Journal of Social and Personal Relationships

A longitudinal study of 129 graduating university students tested whether relationship continuity could best be predicted by a positive pull model, consisting of love and rewards, or a newly proposed barrier model, consisting of investments and commitment. The barrier model proved to be the best discriminator of whether relationships continued past graduation. Validity of the barrier model was further supported by conceptual distinctions found between Love and Commitment scales and by evidence for the importance of investments to the development of commitment. The combination strategy of scale development and examination of relationships over time produced new scales of Investments and Commitment.

This research examined self-disclosure between all possible pairs of sex of discloser and sex of disclosure target. Assuming that socialization encourages women and men to play different roles, men were expected to take the initiative in comparison to women in the first encounter. Among acquaintances, males may exceed women in their disclosure of personal information in order to control the relationship's development. Results supported this prediction. Males disclosed more intimately than females to an opposite-sex partner whom they had just met. Males paired with a female also exceeded the level of disclosure intimacy for females paired with a female or males paired with a male. The intimacy of self-disclosure for males paired with a female (compared to females paired with a male) was more highly correlated with liking for the partner and with perceptions of the partner's positive feelings toward self. Being singled out as a disclosure target led subjects to infer that their partner liked them, but it did not lead to greater disclosure intimacy nor liking for the partner.

The propositional review of research on marital quality by Lewis & Spanier (1979) and the theoretical perspectives on close relationships of phenomenology, communication and consistency theory, suggest the hypothesis that the similarity perceived by a spouse is directly related to that spouse's understanding of his or her partner. The results of this study do not appear to confirm this suggestion. When global perception scores are divided by the importance of the issue in the relationship, it appears that issue salience is implicated in a couple's perceptual accuracy. In general, husband's perceived similarity is consistently closer to the actual level of dyadic agreement than is the wife's perceived similarity. Wife's understanding of her spouse is consistently more accurate than is husband's understanding. Only on low salience items is the wife's perceived similarity as accurate as the husband.

Three issues related to the oldest child's school entry transition were addressed. Retrospective reports of parents' initial response to their oldest child's school entry were contrasted with their responses three months later, revealing a significant decline in parental and marital role stress for mothers and a significant decline in parental role stress for fathers. Mothers reported significantly more parental and marital role stress at school entry than fathers. A second analysis, addressing relationships between demographic variables and parents' initial response to their child's school entry, identified the child's previous experience in pre-school as significantly related to stress for both parents, and level of education and being married previously as significantly related to fathers' stress. The final issue, predicting changes in parents' stress following a three-month period of adjustment, revealed that selected demographic and communication variables were significant predictors.

This paper argues that the evolution of language must have been dependent on the development of social relationships. A broad range of ideas pertaining to the evolution of human language is first critically reviewed. Our state of knowledge with regard to neural, psychological, anatomical and sociocultural aspects of language evolution is outlined. It is argued that a number of major transformations between 100,000 and 35,000 years ago are best understood as reflecting the emergence of language-as-we-know-it. The selective advantages of this development are discussed. It is then suggested that this must have been a long, tortuous process, relying importantly upon the development of an appropriate set of social relations. Finally, consideration is given to the likely nature of social organization and relations prior to a modern level of language competence.