ABSTRACT
During the 1980s, close-relationship research expanded rapidly, rating its own Handbook (Duck, 1988) and its own Annual Review of Psychology chapter (Clark & Reis, 1988). Much of the research in this area does not explicitly define what is meant by a close relationship. However, the behavioral, systemic definition offered by Kelley et al. (1983) has been widely influential. It focuses on mutual influence, interdependence, and degree of interconnectedness of activities. This approach recently served as the basis for the development of a measure of interpersonal-closeness behavior (Berscheid, Snyder, & Omoto, 1989a, 1989b), which focuses on time spent together, diversity of shared activities, and perceived influence of other over one’s own decisions. (Maxwell, 1985, also developed a behavioral measure of closeness, which is based on a more general review of the close-relationship literature.)
There has been much less consensus about the cognitive significance of such behavioral interdependence for each person in a close relationship. Yet a number of relevant phenomena have been observed, mostly falling into one of three overlapping categories:
1. Closeness as a changed resource allocation strategy. Kelley and Thibaut (1978; Kelley, 1983) saw the cognitive consequences for the members of a close relationship as a transformation of each member’s two-person outcome matrix (that is, how rewards or costs to partner are expected to affect self). Specifically, Kelley and
Thibaut argued that members of a close relationship each have a pattern of perceived interdependence of outcomes in which partner’s and joint benefits are expected in the long run to benefit self. Similarly, Clark and Mills (1979) described a close relationship as having a communal character, in which the partners are each motivated to act for the needs of the other, regardless of the expected reciprocal outcome for the self. This general approach is also similar to the empathy model for explaining prosocial behavior and findings showing greater helping for those with whom the person is in a close relationship (e.g., Clark, 1983). Wegner (1980) suggested that empathy may “stem in part from a basic confusion between ourselves and others” (p. 133), which he considered may arise from an initial lack of differentiation between self and caregiver in infancy (Hoffman, 1976).
