Chapter 12 Terms Flashcards
Passionate Love
Strong feelings of longing, desire, and excitement toward a special person.
Companionate Love
Mutual understanding and caring to make the relationship succeed.
Passion
An emotional state characterized by high bodily arousal, such as increased heart rate and blood pressure.
Intimacy
A feeling of closeness, mutual understanding, and mutual concern for each other’s welfare and happiness.
Commitment
A conscious decision that remains constant.
Communal Relationship
Relationships based on mutual love and concern, without expectation of repayment.
Attachment Theory
A theory that classifies people into four attachment styles (secure, preoccupied, dismissing avoidant, and fearful avoidant) based on two dimensions (anxiety and avoidance).
Secure Attachment
Style of attachment in which people are low on anxiety and low on avoidance; they trust their partners, share their feelings, provide and receive support and comfort, and enjoy their relationships.
Preoccupied (anxious/ambivalent) Attachment
Style of attachment in which people are low on avoidance but high on anxiety; they want and enjoy closeness but worry that their relationship partners will abandon them.
Dismissing Avoidant Attachment
Style of attachment in which people have both high anxiety and low on avoidance; they tend to view partners as unreliable, unavailable, and uncaring.
Fearful Avoidant Attachment
Style of attachment in which people have both high anxiety and high avoidance; they have low opinions of themselves and keep others from getting close.
Self-Acceptance
Regarding yourself as being a reasonably good person as you are.
Investment Model
Theory that uses three factors- satisfaction, alternatives, and investments- to explain why people stay with their long-term relationship partners.
Distress-maintaining style of attribution
Tendency of unhappy couples to attribute their partner’s good acts to external factors and bad acts to internal factors.
Relationship-enhancing style of attribution
Tendency of happy couples to attribute their partner’s good acts to internal factors and bad acts to external factors.
Social-Constructionist Theory
Theories asserting that attitudes and behaviors, including sexual desire and sexual behavior, are strongly shaped by culture and socialization.
Evolutionary Theory
Theory of sexuality asserting that the sex drive has been shaped by natural selection and that its factors thus tend to be innate.
Social Exchange Theory
Theory that seeks to understand social behavior by analyzing the cost and benefits of interacting with each other; it assumes that sex is a resource that women have and men want.
Coolidge Effect
The sexually arousing power of a new partner (greater than the appeal of a familiar partner).
Erotic Plasticity
The degree to which the sex drive can be shaped and altered by social, cultural, and situational forces.
Extradyadic Sex
Having sex with someone other than one’s regular relationship partner.
Social Reality
Beliefs held in common by several or many people; public awareness of some event.
Paternity Uncertainty
The fact that a man cannot be sure that the children born to his female partner are his.
Double Standard
Condemning women more than men for the same sexual behavior (e.g., premarital sex).
Reverse Double Standard
Condemning men more than women for the same sexual behavior (e.g., premarital sex).
