Journal of Social and Personal Relationships

Bereavement not only is an individual psychological experience but also has meaningful social and familial impacts. This article examines how relationship quality with both a deceased and a surviving parent influence adult children’s marital quality over time and whether this differs by gender. Data were drawn from the Longitudinal Study of Generations, a study of three- and four-generation families from Southern California. The sample included married adult children who experienced the death of a parent between survey waves (N = 304). A series of multilevel random effects models were estimated using a before/after loss framework. Analyses revealed that improvements and declines in relationship quality with a surviving parent were related with improvements and declines in marital quality following the death of a first parent, regardless of gender. High pre-loss relationship quality with a deceased parent resulted in improved marital quality only for sons who lost mothers. Findings support the linked lives framework and offer some evidence for the “greedy marriage” thesis.

Parent emotion coaching (i.e., child-reported parental responses to sadness and anger) was examined as a moderator of peer relations in the classroom (i.e., peer-rated sociability, number of mutual friends, and respect nominations) and self-perceptions of social competence (i.e., loneliness and optimism). Participants were 129 (44% boys; 66% Caucasian) fourth through sixth graders. If parents were perceived as low in emotion coaching, low sociability and low peer respect were associated with greater loneliness; low peer respect was also associated with low peer optimism when combined with low emotion coaching. Importantly, with high parent emotion coaching, there was no significant association between problematic peer relations and negative self-perceptions of social competence. Parent emotion coaching may buffer the effects of poor peer relations.

The reported study examined the implications of receiving superficial self-disclosures from a friend. A total of 199 adults reported on communication episodes initiated by a friend during the previous 7 days via five communication technologies and completed measures of liking, relationship satisfaction, and willingness to provide social support to their friend. The results revealed significant interactions between the total volume of self-disclosures received and proportion of superficial disclosures for liking and relationship satisfaction. Among respondents who received a relatively greater volume of self-disclosures, the proportion of superficial disclosures received was inversely associated with relationship satisfaction and liking. Perceived costs mediated the preceding relationships.

Using peer nomination data, this study explored predictors of popularity among 144 third- through eighth-grade students in a diverse urban school. Findings demonstrated that children were more likely to be nominated as popular by peers when they exhibited higher levels of prosocial behavior or aggression. Furthermore, a significant interaction between prosocial behavior and aggression predicted popularity. Children with high levels of peer-nominated aggression were more likely to be viewed as popular when they were also nominated by their peers for engaging in high levels of prosocial behavior. Lastly, findings suggested that the positive association between prosocial behavior and popularity was stronger for girls than boys. Implications and areas for future research are discussed.

Familism is a cultural value that emphasizes interdependent family relationships that are warm, close, and supportive. We theorized that familism values can be beneficial for romantic relationships and tested whether (a) familism would be positively associated with romantic relationship quality and (b) this association would be mediated by less attachment avoidance. Evidence indicates that familism is particularly relevant for U.S. Latinos but is also relevant for non-Latinos. Thus, we expected to observe the hypothesized pattern in Latinos and explored whether the pattern extended to non-Latinos of European and East Asian cultural background. A sample of U.S. participants of Latino (n = 140), European (n = 176), and East Asian (n = 199) cultural background currently in a romantic relationship completed measures of familism, attachment, and two indices of romantic relationship quality, namely, partner support and partner closeness. As predicted, higher familism was associated with higher partner support and partner closeness, and these associations were mediated by lower attachment avoidance in the Latino sample. This pattern was not observed in the European or East Asian background samples. The implications of familism for relationships and psychological processes relevant to relationships in Latinos and non-Latinos are discussed.

Do insecurely attached individuals perceive greater rejection from their heritage culture? Few studies have examined the antecedents and outcomes of this perceived rejection – termed intragroup marginalization – in spite of its implications for the adjustment of cultural migrants to the mainstream culture. This study investigated whether anxious and avoidant attachment orientations among cultural migrants were associated with greater intragroup marginalization and, in turn, with lower subjective well-being and flourishing and higher acculturative stress. Anxious attachment was associated with heightened intragroup marginalization from friends and, in turn, with increased acculturative stress; anxious attachment was also associated with increased intragroup marginalization from family. Avoidant attachment was linked with increased intragroup marginalization from family and, in turn, with decreased subjective well-being.

The current study examined the reciprocal associations between friendship attachment and relational experiences. Data came from a longitudinal study that assessed adolescents (N = 223, 108 girls) in the 6th, 8th, 10th, and 12th grades. Cross-lagged models were fitted with structural equation modeling. Results showed that attachment avoidance was consistently predictive of more friendship exclusion, and friendship exclusion was consistently predictive of more attachment anxiety. Attachment avoidance was consistently related to less friendship intimacy across adolescence. Friendship intimacy was also consistently related to lower attachment avoidance across adolescence. Attachment anxiety was consistently related to more friendship intimacy across adolescence. This study shed light on the bidirectional influences between attachment security and relational experiences in adolescent friendships.