No abstract

In this investigation, intimate partner support, relationship satisfaction, and separation proneness were assessed for four types of people: men in a relationship with a woman (MRW), men in a relationship with a man (MRM), women in a relationship with a man (WRM), and women in a relationship with a woman (WRW). Men and women in same-sex relationships received more support, were more satisfied, and reported fewer thoughts of separating than their counterparts in opposite-sex relationships. The effect of relationship type on satisfaction was not significant once the amount of received support was controlled. The implications of these findings for understanding the support process in same-sex relationships are discussed.

The current study examined how attachment styles of parents and adolescents may jointly influence the quality of their relationship. Parent-adolescent (N dyads = 77) pairs were recruited from a Midwestern town in the United States. The mean of adolescents' age was 16.25. Both members reported their attachment styles, relationship closeness, and relationship discord. The Actor-Partner Interdependence Model (APIM) showed that both members' attachment avoidance was associated with self-report lower levels of closeness. Parents' attachment anxiety was related to relationship discord. Parents with higher avoidant attachment reported lower closeness when adolescents were higher in avoidant attachment. Higher parents' anxious attachment was related to higher relationship closeness when adolescents were higher on anxious attachment. Such an association was negative when adolescents had lower anxious attachment. Higher parents' anxious attachment was related to greater discord when adolescents were lower on anxiety attachment. This study reveals the complex dyadic dynamics of relationship quality in parentadolescent pairs.Relationship quality with parents has important implications for adolescents' psychosocial functioning. Adolescents who have warm and less conflictual relationships with parents are less likely to suffer from psychological symptoms and they are more capable of forming well-functioning peer relationships (for a review, see Steinberg, 2001). Although the determinants and outcomes of parent-adolescent relationship quality have been well-examined (Steinberg, 2001), most existing studies have adopted an individuallevel analysis which assumes adolescents ' and parents' individual characteristics (e.g., pubertal status, temperament, parenting) are independently related to their relationship quality. Unfortunately, this approach has prevented us from better understanding how adolescents and parents may jointly shape the quality of their relationships. Indeed, interdependence theory (Kelley & Thibaut, 1978;Kelley et al., 2003) argues that any dyadic relationship outcomes should be conceptualized as the independent and interaction effects of the two members' characteristics. Accordingly, parent-adolescent relationships are a mutually regulated system in which both members' attachment styles may have independent and interactive effects on their quality of relationships. The current study integrated interdependence theory (Kelley et al., 2003) and attachment theory (Bowlby, 1969) to examine how attachment styles of adolescents and parents may independently and jointly relate to their perceptions of relationship closeness and conflict. Adolescent attachment and parent-adolescent relationship qualityAttachment theory postulates that the quality of infant-caregiver interactions during early ages gives rise to cognitive or mental