Describe the role of communication in maintaining relationships

Communication is one of the most important factors for a well functioning relationship. If there is no communication, then relationship would be difficult.

One of the most important factors in maintaing a relationship seems to be attributional style. In happy relationships, attributions tend to be positively biased towards the partner - that is, positive behaviours are seen as dispositional and negative behaviours are seen as situational. Unhealthy relationships are the opposite. It seems that communicating attributions for negative events or behaviour could determine whether a relationship will end. It is important, however, to consider if it is the quality of the relationship which leads to the negative communication or the attributional style which leads to the breakdown of a relationship. Bradbury and Fincham conducted a meta-analysis of research studies on the attributions married couples made on each others behaviour. They found that poor marital quality in a couple predicted dispositional attributions to negative behaviours and situational attributions to positive behaviours. They found that wives who had the tendency to make dispositional attributions about their husbands in negative situations were also more likely to behave negatively towards their husbands. The opposite was found in wives who made dispositional attributions about their husband in positive situations. Generally, the attributions that partners make about each other are associated with levels of satisfaction with the relationship as well as their behaviour towards each other. Negative communication causes marital dissatisfaction and may eventually lead to the end of the relationship.

It seems that communication plays an integral role in the maintenance of relationships. This is supported by the social penetration theory, which argues that close relationships are formed by a gradual process of self-disclosure. Closeness develops if the participants proceed in a gradual manner from superficial to intimate levels of communication and this is associated with attraction. Self-disclosure is the sharing of facts about one's life with a loved one, as well as inner thoughts, feelings and emotions. Collins and Miller conducted a meta-analysis research study that showed that people who disclosed intimate information about themselves are more liked than people who don’t. Disclosing something about yourself makes both strangers and friends like you more. Self-disclosure leads to self-validation, which is the feeling of being truly known and accepted by the listener. A deeper mutual understanding allows each partner to meet the needs of the other more easily. It is also a symbol of trust, which is important in relationships.

Males and females have differences when communicating, and sometimes this can lead to communication error where one gender mistakens the other gender for what they are really trying to say. In observational studies, Tannen found gender differences in how men and women have conversations. Men interrupt more, women use more language tags, women prefer emotional support whereas men tend to have a problem solving approach to problems. According to Tannen, women are more likely than men to respond to someone's negative feelings with understanding and acceptance - to reassure that it is all right to feel bad, perhaps sharing an account of a time when they had similar feelings. Men are more likely than women to take the initial disclosure as a complaint about a problem, and to offer helpful advice on solving it. This leads to misunderstandings: a woman may feel that a problem-solving response belittles her feelings, by failing to deal with them directly. For example, a woman may feel upset about her weight gain after her pregnancy. A woman might response: "I know, it's as if you're not in control of your body", whereas a men might reply, "You could always join a health club to get back into shape". Similarly, men may be troubled by a women's typical emotional response, and how they fail to support them in finding a solution to the problem. Understanding gender differences in communication styles is an important part of successful problem resolution in heterosexual relationships.

Communication plays a pivotal role for the maintenance of relationships. Research comes from mainly western countries, however, therefore cannot be generalised. We also have neglected cultural considerations - other cultures may communicate differently, and many of the research is self-report meaning that respondents may not be fully honest.

Attraction

• Examine biological, psychological and social origins of attraction
• To what extent do biological, cognitive and sociocultural factors influences human relationships
• Evaluate psychological research (that is, theories and/or studies) relevant to the study of human relationships

Everyone experiences attraction at some point in their life. But what is it that makes us attracted to another person? This essay will examine the biological, cognitive and sociocultural origins and explanations of attraction.

The biological factors that I will be examining is hormones, effects of neurotransmitters and evolutionary origins, and how they influence attraction.

Modern research has discovered that two hormones help to increase the bond between lovers. These are oxytocin and vasopressin. Oxytocin is a powerful hormone released during sex, which tends to deepen and intensify feelings of attachment. It is also released during childbirth, to help secure the bond between mother and baby. Pederan and Boccia studied rats and found that oxytocin leads to a shift in the mother's focus from grooming herself to grooming the rat pup. Winslow et al found that when animals were injected with vasopressin, they tend to form stable pair bonds and have more sex than neccessary. When male animals were given a drug that suppressed vasopressin, they lost their devotion to their mates and no longer tried to protect them from potential suitors. This shows that vasopressin plays an important role in the commitment of relationships. Both studies show that oxytocin and vasopressin are strong hormones involved in bonding. However, because this study was done on humans, it is difficult to generalise to humans. Also, the way in which animals show love may be interpreted differently by humans.

Neurotransmitters also explain why we are attracted to others. Chemical substances in the brain make us obsessed, addicted, or in love with a specific person causing us to alter our behaviour. Mazaritti studied 60 individuals: 20 were men and women who had fallen in love in the last 6 months; 20 others had suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder; and the other 20 were healthy individuals who were not in love (control group). By analysing blood samples from the lovers, Mazaritti discovered that low serotonin levels in new lovers were the same with those with obsessive-compulsive disorder. The study established a possible connection between romantic love and low levels of serotonin in the blood.

Though research on biochemistry helps us to explain what is happening to an individual when falling in love and forming attachments, it doesn't explain why we find some people more attractive than others. Evolutionary theories argue that the purpose of attraction is to procreate, to ensure that an individual's genes are passed on to the next generation. Buss et al found that in all cultures in the world, men generally desire younger woman as they are more fertile and therefore can bear more children, whereas woman desire older men as they have more resources for protecting each other and the offspring. Clarke and Hatfield found that men are more likely than woman to accept casual sex. This is because, from an evolutionary view, it is less risky for a man and they can pass on their genes and produce more offspring. However, a woman can only carry one child at a time and it is to her best advantage to make sure that she is given as much protection as possible for each offspring. Thus, woman are more selective when it comes to picking a partner for sex than men.

Wedekind wanted to see if body odour plays an important role in attraction. He tested the role of genes related to the immune system in mate selection. MHC genes are co-dominant, meaning that both sets of inherited genes have an effective on the child's immune system, so the more diverse the MHC genes of the parents, the better the immune system of the offspring. He recruited a group of 49 women and 44 men, with a wide range of MHC genes, and gave each men a clean t-shirt to wear for two nights. They were not allowed eat spicy food and had to use odour-free soap and aftershave. After the men returned the shirts, Wedekind put each shirt in a cardboard box with a sniffing hole at the top. Women were asked to come back at the mid-point of her menstrual cycle, where her sense of smell is at its strongest. They were presented with a different set of seven boxes. Three of the seven boxes contained t-shirts from men with similar MHC genes to women, the other three contained t-shirts from men with different MHC genes and one contained an unworn t-shirt as a control. The women were then asked to rate each of the seven t-shirts as pleasant or unpleasant. The women were more likely to prefer the scent of men with dissimilar MHC. According to Wedekind, choosing mHC-dissimilar mates serve three purposes: increasing fertility, producing healthy offsprings and reduce the risk of genetic disease. This explains why some women find a certain odor as absolutely beautiful or extremely dreadful. No one man spells good for everyone - it depends on who is sniffing him. However, this only explains a woman's attraction to men, but does not explain a men's attraction to woman.

Apart from biological factors, cognitive factors may also explain the origins of attraction. The attraction-similarity model suggests that we usually want to perceive our friends and partners that are similar to us, therefore we are more attracted to those that are similar to us. Market et al investigated the extent to which similarity is a factor in the way people choose partners. Using questionnaires, the researchers asked a large sample of young people to describe their ideal romantic partner. They were then asked to describe themselves. The results showed that the way people described themselves were similar to what their ideal partner was like. The study confirmed that people want partners who are similar to themselves. However, because the results were based on questionnaires, it may not be reliable as there is the problem of social desirability bias, which is where people want to make themselves sound better. But because this study was conducted on a relatively large sample, this enhances the validity of the study.

Self-esteem may also a play a role in relationship formation. Kiesler et al carried out an experiment where they administered a fake IQ on a group of men. They were then given fake scores. One group of men were told that they had scored off the charts - the best they had ever seen. Another group were told that there must have been a mistake with the IQ test because they had scored abnormally low. After the scores were given, the individual men waited in a waiting room for their pay for taking part in the study. During that time, a very attractive woman walked into the room. The experimenters wanted to see if the participant's self-esteem would affect their willingness to engage in discussion with the attractive woman. They found that men who had "high IQ scores" and therefore high self-esteem were more likely to engage in conversation with the woman much more quickly than men who were given low test scores. However, there are some limitations to this study in that attractiveness is very subjective. Some men may not find her attractive enough to talk to her, or different men prefer different types of women.

The cognitive analysis of attraction can also, to some extent, explain sociocultural factors in attraction. It seems that people prefer similarity in a partner, as well as a partner who can contribute positively to their self-esteem.

People who live close to one another tend to be similar and so probably also have the same social and cultural norms of what is attractive in a partner. Proximity refers to the physical or functional distance between individuals and suggests that the smaller the distance separating the individuals, the greater the chance of attraction taking place. Festinger et al studied student friendship patterns in university campus housing and found that the students were most friendly with those living next door, less friendly with those living two doors away and least friendly with those living at the end of the corridor. Likewise, Bossard found that couples in Chicago who lived within one block of each other were more likely to get married than those who lived two blocks apart. People prefer stimuli that they have seen more often. Close proximity clearly increases the chance of repeated exposure, which may lead to familiarity and a sense of trust. This theory might explain why long distance relationships hardly work and that people often fall out of love when they don't see their lover as often.

Examine factors influencing bystanderism

The bystander effect is a situation where people do not offer help in emergency situations when other people are present, even when one is capable of doing so. This essay will examine the main factors that influence bystanderism.

One factor that influences bystanderism is pluralistic ignorance. When in a group, people often look to others to know how to react. This is known as informational social influence. This means that if people see that others are not reacting, then they will not react either. They will conform to the group norms of bystanderism. Latane and Darley carried out an experiment on pluralistic ignorance. They asked participants to sit in a waiting room before participating in an experiment. While they were waiting, they heard the female experimenter fall and cry out for help. They found that participants reacted more quickly and more often when they were the only ones in the waiting room compared to when they were alone sitting with a confederate who showed no reaction. During post-experimental interviews, the participants said that they had felt anxious when they heard the experimenter fall, but because the other people in the waiting room did not react, they thought that it was not an emergency. This experiment shows that people look to others to know how to react. However, participants were not in their natural environment, and so this study lacked ecological validity.

Another factor that influences bystanderism is diffusion of responsibility, which is a phenomenon that occurs in large groups where there is a tendency of individuals to refrain responsibility and to expect that someone else more competent would help. Latane and Darley conducted a laboratory experiment where they told student participants that they would be interviewed about living in a high-pressure urban environment. Anonymity was preserved as they were interviewed over the intercom. Some of the students were told that there were five other people in the discussion group, others were told there was just two and some there was only one. All the comments they heard from other groups were pre-recorded. At one point, one of the voices cried for help. When the students thought that they were the only person there, 85% rushed to help. When they thought there was another person there, this dropped to 65%. When they thought there were five other people, this dropped to 31%. Believing someone else would intervene lowers the probability of a person taking responsibility. This experiment shows that people tend to refrain from responsibility in larger groups.

Another factor that influences bystanderism is proximity of bystanderism. The smaller the distance between the bystander and the victim, the more directly responsible the bystander will feel - and thus they are more likely to help. Piliavin et al conducted a field experiment where confederates acted as strangers in need of help in the New York subway. This was an opportunity sample of over 4000 participants. They found that help was offered just as much in a crowded subway than in a non-crowded one, which suggest that it is difficult to refuse help in an emergency face-to-face situation. This shows that people are more likely to help when the distance between them and the victim is small. However, this study can be criticized on ethical grounds. Participants could not give their consent, as they did not know that they were participants in an experiment. They were also deceived because they are unaware that it is not a genuine emergency. Participants were also not debriefed as this would have been almost impossible. Participants may also experienced guilt, distress or anxiety. Another problem with this field experiment is that it was difficult to control. For example, we could question whether travellers on the train saw more than one trial. They are also difficult to replicate and time consuming. However, a main strength of this study was that it is high in ecological validity. The sample size was also very large and therefore it can be generalized.

Bystanderism is an complex issue and does not only depend on pluralistic ignorance, diffusion of responsibility and proximity of bystander, but also with age, identification with the victim and perception of emergency.

Contrast two theories explaining altruism in humans

Altruistic behaviour is when people help others with no reward, and even at a cost to themselves. Darwin suggested that the evolution of altruism should be seen in relation to what could be advantageous to the group a person belongs to, rather than what could be advantageous by the individual alone. This essay will contrast two theories that explain altruism in humans: the kin selection theory, which is a biological explanation, and the empathy-altruism model, which is a cognitive explanation.

The Kin Selection Theory predicts that the degree of altruism depends on the number of genes shared by the helper and the individual that is being helped. The closer the relationship, the greater the chance for altruistic behaviour. This is supported by many animal studies, where animals tend to help those that are related to them. Dawkins proposed the "selfish gene theory" arguing that there is an innate drive for the survival and propagation of one's own genes. Organisms will try to make sure that their genes are passed on to the next generation. This may explain why mothers often protect their child and are willing to sacrifice themselves to protect them, whilst the vice versa is rare. However, this theory does not explain why some people work for charity or help strangers cross the road. It is also questionable whether animal behaviour can be generalized to human behaviour. Similarly, adoption does not benefit kin and thus cannot be explained by this theory.

By contrast, the Empathy-Altruism Model does explain why people help others that are not family. The Empathy-Altruism Model, by Batson et al, is based on the idea that an emotional response of empathy is generated when another person is perceived to be in need. According to Batson, two emotional responses are experienced when we see someone in need. The first one is personal distress, where we feel bad for the concern person, and this will lead to egoistic helping in order to make ourselves feel better. The second one is emphatic concern, where we feel like we ought to help others if we can, and this will lead to altruistic behaviour. In order words, if you feel empathy towards someone, you will help them regardless of what you gain from it. But if you do not feel empathy, you will weigh the costs and benefits before making a decision of whether to help.

Batson et al carried out an experiment where he asked students to listen to a recording of a student named Carol, who had broken both of her legs and is struggling to catch up with her school work. The students were divided into two groups: low empathy group and high empathy group. The students were then given a letter, asking them to meet up with Carol and share their lecture notes with her. Some participants were told that Carol would be finishing her work at home, and others were told that she would be in their class when she returned to school. Participants from the high empathy group were almost equally likely to help Carol, whether or not she would be in their class or not. Those from the low empathy group were more likely to help if they thought Carol would be in their class. The experiment concluded that if you feel empathy towards someone, you will be more likely to help.

Thus this theory explains what the Kin Selection Theory does not. However, there are also weaknesses of the Empathy-Altruism Model. The study only looked at short-term altruism - would the participants from the high empathy group continue to help Carol throughout her time in school? Interpretation of the results also do not take personality factors into account. It is also difficult to measure a person's level of empathy. But nonetheless, Batson et al's study is constantly being replicated, and the results are the same.

In conclusion, the Kin Selection Theory and the Empathy-Altruism Model both explain altruism in humans. We are more likely to help our family than our friends even when no empathy is felt, but with those that are not family we will help if we feel empathy towards them.