Lindsey A. Beck

Choosing to Enter or Avoid Diagnostic Social Situations

Three studies suggest that people control the nature of their relationships, in part, by choosing to enter (or avoid) situations providing feedback about other peoples social interest. In Study 1, chronically avoidant individuals (but not others) preferred social options that would provide no information about other peoples evaluations of them over social options that would, but did not prefer nondiagnostic situations more generally. In Study 2, chronically avoidant students (but not others) in a methods class preferred to have their teacher assign them to working groups (a nondiagnostic situation) over forming their own groups (a diagnostic situation). In Study 3, individuals experimentally primed to feel avoidant were less likely than those primed to feel secure to choose to receive feedback about how another person felt about them. Overall, the research suggests that choices of socially diagnostic versus socially nondiagnostic situations play an important role in guiding peoples social relationships.

Congruence Between Spouses’ Perceptions and Observers’ Ratings of Responsiveness The Role of Attachment Avoidance

Although close relationships require partners to depend on one another for mutual responsiveness, avoidantly attached individuals are especially averse to risking such dependency. The authors propose that both avoidant and non-avoidant individuals perceive signs of their own and their partners’ responsiveness in ways that reflect motivated perceptions of dependency. The present research examined how the interplay between spouses’ attachment avoidance and observed responsive behaviors during marital conflict shaped perceptions of their own and their partners’ responsiveness. Newlywed couples attempted to resolve a relationship conflict and then reported perceptions of their own and their partners’ responsiveness during the conflict. Observers also coded both partners’ responsive behaviors during the conflict. Avoidant spouses perceived themselves as less responsive, especially when observers rated them as more responsive; avoidant spouses also perceived their partners as less responsive. The discussion highlights the role of attachment in understanding links between responsiveness-related perceptions and behaviors.

Social anxiety, cortisol, and early-stage friendship

Socially anxious people report less closeness to others, but very little research has examined how social anxiety is related to closeness in real-time social interactions. The present study investigated social anxiety, closeness, and cortisol reactivity in zero-acquaintance interactions between 84 same-sex dyads (168 participants). Dyads engaged in either a high or low self-disclosure discussion task and completed self-report measures of closeness and desired closeness post-task. Salivary cortisol was collected before, during, and after the self-disclosure task. Multilevel models indicated that in the high self-disclosure condition, individuals higher in social anxiety displayed flatter declines in cortisol than those lower in social anxiety; cortisol declines were not significantly related to social anxiety in the low self-disclosure condition. Further, across both conditions, individual’s social anxiety was associated with decreased levels of closeness and desired closeness, particularly when individuals were paired with partners higher in social anxiety. These findings are discussed in relation to previous work on hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal function, social anxiety, and interpersonal closeness.

Seeing you in me: Preliminary evidence for perceptual overlap between self and close others

Inclusion of other in the self, a key principle of the self-expansion model, suggests that close others overlap with the self in terms of resources, perspectives, and identities. Research from behavioral, cognitive, and neural domains provides evidence for inclusion of other in the self; the present research extends prior theoretical and empirical work to a new, visual domain by investigating whether inclusion of other in the self applies to facial processing. In two reaction time (RT) experiments, participants viewed static (Study 1) and morphed (Study 2) facial images of themselves, their close friend (i.e., a close other), and a familiar celebrity (i.e., a non-close other). In Study 1, participants showed slower RTs when comparing their own image with their friend’s image than when comparing their own image with a celebrity’s image. In Study 2, participants showed slower RTs when their own image was morphed with their friend’s image than when their own image was morphed with the celebrity’s image. These results suggest that inclusion of close others in the self extends to visual processing. Implications and limitations are discussed.

When do we offer more support than we seek? A behavioral replication and developmental extension

Beck and Clark (2009) found self-report evidence that adults are more likely to offer support to a potential friend than to seek identical support from that potential friend, but that this asymmetry between offering and seeking support weakens among close friends. The present study sought to behaviorally replicate these findings in adults as well as to explore the developmental emergence of this phenomenon by examining when children would display similar patterns of offering and seeking support. Four-year-olds, 6-year-olds, 8-year-olds, and adults were given opportunities to offer or request identical support from peers. Sometimes participants were close friends; sometimes they were potential friends. The findings for adults’ support behaviors replicated previous self-report findings. Adults were more likely to offer support than to request identical support from potential friends, whereas adults were just as likely to request support as they were to offer support to close friends; 8-year-olds showed a similar pattern of behaviors. However, 4- and 6-year-olds did not distinguish between potential and close friends; they were just as likely to request support as they were to offer support to both potential and close friends. The discussion highlights the importance of understanding how these support processes unfold in new, developing relationships compared to in close, established relationships, as well as of understanding when these processes might emerge during childhood.