Gian C. Gonzaga

Love and the Commitment Problem in Romantic Relations and Friendship

On the basis of the proposition that love promotes commitment, the authors predicted that love would motivate approach, have a distinct signal, and correlate with commitment-enhancing processes when relationships are threatened. The authors studied romantic partners and adolescent opposite-sex friends during interactions that elicited love and threatened the bond. As expected, the experience of love correlated with approach-related states (desire, sympathy). Providing evidence for a nonverbal display of love, four affiliation cues (head nods, Duchenne smiles, gesticulation, forward leans) correlated with self-reports and partner estimates of love. Finally, the experience and display of love correlated with commitment-enhancing processes (e.g., constructive conflict resolution, perceived trust) when the relationship was threatened. Discussion focused on love, positive emotion, and relationships.

Romantic Love and Sexual Desire in Close Relationships

Drawing on recent claims in the study of relationships, attachment, and emotion, the authors hypothesized that romantic love serves a commitment-related function and sexual desire a reproduction-related function. Consistent with these claims, in Study 1, brief experiences of romantic love and sexual desire observed in a 3-min interaction between romantic partners were related to distinct feeling states, distinct nonverbal displays, and commitment- and reproductive-related relationship outcomes, respectively. In Study 2, the nonverbal display of romantic love was related to the release of oxytocin. Discussion focuses on the place of romantic love and sexual desire in the literature on emotion.

Power in mixed-sex stranger interactions

The authors tested the approach/inhibition theory of power by examining teasing interactions between women and men in conditions in which either one was given elevated power or they were in an equal-power control condition. Consistent with hypotheses, high-power individuals behaved in a disinhibited fashion and were less accurate judges of their partners emotion, whereas low-power individuals behaved in a more inhibited, indirect fashion and reported more self-conscious/anxiety-related emotion. Additional contrast analyses revealed only modest support for the claim that men would act in powerful fashion in the absence of explicit power differences, and that power-based differences were greatest when the man had power over the woman. Discussion focuses on different perspectives on the interaction between power and gender.

Culture and Teasing: The Relational Benefits of Reduced Desire for Positive Self-Differentiation

The authors hypothesized that teasing, a social interaction that benefits relational bonds at the expense of the self, should be viewed as more affiliative, and experienced as more pleasurable, by members of cultures that deemphasize positive self-differentiation. In four multimethod studies, Asian Americans attributed more affiliative intent to teasers and reported more positive target experience than did European Americans. Teaser behavior, attribution biases, and personality did not account for culture-related differences in teasing experience. Rather, childhood teasing may better prepare Asian American children to overlook a teases affront to the self in favor of its relational rewards. Implications of deemphasizing positive selfdifferentiation in social interaction are discussed.