Category
They describe three different responses to someone else's suffering, and the differences matter because they lead to quite different behaviour — and because one of them burns people out. Sympathy.
Reciprocal liking is one of the more robust findings in social psychology: learning that someone likes you substantially increases how much you like them, often more than similarity or attractiveness
The research is consistent and frequently unwelcome: average relationship satisfaction declines after a first child, and the size and duration of the effect are larger than most people expect.
Because self-disclosure is one of the most reliable mechanisms for generating closeness, and disclosing something difficult carries the strongest signal. The core finding. Research on relationship
Because friendship is not a single relationship type, and a substantial proportion of the people in anyone's network are held there by structure rather than by affection. The research finding.
Because the things that make people different are largely not the things siblings share — and this is one of the more counterintuitive findings in behavioural genetics. What the research shows.
Codependency loosely describes a relationship pattern in which one person's sense of worth becomes organised around meeting another's needs, often to their own detriment. It is widely used and —
Because friendships have no exit script, and the absence of one leaves most people with only unsatisfying options. The structural problem. Romantic relationships have a recognised ending — a
Research on apologies has identified components that reliably improve whether one is accepted, and the most common apology omits several of them. What the evidence supports. Work by Roy Lewicki and
Because memory is reconstructive rather than a recording, and several well-documented biases pull recollection in a positive direction over time. The main mechanisms: Fading affect bias. The
Love bombing is an intense early display of affection, attention and commitment used to create rapid dependence and lower a person's defences. The difficulty is that its early stages are genuinely
The pattern has changed more dramatically in two decades than in the preceding century, and the research documenting it is unusually clear. The headline finding. Work by Michael Rosenfeld and
Because accepting one requires holding two things at once — agreeing with a positive statement about yourself, and doing so in front of someone — and several psychological and social pressures make
The famous finding has not held up well, and the story of its unravelling is a good illustration of how research gets corrected. The original study. In 1987, Robert Zajonc and colleagues published
They are distinct emotions that plain usage conflates, and the difference is about how many people are involved. Envy involves two parties. You lack something another person has, and you want it.
The evidence is reasonably good — better than most people assume — with important qualifications about which approaches, and about timing. What the research shows. Meta-analyses of couples therapy
Because several psychological processes push in the same direction at once, and none of them requires either person to be acting in bad faith. Negativity bias. Negative information is weighted more
The term has two distinct meanings, and conflating them causes confusion — including among people using it. The original academic meaning. Sociologist Arlie Hochschild coined emotional labour in 1983
Ghosting is ending a relationship by abruptly stopping all communication with no explanation. Research into it has grown, and the reasons people give are more varied than the assumption that they
Three properties recur consistently across studies, though the picture is more complicated than the popular summaries suggest. Averageness. Composite faces — produced by digitally averaging many
Attachment theory proposes that early relationships with caregivers shape expectations about closeness and availability that carry into adult relationships. It is among the more empirically grounded
Because two opposite processes run at once, and irritation happens to be governed by the one that goes the wrong way. Habituation is the familiar effect: repeated exposure to a stimulus reduces your
Because text strips out most of the information humans use to interpret each other, and we systematically fail to account for its absence. What is missing. Face-to-face conversation carries tone,
Largely no. It is one of the most repeated claims about relationships and one of the least supported — the research consistently points the other way. What the evidence shows. Decades of work on