• Our relationships with our family members, friends, and romantic partners are important to our body image and can have both negative and positive effects on our sense of self.

• Developing friendships and romantic partnerships can be an important part of your life during your teens and adulthood and can open you up to feelings of vulnerability about your appearance; experiencing some stress surrounding the initiation of relationships is common.

• Maintaining healthy relationships can contribute to your positive body image development.

The Strong Black Woman (SBW) schema exemplifies how many Black women are socialized to experience themselves in relationship to the world. The image of a strong Black woman is embodied by unyielding strength and unlimited capacity when navigating daily roles, interpersonal interactions, and life tasks. Examples include “Black women don’t cry in public” and “Black women have no choice but to be resilient.” Specifically, personifying the SBW schema can make it difficult for Black women to seek and engage in healthy romantic interpersonal relationships. This chapter reviews the history and development of the SBW schema and how this schema manifests in the lived experiences of Black women in romantic relationships. Understanding this context provides better comprehension of the challenges Black women may face when dating and developing healthy intimate partner attachments and can also provide more advantageous clinical insight when working with Black women clients in therapy.

Mate poaching is engaging in premeditated behaviors to attract either short-term or long-term mates by luring them away from their already established relationship. It is unique as compared to other ways to initiate a relationship because it involves specific behaviours and consequences, given that the target is already mated. Despite the potential for negative outcomes related to the discovery of the poacher’s attempt, including homicide and intimate partner violence, it is a common occurrence. Depending on the context, cultural group, and sex, rates vary from slightly under 30 percent to over 60 percent for how many people report having attempted mate poaching. During the past two decades, there has been a noteworthy growth in our understanding of mate poaching, and this chapter will present a comprehensive review of those developments. We focus specifically on men’s use of mate poaching, with the goal of explaining how it has led to advantages over evolutionary time. There are many reasons to examine men separately from women. For example, data reveal that men, more than women, report attempting to poach short-term mates, and that they have succumbed to poaching attempts in short-term contexts. These differences imply that men receive different benefits from poaching, and being poached, than women. We start with an overview to show how frequently it occurs and some of the general traits of those who poach. Then, we use a functional approach to investigate the problems that mate poaching solves for men, as well as the associated costs. This approach allows us to document which strategies are the most effective for poaching, as well as the identity of potential targets. We conclude with suggestions for future research, including the need to be inclusive in studying mate poaching so as to more fully encompass a variety of sexual orientations, and how mate poaching leads to direct reproductive success via increased numbers of children.

In addition to facilitating reproduction and gene propagation, partner attractiveness facilitates pair-bond maintenance. For this reason, partner attractiveness is a core issue for women’s long-term relationships. In this chapter, in addition to explicating the qualities that comprise partner attractiveness for women and their functions, we discuss the extent to which the functional importance of these qualities may shift situationally within the context of women’s committed, long-term relationships. Traits signaling (a) social status, access to resources, and willingness to share resources and (b) physical health and genetic benefits can confer direct benefits to offspring and thus women’s attraction to such traits can facilitate reproduction. Although research to date suggests women’s attraction to traits signaling social status, access to resources, and willingness to share resources does not shift over contexts or the life-course of women’s long-term relationships, women’s attraction to traits signaling physical health and genetic benefits seem to fluctuate across fertility status (though some mixed evidence has emerged). Moreover, the function of such traits may shift as women’s long-term relationships develop over time. We highlight each of these shifts in turn. Traits signaling commitment and trustworthiness (e.g., commitment, supportiveness, warmth, kindness) facilitate long-term relationship maintenance. Given relationship maintenance is consistently important to women, such partner qualities are a stable component of partner attractiveness; nevertheless, we raise the possibility that women’s attraction to such traits may heighten at key milestones in women’s relationship (e.g., during the transition to parenthood, when reaching older age). We end this chapter by proffering an evolutionary developmental relationship life-course model that (a) synthesizes the literature on shifts in partner attractiveness for women and their implications for women’s relationships, (b) suggests new ways of thinking about partner attractiveness, and (c) reveals gaps in empirical knowledge that can pave the way for future research.

Patriotic war culture has routinely touted the symbiosis between mail and morale. Disciplinarians of wartime feeling have issued reams of advice about how to “write right!” in order to sustain men’s esprit and keep love alive despite distance and danger. Above all, military and civilian opinion-leaders alike have strenuously and repeatedly warned women against dispatching Dear Johns to men serving overseas. These prompts have taken many forms: explicit guidance from newspaper and magazine columnists, marriage counselors, government bodies, and voluntary agencies (like the YMCA and Red Cross) as well as pointed cues about emotional etiquette supplied by popular music, radio and television shows, and Hollywood movies. This chapter probes the challenges of sustaining long-distance love at war – difficulties often minimized by wartime advice-givers, but unmistakable to men and women who have tried, and sometimes failed, to keep intimate relationships intact. It also considers how far prescriptions issued to “waiting women” have changed since the 1940s, proposing that there’s been considerable continuity, despite radical shifts in dating behavior and marital norms in US society.

Adolescence is an important phase of development during which youth experience dramatic neurobiological, cognitive, and psychosocial changes. Decades of research have demonstrated gender similarities and differences during adolescence. This chapter takes both a gender perspective and a sociocultural perspective to understand adolescent development. For each of the following seven areas of adolescent development, we summarize latest research findings on gender similarities and differences in diverse cultures (e.g., North America, Europe, Africa, and Asia). We then particularly focus on singleton adolescent girls’ and boys’ development under the One-Child Policy in China as a case in point of sociocultural influences on gendered development during adolescence. Future directions of both theoretical and methodological concerns are discussed.

Intimate relationships exist around the world, throughout the lifespan, and are influential in every domain of peoples’ lives. This chapter provides a brief review of the literature on intimate dating and marital relationships including processes such as attraction and relationship initiation, relationship maintenance, and relationship dissolution. A few theoretical perspectives (evolutionary, interdependence, attachment, self-expansion) are highlighted throughout the chapter. A main focus of this review is discussing intimate relationships in the context of gender and culture, including limitations in our current knowledge and suggestions for future research.

Life-span theory has long emphasized that cognitive functioning and well-being are key constituents of successful development and aging. There is mounting empirical evidence that these central domains of life are closely intertwined, with better performance on a number of cognitive ability tests going hand in hand with higher levels of well-being and satisfaction. Less well understood, however, are the multiple different sets of pathways that underlie how and why well-being either represents a consequence of cognitive functioning and development or operates as an antecedent condition thereof. The major objective of the current chapter is to provide a select overview of (1) an exemplary set of mechanisms that help explain the often dynamic and reciprocal links between the two major areas of life and (2) the role that several layers of individual and contextual factors play as resources and constraints. To do so, we proceed in four steps. First, we review conceptual considerations and empirical evidence on stability and change in well-being from mid adulthood to very old age, the vast individual differences in levels and rates of change, and how these differences are shaped by cognitive functioning and change. Second, we consider how well-being may serve as an antecedent of functioning and development of cognitive performance and abilities. Third, we present stress reactivity, health behaviors, social participation, and neurological pathways as some of the presumed underlying processes. Finally, we discuss the role that resources and constraints at individual and contextual levels may play for linking cognition and well-being.

This chapter revises and describes statistical models for analyzing data from dyadic systems such as therapist-client, mother-children, or romantic partners, among others. It defines interdependence as the key characteristic of dyadic systems, and then identifies clinical research questions related to dyadic systems and processes that unfold over time. These questions are used to select a set of statistical models and data-analytic techniques for answering clinical research questions related to dyadic research. Emphasis is placed on dynamic models that allow transitioning from asking questions about the outcomes (i.e., Did the therapy work?) to questions about the processes and mechanisms (i.e., How did it work?).

This chapter reviews scholarship on communication and relational maintenance and introduces a new conceptualization of relational maintenance: maintenance as growth. Communication plays a unique role in the maintenance of relationships, as it serves both as a maintenance mechanism and as the means through which other maintenance mechanisms are made manifest. In order to limit the scope, the focus is upon romantic relationships. A synopsis of the history of the study of communication and relational maintenance is offered by reviewing typologies, motivations, antecedents, and the complex connections among maintenance behaviors and relational features. The four most often invoked definitions of maintenance are reviewed, and a fifth new definition of maintenance is proposed in order to extend our conceptualizations of relational maintenance. This fifth, heretofore unarticulated (at least explicitly), is one wherein maintenance is seen as the process of keeping a relationship growing. Maintenance is defined as the state and process of growth or continuous positive change. How we communicate maintenance in accordance with definitions of relational maintenance is considered. Areas for further research are put forward, including attention to maintenance as a multiplex of behaviors as well as the valence, context, timing, and perceived intent of maintenance behaviors.

This chapter details and evaluates existing research on the extent to which three related cognitive processes are associated with the successful maintenance of relationships and relationship satisfaction: benevolent attributions, forgiveness, and gratitude. As detailed throughout the chapter, it appears that the extent to which each process is associated with the successful maintenance of relationship satisfaction depends critically on the context in which it operates, including aspects of the people involved in the relationship, aspects of the relationship itself, and aspects of the environment in which the relationship is embedded. Although each process is associated with the successful maintenance of relationship satisfaction in some contexts, each process is also associated with various personal and interpersonal costs to the extent that it operates in other contexts. Accordingly, we argue that maximizing the benefits of any cognitive relationship maintenance strategy requires a nuanced approach to its investigation.