Online dating across the life span: Users' relationship goals.

Utilizing data from an eHarmony.com relationship questionnaire completed by new users (N = 5,434), this study identifies prioritized goals in new romantic relationships and whether importance of these goals differs by participants' age and gender. Overall, users valued interpersonal communication more than sex appeal.

Marital satisfaction and break-ups differ across on-line and off-line meeting venues.

Marital discord is costly to children, families, and communities. The advent of the Internet, social networking, and on-line dating has affected how people meet future spouses, but little is known about the prevalence or outcomes of these marriages or the demographics of those involved. We addressed these questions in a nationally representative sample of 19,131 respondents who married between 2005 and 2012.

Sexual regret: evidence for evolved sex differences.

Regret and anticipated regret enhance decision quality by helping people avoid making and repeating mistakes. Some of people's most intense regrets concern sexual decisions. We hypothesized evolved sex differences in women's and men's experiences of sexual regret.

What is shared, what is different? Core relational themes and expressive displays of eight positive emotions.

Understanding positive emotions' shared and differentiating features can yield valuable insight into the structure of positive emotion space and identify emotion states, or aspects of emotion states, that are most relevant for particular psychological processes and outcomes. We report two studies that examined core relational themes (Study 1) and expressive displays (Study 2) for eight positive emotion constructs--amusement, awe, contentment, gratitude, interest, joy, love, and pride. Across studies, all eight emotions shared one quality: high positive valence.

Effect of fresh fruit availability at worksites on the fruit and vegetable consumption of low-wage employees.

Objective: To examine the impact of fresh fruit availability at worksites on the fruit and vegetable consumption and related psychosocial determinants of low-wage employees.

Design: A prospective, randomized block experimental design.

Setting: Seven apparel manufacturing and 2 food processing worksites.

Similarity, convergence, and relationship satisfaction in dating and married couples.

The current work investigates how personality and interpersonal processes combine to predict change in relationship quality. Measures of personality and emotion similarity were collected during laboratory interactions from a cross-sectional sample of dating couples (Study 1) and a 1-year longitudinal study of newlywed married couples (Study 2). Results showed that emotion similarity mediated the association between personality similarity and relationship quality (Studies 1 and 2) and that emotion convergence mediated the association between personality convergence and relationship satisfaction (Study 2).

Culture and teasing: the relational benefits of reduced desire for positive self-differentiation.

The authors hypothesized that teasing, a social interaction that benefits relational bonds at the expense of the self, should be viewed as more affiliative, and experienced as more pleasurable, by members of cultures that deemphasize positive self-differentiation. In four multimethod studies, Asian Americans attributed more affiliative intent to teasers and reported more positive target experience than did European Americans. Teaser behavior, attribution biases, and personality did not account for culture-related differences in teasing experience.

Will you be there for me when things go right? Supportive responses to positive event disclosures.

Close relationship partners often share successes and triumphs with one another, but this experience is rarely the focus of empirical study. In this study, 79 dating couples completed measures of relationship well-being and then participated in videotaped interactions in which they took turns discussing recent positive and negative events. Disclosers rated how understood, validated, and cared for they felt in each discussion, and outside observers coded responders' behavior.

Romantic love and sexual desire in close relationships.

Drawing on recent claims in the study of relationships, attachment, and emotion, the authors hypothesized that romantic love serves a commitment-related function and sexual desire a reproduction-related function. Consistent with these claims, in Study 1, brief experiences of romantic love and sexual desire observed in a 3-min interaction between romantic partners were related to distinct feeling states, distinct nonverbal displays, and commitment- and reproductive-related relationship outcomes, respectively. In Study 2, the nonverbal display of romantic love was related to the release of oxytocin.

Relation of oxytocin to psychological stress responses and hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenocortical axis activity in older women.

Objective: Animal research suggests that oxytocin (OT) plays a role in stress responses and that in females, this role is modulated by estrogen. Yet little is known about the relation of OT to human stress responses. This study was conducted to examine the relations between estrogen activity and OT, identify stressors distinctively associated with elevations in OT, and investigate whether OT is related to cardiovascular and hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenocortical (HPA) activity in a laboratory challenge paradigm.