spillover of emotions and their links to biology and health. Findings from our lab have demonstrated that EAR-measured family behaviors predict health-relevant outcomes above and beyond traditional measures of relationship functioning. We have found, for example, that EAR-observed conflict at home—independent of “gold standard” questionnaire measures and daily diary reports of conflict—is strongly associated with daily reports of asthma symptoms as well as wheezing coded from the EAR. However, while we predicted that conflict at home would be associated with poorer health and biological markers of health, what we did not initially predict was that positive relationship characteristics would be associated with better health in this population, oftentimes more strongly than negative family behaviors. Such findings emerging from our lab are driving our work in new and exciting directions, pushing us to move beyond thinking about how “risky” relationship behaviors (e.g., conflict) impact adult and youth health to take a much deeper and nuanced approach to studying family relationships.
Learn more:
Relationships, Health, and Well-Being: The Role of Responsiveness
Stanton, S.C.E., Slatcher, R.B., & Reis, H.T. (2019). In D. Schoebi and B. Campos (Eds.), New Directions in the Psychology of Close Relationships (pp. 118-135). New York: Routledge.