{"id":28,"date":"2015-07-13T18:13:23","date_gmt":"2015-07-13T18:13:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.ubalt.edu\/keyssell\/?p=28"},"modified":"2015-07-13T18:13:23","modified_gmt":"2015-07-13T18:13:23","slug":"we-get-by-with-a-little-help-from-billy-shears","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ubalt.edu\/keyssell\/2015\/07\/13\/we-get-by-with-a-little-help-from-billy-shears\/","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;We Get by with a Little Help from&#8230;&#8221; &#8211; Billy Shears"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>When I was in graduate school I took several courses on &#8220;Close Relationships&#8221;. \u00a0Invariably, the studies we read about were focused on romantic ties and marriage\/family issues. \u00a0Because I like to &#8220;poke&#8221; at things I consistently questioned why the field was so obsessed with romantic love. Aren&#8217;t friendships more ubiquitous? \u00a0I mean, lots of people won&#8217;t hold up a hand when asked if they are in a romantic partnership but just about everybody can claim a friend! \u00a0Turns out there was not a lot of research about friendships in the social psychology literature (there was more in the Developmental journals). \u00a0I wondered if relationship processes were different in friendships than they were in romantic relationships and one of my first projects along these lines was a large survey (created with <a href=\"http:\/\/www.personal.psu.edu\/mpj\/MPJ\/Welcome.html\">Michael P. Johnson<\/a>) asking people to answer relationship questions for three people: their closest same-sex friend, closest opposite-sex friend, and their romantic partner. \u00a0At the time my fascination was with the <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Principle_of_least_interest\">Principle of Least Interest<\/a>* (Willard Waller, 1938) and whether or not there were relational asymmetries across all three relationship types. \u00a0I won&#8217;t reveal the findings here as the paper is under review but suffice it to say it was worth asking the question!<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.ubalt.edu\/keyssell\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/348\/2015\/07\/friends2.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-30\" src=\"http:\/\/blogs.ubalt.edu\/keyssell\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/348\/2015\/07\/friends2.jpg\" alt=\"friends2\" width=\"3072\" height=\"2304\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>I am currently working with a developmental psychologist (<a href=\"https:\/\/msmary.edu\/School_of_natural_science_and_math\/department-of-psychology\/Faculty.html\">Caitlin Faas Bond<\/a>) on a project involving friendship breakups. \u00a0We each had our students write essays on an ex-friendship. Their stories were so heart-wrenching we knew we had to study this in more depth to understand the dynamics involved. \u00a0Whenever I refer to this topic in a class or at a talk LOTS of people want to share with me\u00a0their experiences with former friends.<\/p>\n<p>*The Principle of Least Interest describes the phenomenon wherein the partner less interested in a relationship has greater\u00a0power. \u00a0We all know that story.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When I was in graduate school I took several courses on &#8220;Close Relationships&#8221;. \u00a0Invariably, the studies we read about were focused on romantic ties and marriage\/family issues. \u00a0Because I like to &#8220;poke&#8221; at things I consistently questioned why the field was so obsessed with romantic love. Aren&#8217;t friendships more ubiquitous? \u00a0I mean, lots of people [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":501,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,9],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubalt.edu\/keyssell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubalt.edu\/keyssell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubalt.edu\/keyssell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubalt.edu\/keyssell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/501"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubalt.edu\/keyssell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubalt.edu\/keyssell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubalt.edu\/keyssell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28\/revisions\/32"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubalt.edu\/keyssell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubalt.edu\/keyssell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubalt.edu\/keyssell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}