Publisher's Synopsis
Community psychology represents a new way of thinking about people's behavior and well-being in the context of all the community environments and social systems in which they live their lives. One of the most exciting aspects of community psychology is that the field is still developing and defining itself. Moreover, people's willingness to communicate about emotional experience depends on their relationship with the person with whom they are communicating. Studies conducted by the first author and his colleagues indicate that people are more willing to express both positive and negative emotions to the extent that a relationship is intimate, trusting, and communal, regardless of whether the emotion was triggered by the partner or someone else. This volume explores the latest developments in close relationships and community psychology, like social acceptability of polyamory and use of technology. It covers historical and cultural analyses of love, lust, and hate within the context of community psychology. Extensive evidence attests to the importance of relationships for human well-being, and evolutionary theorizing has increasingly recognized the adaptive significance of relationships. Psychological science, however, has barely begun to consider how relationships influence a broad array of basic social, cognitive, emotional, and behavioral processes. This volume discusses contemporary theory and research about the impact of relationship contexts on social cognition, emotion, and human development. Diverse studies demonstrate links between the emotion eliciting power of situations and their relationship context. For example, the intensity of elicited emotions, particularly the so-called hot emotions, varies with the closeness of a relationship.
