Elaine Hatfield’s research while affiliated with University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa and other places

We collected international studies that have used the Passionate Love Scale, the Love Attitudes Scale and the Triangular Love Scale in order to check the stability of reliability estimates of these measures across different cultures until mid-2017. We used cultural dimensions to verify if the different love components of these scales could have some cultural effects on their reliabilities. We were able to gather 79 studies from 33 countries representing 32,867 participants. We used a variance stabilizing transformation to compare Cronbach’s alphas estimations, bivariate correlation analysis for confounding and moderator analysis to check for the reliability across demographic information and various test-characteristics. The results indicated that the love dimensions tended to be reliable across studies and countries and were relatively free of cultural influences. Participants across the world tended to evaluate their romantic feelings with similar consistency and these measures should be reliable worldwide.

Social interaction is a complex matter, but is there a simple and yet comprehensive way of describing and understanding social interaction? This book provides an answer to this question by presenting the original roots and subsequent refinements and developments of social resource theory (SRT). SRT highlights an important aspect of social interaction and interpersonal relationships—the resources being exchanged. This field of research was generally neglected until 1971 when Uriel G. Foa developed SRT, focusing much attention to the importance of specifying exactly what it is that people give and receive in their interactions and making distinctions among the underlying qualities of those objects. Foa presented a typology of six major resource classes and arranged them in a circular order along the two dimensions particularism and concreteness, thereby providing a basis for predictions about how suitable they are for various interpersonal exchanges. The scope of SRT, as presented in the monograph by Foa and Foa published in 1974, which is abridged and provided in Part I of the this volume, constitutes a remarkable integration and reanalysis of social psychological theories via the resource exchange paradigm. Part II of this volume includes chapters on current issues, developments, and applications of SRT as described by 11 scholars. This volume has a simple and clear-cut message: SRT is not an exercise in academic hairsplitting but, rather, has far-reaching societal implications.

This collection of first-person accounts from legendary social psychologists tells the stories behind the science and offers unique insight into the development of the field from the 1950s to the present. One pillar, the grandson of a slave, was inspired by Kenneth Clark. Yet when he entered his PhD program in the 1960s, he was told that race was not a variable for study. Other pillars faced first-hand a type of sexism that was hardly subtle, when women were not permitted into the faculty dining room. Still others have lived through a tremendous diversification of social psychology, not only in the United States but in Europe and Asia, that characterizes the field today. Together these stories, always witty and sometimes emotional, form a mosaic of the field as a whole – its legends, their theories and research, their relationships with one another, and their sense of where social psychology is headed.

This study examined college students' judgments of the physical attractiveness of an interaction partner after a getting‐acquainted interaction, including in comparison with other benchmarks (e.g., an experimenter rating, a self‐rating). With data combined from several past laboratory studies, we found that participants (particularly women who were interacting with another woman) overall rated their interaction partner after a brief interaction to be more attractive than three benchmarks: (1) how the partners were judged by more neutral experimenters who had less interaction with them; (2) how the partners rated themselves; and (3) the participants' own self‐ratings of physical attractiveness. Evidence was found for a prediction derived from interaction appearance theory – ratings of the quality (enjoyment) of the interaction were positively associated with ratings of the partner's physical attractiveness. We also explored whether participants' ratings of the physical attractiveness of their interaction partner were affected by factors about the participant (own physical attractiveness, relationship status) and about the context of their communication (modality, type of get‐acquainted task). Despite prior work suggesting that physical attractiveness ratings of others are malleable depending on a host of other factors, personal and contextual variables considered in this study were generally not associated with how the participants rated the physical attractiveness of their interaction partner.

Political identities tie us to families, friends, generations, and educational groups. In this chapter we will discuss the powerful emotions that arise when strongly held political identities come into conflict. In America, many recent Thanksgiving dinners dissolve into chaos when Trump supporters and Trump opponents insist on airing their views—often loudly. How can such family feuds be avoided? We end the chapter by discussing techniques for avoiding the contagion of anger in these and other explosive settings.