John P Caughlin
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 3770461 |
|---|---|
| NOME | John P Caughlin |
| PRENOMES | John P |
| SOBRENOME | Caughlin |
| ASSINATURA | CAUGHLIN J P |
| AFILIAÇÕES | University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2768-4839 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 38 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 813 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 38 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1997 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 14 |
Technology and face-to-face integration in daily life
The current study advances the communication interdependence perspective (CIP) using an intensive longitudinal design and recent refinements in the conceptualization of integration (i.e., how various channels are interconnected). U.S. adults in romantic relationships (N = 175) completed a baseline questionnaire, and then, provided daily diary data over 30 days (4,806 total observations), which we analyzed with dynamic structural equation modeling…
Computer-Mediated Communication and Well-Being in the Age of Social Media
The association between computer-mediated communication (CMC) and well-being is a complex, consequential, and hotly debated topic that has received significant attention from pundits, researchers, and the media. Conflicting research findings and fear over negative outcomes have spurred both moral panic and further research into these associations. To create a more comprehensive picture of trends, explanations, and future directions in this domain…
Deception in online dating
Deception is a common strategy for securing a first date with someone from an online dating site. But does the possibility of a second date still exist if deception was used to get the first one? To address this question, we investigated the effects of online dating deception on people’s subsequent offline interactions. Online daters ( N = 94) were surveyed before and after their first date with a prospective partner. Their emails through the onl…
Examining discrepancies between actual and desired communal coping with type 2 diabetes
Type 2 diabetes has deleterious physiological, psychological, and relational effects both on people living with diabetes (PLWD) and on their family members. We employed the communal coping model to investigate whether coping alongside family members was advantageous. Specifically, PLWD (n = 213) and family members of PLWD (n = 208) completed an online survey assessing their coping responses and a variety of diabetes-related outcomes (i.e., depres…
What predicts first date success? A longitudinal study of modality switching in online dating
This study uses a longitudinal design to investigate the effects of online dating sites on first date success. Participants were surveyed before their first date with someone from an online dating site ( N = 186) and again after meeting their partner in person ( N = 94). As part of the survey, they also supplied the e‐mails they had sent to their partner through the dating site so their actual communication could be examined. Findings indicated t…
A Normative Approach to Parent-Young Adult Child Communication in the Context of Substance Use Disorders
Despite a decrease in substance use among teens, alcohol and substance use has remained high among young adults. Young adult use of illicit substances is particularly concerning. Parents can play an important role in substance use intervention and prevention, but their efforts are sometimes unsuccessful. Therefore, it is important to consider how parents respond to and communicate about their young adult children’s substance use disorder. Most re…
I Understand How You Feel
Effective communication is one of the most fundamental aspects of successful patient care, and it frequently depends on the nurses' ability to empathize with patients while finding effective ways to translate medical science into personally relevant health information. Skilled nurses are expected to understand the patient's experiences and feelings and be able to communicate this understanding to the patient, but language strategies used to achie…
Enacted Goal Attention in Family Conversations about End-of-life Health Decisions
Most extant research on end-of-life communication in families has been based on the assumption that more communication is better communication. We used a multiple goals theoretical perspective to demonstrate that the quality of communication about end-of-life decisions matters. Members of 121 older parent/adult child dyads (N = 242) engaged in an elicited conversation about end-of-life health choices and reported their assessments of the conversa…
A Communicative Interdependence Perspective of Close Relationships
In response to calls to recognize that both face-to-face (FTF) interaction and technologically mediated communication (TMC) often occur in the same relationships, we introduce a communicative interdependence perspective with a central tenet that relational closeness is associated with interconnections among modes of communication. We examined this perspective with a focus group study (N = 17) and a more extensive survey (N = 317). Consistent with…
We're Going to be Survivors”
Previous research has demonstrated identity challenges that people with cancer experience. Most of this research focuses solely on patients' experiences of identity during illness. The current study is distinct from the extant literature in two ways. First, it examines identity negotiations both during and after treatment. Cancer survivorship after successful treatment is a unique context in which to study identity because cancer is out of the bo…
Caring for a Parent with Lung Cancer
We investigated communication and care in the context of lung cancer through qualitative interviews with 35 adult children. Participants described two core influences on communication: situational and relational influences. Participants also suggested that the ways in which support was communicated impacted how they managed challenges and how they were able to cope with the loss of their parent. This research adds to the literature on caregiving …
Being Open without Talking about It
The present study uses a rhetorical/normative perspective to examine families' communication and coping in response to a parent's diagnosis of, and eventual death from, lung cancer. Through in-depth, semistructured interviews with 35 adult children, we identified two broad areas of communicative avoidance (avoiding information and avoiding emotion) and three general ways of managing avoidance and openness (denial, segmentation, and being open whi…
Breast cancer patients' topic avoidance and psychological distress
Avoiding communication about cancer is common and is likely to have negative psychological health consequences for patients, yet the connection between topic avoidance and psychological well-being is not well understood. This study of women with breast cancer examined coping behaviors as mediating mechanisms through which their cancer-related topic avoidance might affect their psychological distress. Consistent with predictions, greater levels of…
Toward a Communication Theory of the Demand/Withdraw Pattern of Interaction in Interpersonal Relationships
The Flourishing Literature on Flourishing Relationships
A Multiple Goals Perspective on Topic Avoidance and Relationship Satisfaction in the Context of Breast Cancer
Using a multiple goals perspective on interpersonal communication as a theoretical framework, this study examined the circumstances under which topic avoidance might predict lower relationship satisfaction among women coping with breast cancer. Results gathered from questionnaire responses of women who had recently undergone treatment for breast cancer (N=140) indicated that the association between topic avoidance and relationship satisfaction wa…
Invited Review Article
Despite being the dominant perspective for understanding how messages are produced in interpersonal communication, multiple goals theories of communication have not been prominent in relationship scholarship. In this article, I argue that multiple goals theories can be adapted to provide important insights into communication and relational outcomes (e.g., satisfaction). To illustrate the utility of this perspective, I summarize three sets of stud…
Putative secrets
Secrets are common within relationships. Sometimes, unbeknownst to a secret keeper, a relational partner learns a secret but allows the keeper to believe that the secret is still unknown. This article summarizes two investigations of such instances, which we call putative secrets. Study 1 (N = 207) provided a descriptive base of putative secret topics, means by which secrets are kept, and perceived reasons for keeping secrets. Study 2 (N = 383) f…
The Message Design Logics of Responses to HIV Disclosures
This article uses the theory of message design logics to investigate the relative sophistication of responses to disclosure of HIV status. In Study 1, 548 college students imagined a sibling revealing an HIV-positive diagnosis. Their responses to the HIV disclosures were coded as expressive (n = 174), conventional (n = 298), or rhetorical (n = 66). Type of message produced was associated with gender and HIV aversion. In Study 2, 459 individuals l…
Openness and Avoidance in Couples Communicating About Cancer
Open communication and avoidance are fundamental communication processes that have been studied across a range of communication contexts. Couples in which one person has cancer are a theoretically and practically important site for examining openness and avoidance. We review the cancer-related topics that couples find challenging, couples reasons for communicating openly or avoiding talk about cancer-related topics, outcomes of communication, fea…
Communication Privacy Management Theory
In today's world, families deal persistently with questions about private information. Parents face the task of telling children about genetic diseases discovered in their family, and adult children are often afraid to tell their parents about their HIV status. CPM theory highlights the multifaceted nature of management in a parsimonious fashion. To date, CPM theory has broadened understanding of how people manage information they treat as privat…
Reasons for, and consequences of, revealing personal secrets in close relationships
This investigation examines whether individuals’ reasons for keeping secrets predict whether they eventually reveal those secrets and whether individuals can accurately anticipate the outcomes of revealing. Respondents ( n = 342) first reported on a secret they were keeping and then returned 2 months later to report whether they had revealed it and, if so, what happened when they did. Findings indicated that participants’ reasons for keeping a se…
The demand/withdraw pattern of communication in parent-adolescent dyads
The current study used both participant reports and outsider ratings of conversations to examine the demand/withdraw pattern in parent–adolescent dyads (N= 57). Results indicated that demands by either parents or adolescents were associated positively with the other dyad member's withdrawal. Overall, parent-demand/adolescent-withdraw was more prevalent than adolescent-demand/parent-withdraw; however, parent-demand/adolescent-withdraw was signific…
Demand/Withdraw Communication between Parents and Adolescents
Although there is a clear link between parent-adolescent conflict and undesirable outcomes such as poor self-esteem and drug use among adolescents, less is known about why some conflict between parents and adolescents is associated with negative health outcomes, whereas other conflict between parents and adolescents is not. This study examined this issue by focusing on the demand/withdraw pattern of conflict, which involves one person nagging or …
When is Topic Avoidance Unsatisfying
Despite theoretical arguments that avoiding certain topics can be functional, there is consistent evidence that avoiding topics tends to be associated with dissatisfying relationships. This disparity between theory and empirical findings suggests a need to understand better the connection between topic avoidance and relational dissatisfaction. The current study, which is grounded in communication privacy management theory (Petronio, 2002), examin…
The connubial crucible
This study showed that couples' newlywed marriages and changes in their union over the first 2 years foreshadow their long-term marital fate after 13 years. Consistent with the enduring dynamics model, differences in the intensity of newlyweds' romance as well as the extent to which they expressed negative feelings toward each other predicted (a) whether or not they were happy 13 years later (among those who stayed married) and (b) how long their…
Revealing Family Secrets
Nearly every family has secrets. Some of these secrets are told; others are carefully hidden. Why is it that some people reveal their family secrets while others choose to conceal them? Two studies were conducted to investigate this issue by examining the association between the likelihood of revealing family secrets and (a) the topic of the secret, (b) the function of the secret, (c) satisfaction with one's family, and (d) the quality of the rel…
When is Topic Avoidance Unsatisfying
Despite theoretical arguments that avoiding certain topics can be functional, there is consistent evidence that avoiding topics tends to be associated with dissatisfying relationships. This disparity between theory and empirical findings suggests a need to understand better the connection between topic avoidance and relational dissatisfaction. The current study, which is grounded in communication privacy management theory (Petronio, 2002), examin…
The Tripartite Nature of Marital Commitment
Michael P. Johnson, John P. Caughlin, Ted L. Huston, The Tripartite Nature of Marital Commitment: Personal, Moral, and Structural Reasons to Stay Married, Journal of Marriage and Family, Vol. 61, No. 1 (Feb., 1999), pp. 160-177
Family Communication Standards
Despite a burgeoning literature about relational standards (i.e., individuals' ideals for what relationships should be like), little is known about the standards by which people judge communication in families. The 3 studies described in this article address several aspects of this gap in our understanding. First, through analytical induction of participants' descriptions of family communication standards, 15 different communication standards eme…
How does personality matter in marriage? An examination of trait anxiety, interpersonal negativity, and marital satisfaction
Although trait anxiety and its aliases (negative affectivity, neuroticism) have frequently been found to be associated with marital dissatisfaction, few efforts have been made to identify the processes through which trait anxiety exerts its influence. This study reports findings from a 13-year, 4-phase longitudinal study in which trait anxiety, measured when spouses were newlyweds, consistently predicted marital negativity which, in turn, was ass…
An analysis of the association between topic avoidance and dissatisfaction
There is consistent evidence that individuals tend to be dissatisfied with their relationships if they report that topics are frequently avoided in those relationships. The extant literature contains two plausible general explanations for such findings: perceptual processes (e.g., the perceptions that the relational partner avoids are unrelated to the partner's actual avoidance but adversely influence relational satisfaction) and interpersonal pr…
The Demand/Withdraw Pattern of Communication as a Predictor of Marital Satisfaction Over Time
There is ample evidence that marital dissatisfaction is associated concurrently with demand/withdraw, the marital pattern of communication in which one spouse nags or criticizes while the other avoids. However, the connection between demand/withdraw and changes in satisfaction is less clear. Some studies suggest that demand/withdraw is associated with low but steady marital satisfaction; other studies imply that demand/withdraw predicts declines …
Invited Review Article
Despite being the dominant perspective for understanding how messages are produced in interpersonal communication, multiple goals theories of communication have not been prominent in relationship scholarship. In this article, I argue that multiple goals theories can be adapted to provide important insights into communication and relational outcomes (e.g., satisfaction). To illustrate the utility of this perspective, I summarize three sets of stud…
An Individual Difference Explanation of Why Married Couples Engage in the Demand/Withdraw Pattern of Conflict
Demand/withdraw is a pattern in which one spouse nags or complains while the other spouse avoids or withdraws. Given the fact that demand/withdraw has been repeatedly linked to marital discord, it is important to understand why couples engage in such a seemingly dissatisfying conflict pattern. Although several scholars have suggested that power differences between men and women lead to demand/withdraw, the research reported here focused on an alt…
Demand/Withdraw Communication between Parents and Adolescents
Although there is a clear link between parent-adolescent conflict and undesirable outcomes such as poor self-esteem and drug use among adolescents, less is known about why some conflict between parents and adolescents is associated with negative health outcomes, whereas other conflict between parents and adolescents is not. This study examined this issue by focusing on the demand/withdraw pattern of conflict, which involves one person nagging or …
Criteria for revealing family secrets
Because revealing family secrets can have substantial influences on individuals and their interpersonal relationships, the criteria people use when they consider whether to divulge a family secret are quite important. The current study was conducted to explore these criteria and to examine the factors that encourage people to employ some criteria as opposed to others. In the first stage of the investigation, a list of criteria was generated and i…
A Multiple Goals Perspective on Topic Avoidance and Relationship Satisfaction in the Context of Breast Cancer
Using a multiple goals perspective on interpersonal communication as a theoretical framework, this study examined the circumstances under which topic avoidance might predict lower relationship satisfaction among women coping with breast cancer. Results gathered from questionnaire responses of women who had recently undergone treatment for breast cancer (N=140) indicated that the association between topic avoidance and relationship satisfaction wa…
Being Open without Talking about It
The present study uses a rhetorical/normative perspective to examine families' communication and coping in response to a parent's diagnosis of, and eventual death from, lung cancer. Through in-depth, semistructured interviews with 35 adult children, we identified two broad areas of communicative avoidance (avoiding information and avoiding emotion) and three general ways of managing avoidance and openness (denial, segmentation, and being open whi…
Breast cancer patients' topic avoidance and psychological distress
Avoiding communication about cancer is common and is likely to have negative psychological health consequences for patients, yet the connection between topic avoidance and psychological well-being is not well understood. This study of women with breast cancer examined coping behaviors as mediating mechanisms through which their cancer-related topic avoidance might affect their psychological distress. Consistent with predictions, greater levels of…
Putative secrets
Secrets are common within relationships. Sometimes, unbeknownst to a secret keeper, a relational partner learns a secret but allows the keeper to believe that the secret is still unknown. This article summarizes two investigations of such instances, which we call putative secrets. Study 1 (N = 207) provided a descriptive base of putative secret topics, means by which secrets are kept, and perceived reasons for keeping secrets. Study 2 (N = 383) f…
Enacted Goal Attention in Family Conversations about End-of-life Health Decisions
Most extant research on end-of-life communication in families has been based on the assumption that more communication is better communication. We used a multiple goals theoretical perspective to demonstrate that the quality of communication about end-of-life decisions matters. Members of 121 older parent/adult child dyads (N = 242) engaged in an elicited conversation about end-of-life health choices and reported their assessments of the conversa…
The Message Design Logics of Responses to HIV Disclosures
This article uses the theory of message design logics to investigate the relative sophistication of responses to disclosure of HIV status. In Study 1, 548 college students imagined a sibling revealing an HIV-positive diagnosis. Their responses to the HIV disclosures were coded as expressive (n = 174), conventional (n = 298), or rhetorical (n = 66). Type of message produced was associated with gender and HIV aversion. In Study 2, 459 individuals l…
Trait Expressiveness and Marital Satisfaction
This study examined the processes that underlie the association between trait expressiveness and marital satisfaction. A total of 168 newlywed couples participated in a four-wave, 13-year longitudinal study of marriage. Cross-sectional and longitudinal path analyses suggested that expressiveness promotes satisfaction by leading spouses to engage in affectionate behavior and by leading them to idealize their partner. Expressive people formed ideal…
Desire for change in one's partner as a predictor of the demand/withdraw pattern of marital communication
Even though the demand/withdraw pattern of marital communication has been implicated as a contributor to marital dissatisfaction and divorce, relatively little research has examined why couples engage in demand/withdraw. Why would individuals engage in this seemingly negative communication pattern? To investigate this issue, a study of married couples was conducted in which the association between spouses’ desire for change in their partner and c…
Deception in online dating
Deception is a common strategy for securing a first date with someone from an online dating site. But does the possibility of a second date still exist if deception was used to get the first one? To address this question, we investigated the effects of online dating deception on people’s subsequent offline interactions. Online daters ( N = 94) were surveyed before and after their first date with a prospective partner. Their emails through the onl…
We're Going to be Survivors”
Previous research has demonstrated identity challenges that people with cancer experience. Most of this research focuses solely on patients' experiences of identity during illness. The current study is distinct from the extant literature in two ways. First, it examines identity negotiations both during and after treatment. Cancer survivorship after successful treatment is a unique context in which to study identity because cancer is out of the bo…
Examining discrepancies between actual and desired communal coping with type 2 diabetes
Type 2 diabetes has deleterious physiological, psychological, and relational effects both on people living with diabetes (PLWD) and on their family members. We employed the communal coping model to investigate whether coping alongside family members was advantageous. Specifically, PLWD (n = 213) and family members of PLWD (n = 208) completed an online survey assessing their coping responses and a variety of diabetes-related outcomes (i.e., depres…
I Understand How You Feel
Effective communication is one of the most fundamental aspects of successful patient care, and it frequently depends on the nurses' ability to empathize with patients while finding effective ways to translate medical science into personally relevant health information. Skilled nurses are expected to understand the patient's experiences and feelings and be able to communicate this understanding to the patient, but language strategies used to achie…
The Flourishing Literature on Flourishing Relationships
Revealing Family Secrets
Nearly every family has secrets. Some of these secrets are told; others are carefully hidden. Why is it that some people reveal their family secrets while others choose to conceal them? Two studies were conducted to investigate this issue by examining the association between the likelihood of revealing family secrets and (a) the topic of the secret, (b) the function of the secret, (c) satisfaction with one's family, and (d) the quality of the rel…
Desire for change in one's partner as a predictor of the demand/withdraw pattern of marital communication
Even though the demand/withdraw pattern of marital communication has been implicated as a contributor to marital dissatisfaction and divorce, relatively little research has examined why couples engage in demand/withdraw. Why would individuals engage in this seemingly negative communication pattern? To investigate this issue, a study of married couples was conducted in which the association between spouses’ desire for change in their partner and c…
The Tripartite Nature of Marital Commitment
Michael P. Johnson, John P. Caughlin, Ted L. Huston, The Tripartite Nature of Marital Commitment: Personal, Moral, and Structural Reasons to Stay Married, Journal of Marriage and Family, Vol. 61, No. 1 (Feb., 1999), pp. 160-177
How does personality matter in marriage? An examination of trait anxiety, interpersonal negativity, and marital satisfaction
Although trait anxiety and its aliases (negative affectivity, neuroticism) have frequently been found to be associated with marital dissatisfaction, few efforts have been made to identify the processes through which trait anxiety exerts its influence. This study reports findings from a 13-year, 4-phase longitudinal study in which trait anxiety, measured when spouses were newlyweds, consistently predicted marital negativity which, in turn, was ass…
An Individual Difference Explanation of Why Married Couples Engage in the Demand/Withdraw Pattern of Conflict
Demand/withdraw is a pattern in which one spouse nags or complains while the other spouse avoids or withdraws. Given the fact that demand/withdraw has been repeatedly linked to marital discord, it is important to understand why couples engage in such a seemingly dissatisfying conflict pattern. Although several scholars have suggested that power differences between men and women lead to demand/withdraw, the research reported here focused on an alt…
Criteria for revealing family secrets
Because revealing family secrets can have substantial influences on individuals and their interpersonal relationships, the criteria people use when they consider whether to divulge a family secret are quite important. The current study was conducted to explore these criteria and to examine the factors that encourage people to employ some criteria as opposed to others. In the first stage of the investigation, a list of criteria was generated and i…
The connubial crucible
This study showed that couples' newlywed marriages and changes in their union over the first 2 years foreshadow their long-term marital fate after 13 years. Consistent with the enduring dynamics model, differences in the intensity of newlyweds' romance as well as the extent to which they expressed negative feelings toward each other predicted (a) whether or not they were happy 13 years later (among those who stayed married) and (b) how long their…
"I'd rather not talk about it"
This study examined adolescents' and young adults' use of topic avoidance with their mothers, fathers, stepmothers, and stepfathers. The types of topics avoided differed according to the type of parent-child relationship. Specifically, adolescents and young adults engaged in the most topic avoidance with their stepparents (regardless of whether the stepparent was a stepmother or stepfather), followed by their fathers, and then their mothers. Quan…
A contextual analysis of the association between demand/withdraw and marital satisfaction
In spite of research connecting the demand/withdraw pattern of marital interaction to marital dissatisfaction, questions remain about its association with marital satisfaction when it is considered in the context of other interpersonal behaviors. We explore the possibility that the correlation between demand/withdraw and dissatisfaction merely reflects the ubiquitous finding that expressions of negative affect are associated with dissatisfaction.…
An analysis of the association between topic avoidance and dissatisfaction
There is consistent evidence that individuals tend to be dissatisfied with their relationships if they report that topics are frequently avoided in those relationships. The extant literature contains two plausible general explanations for such findings: perceptual processes (e.g., the perceptions that the relational partner avoids are unrelated to the partner's actual avoidance but adversely influence relational satisfaction) and interpersonal pr…
The Demand/Withdraw Pattern of Communication as a Predictor of Marital Satisfaction Over Time
There is ample evidence that marital dissatisfaction is associated concurrently with demand/withdraw, the marital pattern of communication in which one spouse nags or criticizes while the other avoids. However, the connection between demand/withdraw and changes in satisfaction is less clear. Some studies suggest that demand/withdraw is associated with low but steady marital satisfaction; other studies imply that demand/withdraw predicts declines …
Trait Expressiveness and Marital Satisfaction
This study examined the processes that underlie the association between trait expressiveness and marital satisfaction. A total of 168 newlywed couples participated in a four-wave, 13-year longitudinal study of marriage. Cross-sectional and longitudinal path analyses suggested that expressiveness promotes satisfaction by leading spouses to engage in affectionate behavior and by leading them to idealize their partner. Expressive people formed ideal…
Family Communication Standards
Despite a burgeoning literature about relational standards (i.e., individuals' ideals for what relationships should be like), little is known about the standards by which people judge communication in families. The 3 studies described in this article address several aspects of this gap in our understanding. First, through analytical induction of participants' descriptions of family communication standards, 15 different communication standards eme…
Demand/Withdraw Communication between Parents and Adolescents
Although there is a clear link between parent-adolescent conflict and undesirable outcomes such as poor self-esteem and drug use among adolescents, less is known about why some conflict between parents and adolescents is associated with negative health outcomes, whereas other conflict between parents and adolescents is not. This study examined this issue by focusing on the demand/withdraw pattern of conflict, which involves one person nagging or …
When is Topic Avoidance Unsatisfying
Despite theoretical arguments that avoiding certain topics can be functional, there is consistent evidence that avoiding topics tends to be associated with dissatisfying relationships. This disparity between theory and empirical findings suggests a need to understand better the connection between topic avoidance and relational dissatisfaction. The current study, which is grounded in communication privacy management theory (Petronio, 2002), examin…
Reasons for, and consequences of, revealing personal secrets in close relationships
This investigation examines whether individuals’ reasons for keeping secrets predict whether they eventually reveal those secrets and whether individuals can accurately anticipate the outcomes of revealing. Respondents ( n = 342) first reported on a secret they were keeping and then returned 2 months later to report whether they had revealed it and, if so, what happened when they did. Findings indicated that participants’ reasons for keeping a se…
The demand/withdraw pattern of communication in parent-adolescent dyads
The current study used both participant reports and outsider ratings of conversations to examine the demand/withdraw pattern in parent–adolescent dyads (N= 57). Results indicated that demands by either parents or adolescents were associated positively with the other dyad member's withdrawal. Overall, parent-demand/adolescent-withdraw was more prevalent than adolescent-demand/parent-withdraw; however, parent-demand/adolescent-withdraw was signific…
Communication Privacy Management Theory
In today's world, families deal persistently with questions about private information. Parents face the task of telling children about genetic diseases discovered in their family, and adult children are often afraid to tell their parents about their HIV status. CPM theory highlights the multifaceted nature of management in a parsimonious fashion. To date, CPM theory has broadened understanding of how people manage information they treat as privat…
Openness and Avoidance in Couples Communicating About Cancer
Open communication and avoidance are fundamental communication processes that have been studied across a range of communication contexts. Couples in which one person has cancer are a theoretically and practically important site for examining openness and avoidance. We review the cancer-related topics that couples find challenging, couples reasons for communicating openly or avoiding talk about cancer-related topics, outcomes of communication, fea…
The Message Design Logics of Responses to HIV Disclosures
This article uses the theory of message design logics to investigate the relative sophistication of responses to disclosure of HIV status. In Study 1, 548 college students imagined a sibling revealing an HIV-positive diagnosis. Their responses to the HIV disclosures were coded as expressive (n = 174), conventional (n = 298), or rhetorical (n = 66). Type of message produced was associated with gender and HIV aversion. In Study 2, 459 individuals l…
Putative secrets
Secrets are common within relationships. Sometimes, unbeknownst to a secret keeper, a relational partner learns a secret but allows the keeper to believe that the secret is still unknown. This article summarizes two investigations of such instances, which we call putative secrets. Study 1 (N = 207) provided a descriptive base of putative secret topics, means by which secrets are kept, and perceived reasons for keeping secrets. Study 2 (N = 383) f…
Toward a Communication Theory of the Demand/Withdraw Pattern of Interaction in Interpersonal Relationships
The Flourishing Literature on Flourishing Relationships
A Multiple Goals Perspective on Topic Avoidance and Relationship Satisfaction in the Context of Breast Cancer
Using a multiple goals perspective on interpersonal communication as a theoretical framework, this study examined the circumstances under which topic avoidance might predict lower relationship satisfaction among women coping with breast cancer. Results gathered from questionnaire responses of women who had recently undergone treatment for breast cancer (N=140) indicated that the association between topic avoidance and relationship satisfaction wa…
Invited Review Article
Despite being the dominant perspective for understanding how messages are produced in interpersonal communication, multiple goals theories of communication have not been prominent in relationship scholarship. In this article, I argue that multiple goals theories can be adapted to provide important insights into communication and relational outcomes (e.g., satisfaction). To illustrate the utility of this perspective, I summarize three sets of stud…
Psychology (34 obras) · Social Psychology (31 obras) · Attachment and Relationship Dynamics (28 obras) · Social Psychology (23 obras) · Developmental psychology (16 obras) · Computer Science (10 obras) · Interpersonal communication (10 obras) · Medicine (10 obras) · Child and Adolescent Psychosocial and Emotional Development (9 obras) · Family Dynamics and Relationships (9 obras)