Real-life Relationships Research Articles

Building Knowledge in the Virtual World – Influence of Real Life Relationships

This paper intends to present a preliminary PhD research that is being developed by the authors, with the intention to determine how to improve teaching and learning situations, at the university level, based on experiences in immersive virtual worlds. The authors have realized that, nowadays, courses don’t fulfill our students’ needs. They belong to a networked and multitasking generation, and what they get from today’s teaching strategy does not, in many situations, fulfill students’ needs and perspectives. They need to gather competences in order to become motivated citizens, communicative and knowledge builders. It is our belief that we can take advantage from the immersive virtual worlds’ resources to overcome this situation and therefore to transfer it to real life. In order to achieve this we need, at the first instance, to understand how social interactions occur in these environments (in particular at Second Life®), how they grow and how they are developed. What we present here is a preliminary sample of our intended research.

Can Girls Be Friends?: Talking about Gender in Cicero's de Amicitia

One of the most prominent, although often overlooked, features of Cicero's de Amicitia is that it talks exclusively about men's relationships with other men. Similarly to the pederastic system and the sexual and political assumptions of Plato and his contemporaries, the idealized Roman male affective relationships called amicitia present us with a crucial and intense form of social attachment. This essay offers strategies for encouraging students to analyze the role of gender in the theory and practice of Roman and Hellenistic amicitia , as well as in their own real-life relationships, beginning from Cicero's text.

Young women's attachment style and interpersonal engagement with female TV stars

The present study builds on an emerging body of research that finds adult attachment style predictive of interpersonal engagement with fictional media personas in ways that are congruent to patterns that emerge in real life relationships. Results of a questionnaire study indicate that a preoccupied attachment style among college women is associated with increased idealization of a favorite female character's behavior and physical appearance. Additionally, the desire to look like a favorite female character was greatest for women selecting thin characters, while perceived similarity to a character's appearance was greatest for those selecting average weight characters. The psychological motivation behind such media involvement and its potential impact on the emotional well being of anxiously attached young women are discussed.

Is Secure Attachment the Antidote to Everything that Ails Us?

There are two remarkable things about the empirical findings summarized by Mikulincer and Shaver. One is that meaningful benefits emerge not only from actual secure attachments in real-life relationships, but also from the mere activation of attachment-connoting con cepts into working memory. The second remarkable finding is that these beneficial effects are found across such a diverse range of meaningful outcomes. The cog nitive priming of attachment security makes people healthier. It leads them to be more compassionate and helpful to others. It reduces prejudice. Future research will, no doubt, discover yet more benefits that emerge from the simple priming of attachment security. I'm tempted to believe that a sense of secure attachment may be the psychological equivalent of a broadband antibiotic-a sort of universal antidote to everything that ails us. But first, before I yield to this idealistic temptation, perhaps I should ask a couple of questions.

(Dis-)integrative Effects of MUD-Usage as Seen by the Players

Most studies on social relationships in Multi-User-Dungeons (MUDs) focus on the online development of the relationships or on their trans¬fer from Virtual Reality (VR) to Real Life (RL). The perspective of my study is broader: 50 players of the German MUD Avalon were questioned in an online survey about the relationships they had gained or lost by playing online – and for their own judgement on the effects the MUD had on their social network. Of these 50, 20 participated in qualitative online interviews; their answers allow a better under¬standing of the quantitative data. The main results of the quantitative survey are that most of the players gained new relationships – in¬cluding an amazingly high number of couples – and only one player lost a friend; nevertheless nearly half of the players had neglected their RL relationships for some time. The interviewees judged these effects according to their RL experiences: Highest ratings were re-ported by those who gained closer relationships in VR than they were used to in RL – even though this might mean that they had simply found acquaintances rather than real friends.

Helen Keller, Henry James, and the Social Relations of Perception

Helen Keller, Henry James, and the Social Relations of Perception Sam Halliday Introduction Henry James's The Bostonians (1886) is shaped around a remarkably close, and for a time robust, relationship. This unites Verena Tarrant and Olive Chancellor, whose conversation, like that of their associates, characteristically dwells on the precise nature of their relation. On one such occasion, Verena tells Olive, "'You are my conscience,'" prompting the other to reply, "'I should like to be able to say that you are my form—my envelope.'"1 On another, a friend reports that when Verena speaks, Olive "'vibrate[s]'" as if "'chords were strung across her own heart'" (224). As these exchanges suggest, each of the pair imagines the other (or are seen as so doing by observers) as either mentally or physically part of their own person. Here is James's summary of Olive's view: "To Olive it appeared that just this partnership of their two minds—each of them, by itself, lacking an important group of facets—made an organic whole which, for the work in hand, could not fail to be brilliantly effective" (169). "Wholeness" thus emerges from a prior state of mutual incompletion. Two people, not fully adequate in their own right, become so joined together. There are several ways in which one might begin contextualizing this idea, and this relationship. For a start, several biographers have noted the resemblance between Olive's alliance with Verena and that between James's sister, Alice, and her nurse-cum-companion Katharine Peabody Loring.2 A more broadly "cultural" explanation offers itself when we compare Olive's musing to contemporaneous ideas concerning marriage: in William Dean Howells's A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890), for example, a character declares that in wedlock, people similarly "supplement each other and form a pretty fair sort of human being together."3 Yet a third approach would see Olive and Verena's intimacy as an expression of James's long-standing interest in same-sex erotic friendship, as explored in such novels as [End Page 175] Roderick Hudson (1875) and The Princess Casamassima (1886).4 But nobody, to my knowledge, has yet explored the connection between James's fictional alliance and the real-life relationship between Helen Keller (1880–1968), the famous autobiographer, socialist, and disability-rights activist, and her "teacher," Anne Sullivan Macy (1866–1936). To be sure, there may seem no immediately compelling reason why one should explore this connection—for a start, The Bostonians appeared almost two decades before Keller became famous, so there can be no question of the latter having "influenced" the former—but the wager of this essay is nonetheless that such exploration is worthwhile, and that in doing this, one illuminates not only James's oeuvre (including texts written after Keller's rise to fame), but also, conversely, Keller's hitherto underappreciated significance in American cultural and intellectual life.5 Deaf and blind from the age of nineteen months, Keller experienced a particularly extreme version of Olive and Verena's "incompletion"—the total devastation of at least two organic "facets." However, with the help of Sullivan, her close companion from the age of eight, Keller learned a range of communicative techniques—chief among them, a tactile mode of linguistic notation that enabled her to read, write, and "talk" with others—through which to compensate for such disadvantages. In a letter that effectively reprises The Bostonians, Mark Twain told her, "You are a wonderful creature, the most wonderful in the world—you and your other half together—Miss Sullivan, I mean, for it took the pair of you to make a complete and perfect whole."6 Here, almost exactly as in James's novel, two people, mere "halves" in isolation, are made "whole" through social realignment. Keller, as it happens, was quick to make such claims herself. In The Story of My Life (1903)—her first and most famous book—for instance, she writes: "My teacher is so near to me that I scarcely think of myself apart from her."7 What Keller shares with James (and Twain), then, is an interest in what this article will call "social relations of perception," a rubric under which we...

From Tree House to Barracks

A representative sample of players of a popular massively multiplayer online game (World of Warcraft) was interviewed to map out the social dynamics of guilds. An initial survey and network mapping of players and guilds helped form a baseline. Next, the resulting interview transcripts were reviewed to explore player behaviors, attitudes, and opinions; the meanings they make; the social capital they derive; and the networks they form and to develop a typology of players and guilds. In keeping with current Internet research findings, players were found to use the game to extend real-life relationships, meet new people, form relationships of varying strength, and also use others merely as a backdrop. The key moderator of these outcomes appears to be the game's mechanic, which encourages some kinds of interactions while discouraging others. The findings are discussed with respect to the growing role of code in shaping social interactions.

Online Infidelity: Aspects of Dyadic Satisfaction, Self-Disclosure, and Narcissism

This study examined the hypothesis that the desire for an online infidelity act is formed on the basis of both personality-related factors and relationship-related factors, similarly to “real life” infidelity. Two hundred participants who maintain a relationship in “real life” were recruited through web advertisements, and filled in online questionnaires regarding their dyadic satisfaction (DAS-7), self-disclosure (JSDQ), narcissism (NPI), and their Internet relationship expectations (IRI). Results indicated that the predictors of Internet relationship expectations are the experience of having an Internet relationship, higher tendencies of manipulation and exhibitionism, lower self-disclosure and lower dyadic cohesion. However, dyadic and sexual satisfaction do not predict higher expectations of an Internet relationship, in contrast to real life relationships. These findings demonstrate the difference between online and “real life” infidelity and emphasize the need for further research on the link between personality dynamics and online infidelity. Additional theoretical and clinical implications deriving from the results are discussed.

Factors determining compliance with command hallucinations with violent content: the role of social rank, perceived power of the voice and voice malevolence

We have examined the nature of the cognitive processes sub-serving compliance with command hallucinations. Specifically, we investigated the interaction between self beliefs of social rank in the voice-hearer and beliefs about the voice in determining compliance with content-specific violent commands (self-harm, harm-other). Thirty-two people who heard violent command hallucinations were asked to rate their beliefs about the power and the benevolence/malevolence of the commanding voice. They also rated their perception of their own inferiority/superiority within real-life social relationships. The study reliably identified two groups of ‘compliers’ and ‘non-compliers’ sub-divided into two groups of ‘self-harm command hearers’ and ‘harm-other command hearers’. No significant differences were found between the compliers and non-compliers on beliefs about benevolence or malevolence of the voice. The complier group reported that they perceived the command voice to be significantly more powerful than the non-complier group. Further, ‘self-harm command compliers’ reported significantly higher ratings of inferiority in social relationships, whilst ‘harm-other command compliers’ reported significantly higher ratings of superiority within social relationships. The results show that beliefs about social rank have potentially important mediating effects upon complying with content-specific commands (self-harm vs harm-other). Importantly, the results have highlighted that for people in contact with psychiatric services compliance with violent command hallucinations is far more common than non-compliance. This may mirror Milgram's (1974) findings of the rarity of resistance to obedience with authority. However, these conclusions must be tentative due to the small sample size in the non-compliance conditions.

Heading off a Problem

As a movie-going scientist, I like to watch out for the science in science fiction films. I find that usually this doesn’t detract much from watching most science fiction films, in that scientific explanations rarely occupy more than a couple of sentences in the script. Particularly in insectrelated science fiction films, it’s usually a simple matter to identify the entomological errors in the statements made by the supposedly knowledgeable characters in the film, as, for example, when Dr. Gates, Dr. Susan Tyler’s entomologist mentor in the film Mimic (1997), expounds on the “kind of simplicity that governs the Phylum Insecta.” But I have to confess that I was taken aback by a plot development in the sequel to Mimic, Mimic 2: Hardshell, which presented a challenge to my entomological expertise. Mimic, described by critic Roger Ebert as “a loyal occupant of its genre” (http://www.suntimes.com/ ebert/ebert_reviews/1997/08/082212.html), recounts how genetically engineered cockroaches in the subways of New York evolve to resemble humans and prey on them; in Mimic 2, the so-called “Judas Breed” cockroaches are back, and they seem to be selectively killing only those men that Remi Panos, the entomologist/schoolteacher who had only about 10 minutes of screen time in the first film, goes out with. Setting aside the myriad other improbabilities associated with human-sized man-eating cockroaches as well as the real-life relationship problems of female entomologists, the plot device that caused me greatest consternation was the plan concocted by Detective Klaski to dispatch the Judas Breed human-like cockroach by decapitating it with a paper cutter. Fortunately for single men in New York City, Remi knows that “you can’t even make a scratch unless it’s in molt....Besides, you know what happens when you take the head off a cockroach?...It dies, about nine days from now, when it finally starves to death.” To make a long story short, the Judas Breed is eventually decapitated with a pair of oversize scissors, leaving Remi and a surviving male character (who undoubtedly owes his good fortune to the fact that he’s too young to be her boyfriend) trapped in her apartment while the dying Judas Breed blocks the exit for eight more days. It’s always a little annoying to feel inferior to movie entomologists, so it was disconcerting to realize that I couldn’t belittle the office-supply-based integrated pest management plan that had been implemented because I didn’t know how long cockroaches can live without their heads. A search through the available literature reveals a remarkable dearth of longevity studies on decapitated cockroaches. This is not to say there is a dearth of studies on decapitated cockroaches. In fact, it’s alarming how many studies do involve decapitation in general; a search of the 1983–2004 Current

Showing Status. Representation of Social Positions in the Late Middle Ages (review)

Reviews 129 research tool, as indispensable to our generation and those which follow as such an overview (however many times updated) as J. Wells, A Manual ofthe Writings in Middle English has been essential now for nearly a century. J. S. Ryan School ofEnglish, Communication and Theatre University ofNew England Blockmans, W i m and Antheun Janse, eds, Showing Status. Representation of Social Positions in the Late Middle Ages (Medieval Texts and Cultures of Northern Europe 2), Turnhout, Brepols, 1999; board; pp. vii, 491; b/w illustrations, maps, tables; R R P EUR65.00, BEF2622.09; ISBN 2503507662. This volume brings together papers presented at four symposia on the late medieval culture of the L o w Countries organised by the Netherlands Research School for Medieval Studies. The symposia were clearly feasts of learning, and the book seems a positive banquet. The dishes are served in three main courses: 'Positioning by Milieu', 'Visions and Problems', and 'Posititioning by Social Function.' W i m Blockmans plays the role ofmaster ofceremomies with an introduction , "The Feeling ofBeing Oneself,' and a conclusion, 'To Appear or to Be'. Thefirstgroup of papers relate to issues of social rank, especially as represented and communicated symbolically. According to Danielle Queruel, the courtly romance still presented a traditional view of the social order, rendering i t concrete by careful descriptions of externals, and attributing perturbations to the passions of individuals. Raymond von Uytven provides a wide-ranging exploration of the sociology of food and dress. Blockmans and Esther Donckers usefully analyse the civic receptions for princes, notably Bruges's reception for Prince Charles in 1515. According to Fred van Kann, the civic militia of St. George in the court-town ofThe Hague provided opportunities for intermingling between townsmen and court officials, but social distinctions were nonetheless maintained. Using records of the livery of mourning-cloth at ducal funerals, Robert Stein documents social differentiation at the court of Brabant. In an interesting study of the ownership of graves in Dutch churches, Koen Goudriaan finds the correlation between an individual's status and the placement of their grave not especially marked, and little evidence ofthe clustering of family graves that might attest a sense of dynastic solidarity. In complementary studies, on the 130 Reviews basis of literary sources and data on marriages respectively, Jeanne VerbijSchillings and Antheun Janse chart increasing differentiation among the nobility of Holland. Hilde de Ridder-Symoens focuses on the university, which though 'not an egalitarian community based on intellectual merit' was 'still a socially more open microcosm than the world outside'. From the latefifteenthcentury, though, she detects 'a process of aristocratization' with consequent marginalisation of the poor, observing that it was mainly the urban rich who benefited from the humanist 'ideology of the ennobling effects of intellectual achievement' (pp. 171^4). The second group of papers variously address the representation of behaviour. From an examination of works offiction,Annelies van Gusen seeks to identify typical ideas regarding love and marriage: writers accept that 'love has a natural cause and does not regard wealth or rank', but generally take the view that the 'lover needs self-control and instruction to practise the art of love in a proper way' (p. 262). Several papers engage with the problematical relationship between social reality and cultural representation. Blockmans and Tess Neijzen contrast images of the domineering, violent wife in literature and art with evidence from court cases involving domestic violence, and conclude that 'real-life relationships have been reversed infiction'(p. 276). Hanneke de Bruin makes a similar point with respect to the representations of sexually aggressive w o m e n in wood-cut illustrations, as in depictions of Aristotle's humiliation by Phyllis. Jos Koldeweij demonstrates the interest of another popular cultural item, the pewter badge. Mass-produced, mostly as pilgrimage souvenirs and charms, some were frankly erotic, raising questions, not addressed elsewhere in this collection, about attitudes to sexuality. Hans-Joachim Raupp considers visual comments on social change in contemporary art. While the social order had 'lost its charming simplicity with the rise ofthe urban population and a new economy based on trade and money', he finds that the traditional schema 'is sometimes used more emphatically', with...

Plotting Sensation Stories: Affect and Intuition in Short Sensation Fiction

The British short story is still an understudied form in Victorian studies, and particularly so in studies of sensation fiction. Despite rich and growing scholarship on sensation fiction and its relationship with literary markets and commodity culture, scholars have a had a difficult time shaking off its enduring brand “the novel with a secret,” which has problematically discounted an incredible body of periodical fiction that falls “short” of our expectations about what this kind of fiction looks like. Short periodical works, however, are crucial if we are to understand the nexus of consumerism, mass marketing, social anxiety, and literary production that first peaked in the 1860s, things which have largely come to organise our understanding of what was so sensational about this historical moment in time. This essay compares short and long works from Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, Ellen Wood, and J.S. Le Fanu to explore how short stories could take up common themes and features of sensation novels (mistaken identity, unchecked passion, family secrets, shocking revelations, etc.) while also considering how formal considerations of length encouraged greater reliance on impressions and feelings to resolve conflicts in the text. These sensation stories so often suggest that deviance is best discerned through the body rather than the mind, and they create a path to pleasurable revelation where trusting one’s gut offers the most effective form of policing. These supposedly “unimportant” periodical works – sensational not only in the way they glutted periodicals with their sheer volume – could in turn promote suspicion and distrust in readers that were capable of damaging real-life bonds and relationships. Although short fiction could provoke anxieties about shifting roles and hierarchies in an increasingly fast-paced, automated British society, the tremendous visibility of the novel effectively shielded them from comparable criticism.

The Relationship Between Loneliness and Internet Use and Abuse

Research has found that loneliness is associated with both increased Internet use and Internet abuse. Causality is hard to determine. This article presents evidence from research on computer-mediated communication, social anxiety, and Internet-specific survey and field studies that support two opposing hypotheses. Loneliness is a byproduct of excessive Internet use because users invest in online relationships at the expense of real-life relationships. Lonely individuals are drawn to some forms of interactive activities online because of the possibilities of connectedness, companionship, and communities they offer. Limitations of these hypotheses and the potential benefits and risks of Internet use by the lonely also is discussed.

How storytelling shapes memory and impressions of relationship events over time.

In 4 longitudinal studies, the authors explicated how storytelling about relationships biases subsequent impressions in the direction of the story told. In Study 1, storytelling about a relationship conflict vignette biased impressions of blame 2 weeks later, even with memory bias neutralized. Study 2 tracked 2 distinct and variable influences on blame,—storyt elling heuristic and memory mediated mechanisms—over a 40-week period. Heuristic but not memory mediated effects depended on story quality. In Study 3, the need for structure moderated use of the storytelling heuristic. In Study 4, storytelling biased impressions of real-life relationship conflicts 8 weeks later. In light of past research indicating that storytelling and idealization characterize satisfied relationships, the present results suggest that the cognitive side effects of storytelling may help cause idealization and satisfaction in relationships .

Handbook of Personal Relationships: Theory, Research and Interventions

Handbook of Personal Relationships: Theory, Research and Interventions (2nd ed.). Steve Duck (Ed.). Chichester, England: John Wiley & Sons. 1997. 857 pp. ISBN 0-471-95913-8. $140.00 cloth. Steve Duck, Lee West, and Linda Acitelli underscore in the introduction to the Handbook of Personal Relationships the sentiment that life relationships . . . happen to real people while. . . researchers are busy making other models (p. 20). Their main thesis is that a discrepancy exists between real life relationships and relationships depicted in research. To support that contention, they present several criticisms, two of which are emphasized here. They argue that researchers represent relationships too simplistically, and little focus is placed on sociocultural contexts of relationships. Contributors address the thesis by demonstrating how research can represent complexities of relating and relationships, thereby illustrating how the criticism can be overcome or by stressing sociocultural contexts in which relationships exist. Chapters in Section 1, Developmental Psychology, demonstrate that the study of relationship learning has moved beyond the dyadic level to the more complex systems level of influence. For example, Ross Parke and Robin O'Neil review research on family subsystems that describe how subsystems influence relationship learning and the processes through which that learning occurs. Maria von Salisch builds on Parke and O'Neil's work by describing how affect regulation is learned through experiencing emotions elicited by others. Two themes pervade Section 2, Social Psychology. The first concerns how, within interdependent relationships, motives conflict. converge, and resolve into individual and joint outcomes. This theme is addressed through a data-analytic approach and through the perspectives of two theories-interdependence and self-expansion. The second theme concerns origins of personal dispositions leading to conflicts in relationships and is addressed in chapters covering evolutionary approaches to relationships, adult attachment formation, and interracial ties. For example, Stanley Gaines and William Ickes present the origins of differences between contrasting opinions of interracial relationships by examining such relationships from two perspectives-that of individuals observing them (outsiders) and that of individuals engaging in them (insiders). Gaines and Ickes explain that previous research, capturing only the outsiders' perspective, was incomplete. They argue that outsiders' and insiders' perspectives are needed to understand interracial relationships and that the interaction of these perspectives is important because tensions between the two can affect relationships. Complexities of interracial relationships are made more evident by records of frank conversations among insiders communicating with one another via the Internet. …

Memory Aging Research: Real-Life and Laboratory Relationships

Memory, more so than any other cognitive function, seems to be impaired by the processes associated with normal and neuropathological aging. In fact, conventional wisdom suggests that age-related and disease-related memory decrements are both universal and irreversible. The articles contained in this section of Applied Cognitive Psychology, challenge these assumptions. They show that certain types of memory are spared in both healthy elderly adults and demented individuals, and that successful intervention programs based upon implicit memory techniques may be used to enhance the memorial abilities of severely demented patients. Furthermore, these articles illustrate the dynamic interplay between basic and applied memory research from a developmental perspective. Language: en

Patterns of Friendship for Women and Men in Same and Cross-Sex Relationships

Ninety-five women and 95 men undergraduates rated each of their closest friends, and rated themselves with each of those friends on a Relationship Grid evaluating both `structural' dimensions (i.e., age, sex, duration of friendship and frequency of contact) and `affective' dimensions (i.e. self-disclosure, appreciation, assistance, empathic understanding, deepening others' self-awareness, shared activity, authenticity, trust, control, responsibility, connectedness, empowerment of others and satisfaction). Results indicated similarity in the rankings of the importance of those dimensions in the friendships of men and women, and that same-sex friendships were more common and of longer duration than cross-sex friendships. Two broad patterns of differences emerged on the `affective' dimensions: (1) relationships with men friends were less reciprocal than relationships with women friends; and (2) men's same-sex relationships were characterized by less giving and receiving. This study suggests similarities and differences in the nature, meaning and perceived function of friendship for women and men, and illustrates the importance of studying people's conceptions of themselves and their friendships in the context of their specific real-life relationships.

Entitlement and the Inability to Find a Mate

This article studies the resolution of a 40-year-old professional woman's sense of entitlement to marry a perfect man. The case was treated through Modern Psychoanalysis, which made use of the therapist's countertransference reactions to understand the defensive nature of the sense of entitlement as it related to the patient's inability to handle aggression and to remain in relationships. A disappointing therapy relationship helped the patient accept disappointments in real life relationship.

Kafka, His Fate and Work (Part 2)

The plot of Lost Without Trace (America) is developed through the adventures of Karl Rossmann, a modest, naive, and open-hearted youth driven from his parents' house in Prague because he had been seduced by a servant girl. But with a minor exception, the unusual turns taken by his destiny are of little help in gaining knowledge of the societal contradictions that rend American life. The reason for this is not merely the mixture of two types of narration in the novel: the realistic, marked by authenticity and accuracy of observations of life, and the fantastic, which distorts real-life relationships, leaves unexplained the motivations of human conduct and distorts the nature of the world in which Karl Rossmann functions. A second reason is the detachment of the fantastic from its nutritive soil — reality.