Maleah Fekete’s research while affiliated with Harvard University and other places

Theorists have proposed that a value of close friends and family—strong ties—is the ability to confide in them when facing difficult issues. But close relationships are complicated, and recent studies report that people sometimes avoid strong ties when facing personal issues. How common is such avoidance? The question speaks to theoretical debates over the nature of “closeness” and practical concerns over social isolation. We develop an approach and test it on new, nationally representative data. We find that, when facing personal difficulties, adult Americans are as likely to avoid as to talk to close friends and family. Most avoidance is not actively reflected on but passively enacted, and, contrary to common belief, is not limited to either specific network members or particular topics, depending instead on the conjunction of member and topic. Building on Simmel, we propose that a theory of the fundamental need to conceal and reveal helps account for the findings. We suggest that there is no more empirical justification for labeling strong ties as those who are trusted than for labeling them as those who are avoided. In turn, isolation might be less a matter of having no intimates than of having repeatedly to avoid them.

This article’s purpose is twofold: first, we aim to extend a prior social cognitive model of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) based on recent research; and second, we use our updated social cognitive model of PTSD to motivate future empirical investigations of group differences in PTSD risk mediated by trustworthiness of social context. We review Sharp and colleagues’ developmentally sensitive social cognitive model of PTSD and relate their model to recent advances in the understanding of mentalizing. We focus on how recent research incorporates the effects of social context in the development of individual mentalizing styles. This article suggests that the social cognition-related development of PTSD may be informed not only by a child’s caregiving relationships as previously believed, but also by the broader developmental social environment. The proposed extension of Sharp and colleagues’ social cognitive model of PTSD suggests that scholarship should consider the effects of ecological factors, such as the trustworthiness of social context, on the risk of developing PTSD. We offer suggestions for future research that consider our updated model.

Social networks are ubiquitous. The science of networks has shaped how researchers and society understand the spread of disease, the precursors of loneliness, the rise of protest movements, the causes of social inequality, the influence of social media, and much more. Egocentric analysis conceives of each individual, or ego, as embedded in a personal network of alters, a community partially of their creation and nearly unique to them, whose composition and structure have consequences. This volume is dedicated to understanding the history, present, and future of egocentric social network analysis. The text brings together the most important, classic articles foundational to the field with new perspectives to form a comprehensive volume ideal for courses in network analysis. The collection examines where the field of egocentric research has been, what it has uncovered, and where it is headed.