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Ethnic Reproduction and the Amniotic Deep: Joy Kogawa's 'Obasan'

Decent Essays

Chapter

28
INTERPERSONAL
RELATIONSHIPS
Introduction and overview (p. 428)
Affiliation: the need for other people (p. 428)
Love and intimacy (p. 428)
Relationships: definitions and varieties (p. 429)
Voluntary/involuntary relationships (p. 429)
Arranged marriages (p. 430)
Gay and lesbian relationships (p. 430)
‘Electronic’ friendships (p. 431)
Different types of love (p. 431)
The power of love (p. 431)
Is romantic love unique to western culture? (p. 431)
An evolutionary theory of love: love as attachment (p. 432)
Stage theories of relationships (p. 433)
The filter model (Kerckhoff & Davis, 1962) (p. 433)
An evaluation of the filter model (p. 433)
Stimulus-value-role theory (Murstein, 1976, 1986,
1987) (p. 434)
An …show more content…

The need to belong and to be accepted by others is one of Maslow’s basic survival needs
(see Chapter 9), and is also a major motive underlying conformity (see Chapter 26). We also saw in Chapter
26 that conformity can be explained in terms of the need to evaluate our beliefs and opinions by comparing them with other people’s, especially in ambiguous or unstructured situations. This is the central idea in
Festinger’s (1954) social comparison theory.
According to Duck (1988), we’re more ‘affiliative’ and inclined to seek others’ company under certain conditions than others, for example, when we’re anxious, when we’ve just left a close relationship (the ‘rebound’ situation), and when we’ve moved to a new neighbourhood. Anxiety is one of the most powerful factors.

Key Study 28.1
‘Anxiety loves anxious company’
(Schachter, 1959)










Female psychology students were led to believe they’d be receiving electric shocks. One group was told the shocks would be painful (high-anxiety condition), while another group was told they wouldn’t be at all painful (low-anxiety condition).
They were then told that there’d be a delay while the equipment was set up, and they were given the option of waiting either alone or with another participant (this was the dependent variable and no actual shock was given).
As predicted, the high-anxiety group showed a

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