Close relationships are powerful sources of both pleasure and pain. The potential incentives of close relationships, such as companionship, love, and intimacy are immense. Comparable in magnitude however are the potential threats in close relationships, such as rejection, conflict, and loss. Despite this precarious balance of incentives and threats in interpersonal relationships, people, across the life span are nevertheless tenaciously motivated to form and maintain strong and stable social relationships, and failing to do so is linked with higher mortality and lower health and well-being. The motives and goals people have for relationships can be focused either on incentives and desired end-states-approach-or they can be focused on the threats and undesired end-states-avoidance. Prior research has shown that this distinction (approach versus avoidance) has important implications for cognition, behavior, affect, well-being, and health. For example, avoidance motives and goals are often associated with less effective regulation (e.g., stronger emotional reactions to negative interactions) and poorer outcomes (e.g. more loneliness). In this CAREER grant, Shelly Gable of the University of California - Los Angeles explores how and why motives and goals influence interpersonal outcomes.
Specifically, this project focuses on five likely mechanisms for these effects: direction of attention to social cues (incentives and threats), memory of relationship events, interpretation of ambiguous social information, evaluation of progress in relationships and the corresponding emotional consequences, and satisfaction with relationships and decisions to dissolve relationships. Strong approach motives and goals are expected to facilitate recognition of social incentives; increase accessibility of positive social information in memory; benevolently bias interpretation of ambiguous social cues; lead to gain-based progress assessments with corresponding joy-disappointment emotional consequences; and direct greater weighting of rewards for satisfaction and commitment decisions. Conversely, strong avoidance motives and goals are expected to be associated with increased hypervigilance to social threats; greater memory for negative social information; negatively biased interpretation of ambiguous cues; loss-based progress assessments with corresponding relief-anxiety emotional consequences; and higher weighting of threats in satisfaction and commitment decisions. The project balances the careful control offered in the laboratory with studies that occur in the natural context of everyday social interaction by employing diverse methods, including laboratory experiments, daily experience studies, and longitudinal designs. To reflect the diversity of interpersonal relationships, the project includes studies targeting individuals' broader social networks, specific close relationships, and discrete interactions. Finally, because close relationships, by default, involve coordination with another person (who also has his or her own motives and goals) over some time course, the project includes investigations of individuals and dyads, sampled at specific moments, as well as over longer periods of time.
This project brings together well-established ideas and findings from motivation and close relationships. Due to the near constant need to regulate social behavior, the ever shifting tapestry of relationship rewards and costs, and the potential impact of individual differences, examination of social motives and goals and the processes regulating relationship incentives and threats is critical. This project is important because the majority of life experiences, both meaningful and trivial, take place in the context of close relationships; and the quality and stability of our close relationships has a significant impact on well-being, health, and mortality. The findings from this project may advance understanding of these links, inform public policy debates, and provide the basis for effective interventions.
