Relationship science is an interdisciplinary field dedicated to the scientific study of interpersonal relationship processes. Due to its interdisciplinary nature, relationship science is made up of researchers of various professional backgrounds within psychology (e.g., clinical, social, and developmental psychologists) and outside of psychology (e.g., anthropologists, sociologists, economists, and biologists), but most researchers who identify with the field are psychologists by training. Additionally, the field's emphasis has historically been close and intimate relationships, which includes predominantly dating and married couples, parent-child relationships, and friendships and social networks, but some also study less salient social relationships such as colleagues and acquaintances.
History
Early 20th century Empirically studying interpersonal relationships and social connection traces back to the early 20th century when some of the earliest focuses were on family relationships from a sociological perspective—specifically, marriage and parenting. In 1938 the National Council on Family Relations (NCFR) was formed and, in 1939, what is now the Journal of Marriage and Family (JMF) was established to publish peer-reviewed research with this emphasis. In the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, researchers such as John Bowlby, Harry Harlow, Robert Hinde, and Mary Ainsworth began pursuing the study of mother–infant attachment. In 1949, Reuben Hill developed the ABC-X model, which is a theoretical framework used to examine how families manage and adapt to crises given the resources they have. Then, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the purview of relationship research began to expand more, beyond the idea of just family research. In 1959, Stanley Schachter published the book The Psychology of Affiliation: Experimental Studies of the Sources of Gregariousness, where he discussed humans' general affiliative needs and how they are intensified by biological responses (e.g., anxiety and hunger).Schachter, S. (1959). The psychology of affiliation: Experimental studies of the sources of gregariousness. Stanford Univer. Press. That same year, Harold (Hal) Kelley and John Thibaut published a book, The Social Psychology of Groups, that outlined interdependence theory—an interdisciplinary theory that would become an essential framework for understanding close relationships from a cost-benefit perspective in the years to come.Thibaut, J. W., & Kelley, H. H. (1959). The social psychology of groups. John Wiley. However, this prior interest in relationships was infrequent, and it was not until the late 1960s and early 1970s that the study of relationships truly began to blossom and gain popularity, which was in large part due to the influence of Ellen Berscheid and Elaine Hatfield.Reis, H. T., Aron, A., Clark, M. S., & Finkel, E. J. (2013). Ellen Berscheid, Elaine Hatfield, and the Emergence of Relationship Science. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 8(5), 558–572.
1960s to 2000s Roughly two decades after the aforementioned work of Hill and a decade after the works of Schachter, Kelley, and Thibaut, Ellen Berscheid and Elaine Hatfield (professors at the Universities of Minnesota and Wisconsin, respectively) began studying how two individuals become attracted to one another.Walster, E., Aronson, V., Abrahams, D., & Rottman, L. (1966). Importance of physical attractiveness in dating behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 4(5), 508–516. Dion, K., Berscheid, E., & Walster, E. (1972). What is beautiful is good. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 24(3), 285–290. Yet, their work went beyond just attraction and began to explore other domains such as the processes of choosing a romantic partner and falling in love, and the centrality of relationships in human health and well-being. However, being a female professor and researcher during the era (when academia was overwhelmingly dominated by white males) was incredibly difficult, and was only made more difficult by the public reception to their phenomena of interest. In 1974, their work came under fire after the senator of Wisconsin at the time alleged their research was a waste of taxpayer dollars, in light of Berscheid receiving $84,000 from the National Science Foundation to study love. Despite this immense scrutiny, they nevertheless persisted in pioneering the nascent field of relationship science through the 1970s and into the 1980s through seminal developments such as the distinction between passionate and companionate love and a scale to measure the former.Hatfield E. (1982) Passionate Love, Companionate Love, and Intimacy. In: Fischer M., Stricker G. (eds) Intimacy. Springer, Boston, MA. Meanwhile, researchers from across different disciplines had begun to dedicate themselves to the study of relationships.
Along with the fast growing interest came high-impact works. Urie Bronfenbrenner's late 1970s and mid-1980s social–ecological model established key principles that researchers would eventually use ubiquitously to study the impact of socio-contextual factors on relationships.Bronfenbrenner, U. (1977). Toward an experimental ecology of human development. American Psychologist, 32(7), 513–531. Bronfenbrenner, U. (1979).The ecology of human development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Graham Spanier published the Dyadic Adjustment Scale (DAS) in JMF, which is currently the most widely cited scale of intimate relationship quality.Spanier, G. (1976). Measuring Dyadic Adjustment: New Scales for Assessing the Quality of Marriage and Similar Dyads. Journal of Marriage and Family, 38(1), 15-28. John Bowlby's attachment theory, formalized in the late 1960s and early 1970s, laid the groundwork for the study of parent–child relationships and also helped shape the study of adult relationships in the field. Notably, in 1983, Harold Kelley, Ellen Berscheid, Andrew Christensen, Anne Peplau and their colleagues wrote the book Close Relationships, which provided a comprehensive overview of the field of relationship science in its early stages, and identified the typologies of relationships studied.Kelley, H.H., Berscheid, E., Christensen, A., Harvey, J.H., Huston, T.L., Levinger, G., McClintock, E., Peplau, L.A. & Peterson, D.R.. (1983) Close Relationships. New York: W.H. Freeman. Also in the 1980s and into the 1990s, Toni Antonucci began exploring friendships and social support among adults,Toni C. Antonucci, Hiroko Akiyama, Social Networks in Adult Life and a Preliminary Examination of the Convoy Model, Journal of Gerontology, Volume 42, Issue 5, September 1987, Pages 519–527, while Arthur Aron was examining the role of relationships with romantic partners, siblings, friends, and parents in individual self-expansion.Aron, A., & Aron, E. N. (1986). Love and the expansion of self: Understanding attraction and satisfaction. Hemisphere Publishing Corp/Harper & Row Publishers. Additionally, Thomas Malloy and David Kenny developed the social relations model (an early analytic approach to understanding the roles of a person and their partner in their interactions)Malloy, T.E. and Kenny, D.A. (1986), The Social Relations Model: An integrative method for personality research. Journal of Personality, 54: 199-225. and Kenny later published his work on Models of Non-independence in Dyadic Research in 1996.Kenny, D. A. (1996). Models of Non-Independence in Dyadic Research. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 13(2), 279–294.
With a growing interest in marriage and family therapy in relationship science, in the late 1980s and 1990s, researchers such as Howard Markman, Frank Floyd, and Scott Stanley began developing romantic relationship (with a primary focus on marriages) interventions;Markman, H. J., Floyd, F. J., Stanley, S. M., & Storaasli, R. D. (1988). Prevention of marital distress: A longitudinal investigation. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 56(2), 210–217. specifically, in 1995, Floyd and colleagues published the program they developed, called Prevention Intervention and Relationship Enhancement (PREP).Floyd, F. J., Markman, H. J., Kelly, S., Blumberg, S. L., & Stanley, S. M. (1995). Preventive intervention and relationship enhancement. In N. S. Jacobson & A. S. Gurman (Eds.), Clinical handbook of couple therapy (p. 212–226). The Guilford Press. Interest in and development of relationship education programming increased in the 2000s due to state and federal Healthy Marriage Initiatives, which allocated grant funding to support programming that would impact disadvantaged communities.Johnson, M. D. (2012). Healthy Marriage Initiatives On the Need for Empiricism in Policy Implementation. The American Psychologist, 67(4), 296–308. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0027743
Although there were many theoretical and empirical contributions of the 1970s and 80s, the professional evolution of relationship science was simultaneously taking place. The first international conference specifically dedicated to relationship processes took place in 1977 in Swansea, Wales, hosted by Mark Cook (a social psychologist) and Glen Wilson (a psychotherapist). In 1982, the first of the eventually bi-annual International Conference of Personal Relationships (ICPR) took place in Madison, Wisconsin, under the direction of Robin Gilmour and Steve Duck, with about 100 attendees. Two years later, in 1984, the International Society for the Study of Personal Relationships (ISSPR) was borne out of the ICPR and the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, the first peer-reviewed journal unique to the field of relationship science, was established. Then in 1987, the Iowa Network of Personal Relationships (which would later be known as the International Network of Personal Relationships; INPR) was formed and Hal Kelley was elected president of ISSPR that same year. A few years later in 1991, Ellen Berscheid (the then-president of ISSPR) announced a merger of ISSPR and INPR, which ultimately fell through until the idea was reignited over a decade later. In 1994, the journal Personal Relationships was formally established by ISSPR and began publishing work in relationship science with Pat Noller as the editor; Anne Peplau became president of ISSPR. The changing of roles only persisted when Dan Perlman became president of ISSPR in 1996 and began discussing with the president of INPR (at the time, Barbara Sarason) how they might work to better integrate the efforts and goals of the two organizations; in 1998, Jeffry Simpson took over as editor of Personal Relationships.