More action, less closeness: Number of actions and feelings of closeness in interpersonal relationships
Dai, Wenhao
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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/116030
Description
Title
More action, less closeness: Number of actions and feelings of closeness in interpersonal relationships
Author(s)
Dai, Wenhao
Issue Date
2022-06-20
Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)
Albarracin, Dolores
Doctoral Committee Chair(s)
Albarracin, Dolores
Committee Member(s)
Cohen, Dov
Sundaram, Hari
Shavitt, Sharon
Stern, Chadly
Department of Study
Psychology
Discipline
Psychology
Degree Granting Institution
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Degree Level
Dissertation
Keyword(s)
Action
inaction
feelings of closeness
loneliness
Go / No-Go paradigm
Abstract
Can actively interacting with other people make us like them and feel close to them even if the interactions are trivial? Does a context that requires more interactions affect feelings of closeness? A series of experiments examined the underlying processes related to liking and feeling close to other people. Experiments 1 and 2 involved a social multi-target Go / No-Go paradigm in which participants pressed a key to socialize with some targets and withheld the key for others. Participants liked more and felt closer to those with whom they did (vs. did not) interact. However, for feelings of closeness, the effect of active interactions depended on whether participants interacted with a higher (vs. lower) number of targets. Experiment 3 introduced target people who expressed negative (vs. neutral-positive) emotions and trivial key presses without social meaning. Findings showed no effects of active interactions on liking but the effects on feelings of closeness remained, implying that these feelings did not derive from evaluations. The processes leading to feelings of closeness were further characterized in other experiments. Experiment 4 showed that the relation between number of actions and differences in feelings of closeness to action and inaction targets, which was present even under conditions of high distraction, was fully mediated by feelings of familiarity. Experiment 5 disentangled number of actions and percentage of actions, showing that a lower number of actions, and not a lower percentage of actions, was a prerequisite for the effect identified in prior experiments. Altogether, the research showed that active interactions with other people only increase feelings of closeness when the number of interactions is lower, in which people can fully develop familiarity with whom they interacted.
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