#interpersonal-relationships — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #interpersonal-relationships, aggregated by home.social.
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DATE: August 19, 2026 at 11:00PM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: People who imagine their future without anyone else in it aren’t loners by nature — new research suggests it’s a learned defense that quietly collapses the moment the imagined future turns stressful
New research published in the Journal of Individual Differences provides evidence that a person’s relationship patterns actively shape how they imagine their own future. The findings suggest that people with high relationship anxiety tend to envision future scenarios filled with social interactions. In contrast, those who avoid closeness tend to imagine futures with fewer interpersonal connections.
Human beings spend a significant portion of their mental lives thinking about things that have not yet happened. Psychologists refer to this ability to mentally simulate personal future events as episodic future thinking. This mental process plays an important role in how people make decisions, regulate their emotions, and behave in everyday situations.
Episodic future thinking is generally recognized as a healthy cognitive habit. It contributes to overall well-being by allowing individuals to anticipate challenges, create effective plans, and manage their emotional responses before an event actually occurs. Because interpersonal relationships make up a massive part of daily life, the degree to which people include social interactions in these mental rehearsals can influence their behavior.
When imagining these future events, people draw heavily on their past social experiences. One major framework for understanding how past experiences shape human behavior is attachment theory. Attachment style refers to the individual differences in how people feel, think, and act within interpersonal relationships.
Scientists often measure attachment style along two specific dimensions known as attachment anxiety and attachment avoidance. People with high attachment anxiety often fear abandonment and constantly seek closeness and reassurance from others. Individuals with high attachment avoidance tend to feel uncomfortable with intimacy and prefer to rely solely on themselves.
Most past research on attachment styles has focused on how these traits affect a person’s memory of the past or their experiences in the present moment. Very little attention has been given to how these deeply ingrained relationship habits influence expectations about the future. Fan Yang, an assistant professor at Waseda University, and Ze Zhang, a doctoral student at Okayama University, explained the underlying motivation for the study.
“We often think about attachment as something rooted in the past that affects our present relationships,” Yang and Zhang said. “But people also constantly imagine the future. These imagined possible futures matter because they can shape how people prepare, make decisions, and regulate their emotions.”
The researchers noted a gap in the scientific literature regarding interpersonal expectations. “What we wanted to know was whether those past relationship experiences also shape how people picture their future, especially whether they imagine future events as involving other people, support, closeness, or distance,” Yang and Zhang explained.
To test these ideas, the researchers conducted two separate studies. The first study involved 155 participants who were recruited through Chinese social networking platforms. The sample consisted of 129 females and 26 males, with an average age of about 22 years.
First, the participants completed a well-established questionnaire designed to measure their levels of attachment anxiety and attachment avoidance. The scientists then asked each person to complete five distinct episodic future thinking tasks.
For each task, participants had to imagine a realistic and plausible future event that could happen in their personal lives. The instructions required them to picture highly specific details, such as the exact time and location of the event. The imagined scenario needed to last anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours, but no longer than a single day.
The researchers also instructed the participants to come up with completely new events rather than repeating daily routines or past experiences. They were given at least thirty seconds to mentally simulate each scenario. Afterward, the participants rated how strongly the imagined event related to interpersonal relationships on a seven-point scale.
The data revealed a distinct pattern based on attachment styles. As expected, attachment anxiety positively predicted the amount of interpersonal content in the imagined future scenarios. This means that as a person’s level of relationship anxiety increased, they tended to imagine more future events involving other people.
On the other hand, attachment avoidance negatively predicted this relevance. Participants with higher levels of avoidance tended to mentally simulate future events that had very little to do with interpersonal relationships. These findings provided initial evidence that attachment traits manifest when people daydream about the future.
Following these initial findings, the scientists designed a second study to see if stress would alter this dynamic. According to attachment theory, relationship behaviors are typically activated under conditions of threat or stress. The researchers wanted to observe how episodic future thinking might change when participants imagined stressful events compared to nonstressful ones.
The second study involved 67 Japanese university students, including 50 females, 14 males, and three individuals who identified as other. Their average age was about 20 years. Similar to the first study, participants filled out a questionnaire to measure their attachment styles before moving on to the imagination tasks.
In this phase, the researchers used a within-person design, meaning every participant completed both the nonstressful and stressful tasks. First, the participants were instructed to imagine five potential personal future events that were entirely nonstressful. They followed the same strict guidelines regarding specificity and realism used in the first study.
After completing the nonstressful simulations, the participants imagined five stressful future events. The scientists purposely had everyone complete the nonstressful tasks first to prevent the negative emotions of the stressful scenarios from lingering and affecting the neutral tasks.
Following each mental simulation, participants rated how much the event involved interpersonal relationships. They also rated the extent to which they felt positive or negative emotions about the imagined scenario. This emotional rating allowed the authors to verify that the stressful tasks actually elicited more negative feelings than the nonstressful tasks.
When the researchers analyzed the data, they found that attachment anxiety continued to predict more interpersonal content across both conditions. Anxiously attached individuals consistently included other people in their future simulations, whether they were imagining a relaxing day or a highly stressful situation.
For avoidantly attached individuals, the patterns shifted depending on the emotional tone of the imagined event. During the nonstressful tasks, higher attachment avoidance predicted less interpersonal content, matching the findings of the first study. However, during the stressful tasks, attachment avoidance had no significant effect on whether the scenario involved other people.
The authors suggest this shift occurs because avoidant individuals can easily suppress their need for social connection when they feel safe and relaxed. When imagining a stressful situation, keeping up that emotional defense requires more cognitive effort. Under the mental load of a stressful scenario, their natural inclination to avoid relying on others may become harder to maintain.
“Our findings suggest that how we imagine the future may reflect our relationship patterns,” Yang and Zhang told PsyPost. “People who worry more about relationships may picture the future as more interpersonal, whether the imagined event is stressful or not. In contrast, people who tend to avoid closeness may imagine fewer social elements in ordinary, nonstressful future events, but this tendency becomes weaker when they imagine stressful situations.”
This dynamic provides a new perspective on how relationship history impacts our daily lives. “In everyday life, this means our past relationship experiences may shape not only how we relate to others now, but also how we expect support, closeness, or distance in what probably comes next,” Yang and Zhang explained.
While these studies provide new insights into how we think about the future, the research does have some limitations. One notable issue is the demographic makeup of the samples. Both studies primarily relied on young, female university students from Eastern countries.
Because relationship dynamics and social expectations can vary widely across different cultures and age groups, these findings might not apply to the broader global population. Research suggests that gender identity can influence the emotional intensity of future-oriented thinking. This means a more balanced sample of men and women is needed to confirm these patterns.
The authors also cautioned against reading too deeply into the results without considering the context. “One important caveat is that our findings do not mean attachment style rigidly determines how people imagine the future,” Yang and Zhang noted. “Our studies were based mainly on university student samples, so future research should test whether the same patterns appear in more diverse populations.”
They also emphasized that there is no right or wrong way to imagine the future. “Our findings should not be interpreted as saying that relationship-focused future thinking is always good or that less interpersonal future thinking is always bad,” the researchers said. “Rather, they show that attachment patterns may influence which aspects of possible future events become more or less salient when people imagine what may happen to them.”
Another limitation involves the controlled experimental setting. Asking participants to generate future thoughts on command in a laboratory context might not perfectly capture how people spontaneously daydream in their everyday lives. To get a more accurate picture, future research could use mobile technology to survey people about their future-oriented thoughts as they naturally occur throughout the day.
The design of the tasks also introduces the possibility of a demand effect. In both studies, participants rated how much their imagined event related to relationships immediately after their first task. Doing this might have unintentionally prompted them to focus on social connections during the subsequent four tasks.
Additionally, the fixed order of the tasks in the second study presents a potential problem. Because all participants completed the nonstressful tasks before the stressful ones, the initial tasks might have influenced how they responded to the later ones. Future studies could address this by randomizing the order of the tasks or giving participants a break between conditions to reset their minds.
The authors also noted that the second study had a relatively small sample size and was not preregistered. This means the findings from the second study should be treated as preliminary. The researchers did not account for other psychological factors, such as general anxiety levels or personality traits, which could also influence how a person envisions their future.
Moving forward, the scientists plan to explore these concepts in more naturalistic settings. “Our next step is to look more closely at how people think about the future in everyday life,” Yang and Zhang said. “The future is not just something that happens later; the way we imagine it may already shape how we feel, make decisions, and relate to others now.”
They plan to investigate how mental time travel differs depending on whether a person is looking forward or backward. “One interesting question is that imagining the future often draws on past experiences, but the future also has a unique quality: it has not happened yet, but it might,” the authors explained.
This distinction could have important implications for psychological health. “We want to examine whether this ‘possible but not yet real’ quality makes imagining the future different from remembering the past in how it affects mental health and well-being,” Yang and Zhang said. “In other words, are remembering the past and imagining the future psychologically similar processes, or do they serve different functions?”
The authors have broad goals for this expanding area of study. “More broadly, we hope to understand why some people look ahead with confidence, while others feel worry, uncertainty, or anxiety,” they noted. “In particular, Ze Zhang will continue this line of work by focusing on topics such as future anxiety.”
The study, “The Influence of Attachment Style on the Extent to Which the Content of Episodic Future Thinking Relates to Interpersonal Relationships,” was authored by Fan Yang, Ze Zhang, Nanami Sawada, and Atsushi Oshio.
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#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #EpisodicFutureThinking #AttachmentTheory #FutureForecasting #InterpersonalRelationships #AnxietyInRelationships #AvoidantAttachment #SocialConnections #FutureOrientation #PsychologyResearch #MentalTimeTravel
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DATE: August 2, 2026 at 02:00PM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: A 12-country study highlights regional differences in ghosting behaviors and attitudes
People across the globe recognize ghosting as a common way to end relationships, but geographic location tends to influence how acceptable they find the practice. Research published in the *Journal of Social and Personal Relationships* provides evidence that individuals from different countries vary in their intentions to cut off contact and their actual history of doing so. The findings suggest that severing ties without explanation is a worldwide phenomenon with distinct regional patterns.
Ghosting occurs when a person abruptly stops communicating with someone else to end their relationship, offering no warning or explanation for their departure. Most previous research on this type of social rejection has relied heavily on participants from the United States and Western Europe. A vast majority of studies on close relationships tend to exclude people from African, Asian, and Latin American countries.
“There has been a lot of research on ghosting over the past 10 years or so, but much of that research (like the broader research on close relationships) has focused on participants from certain regions,” said Gili Freedman, an associate professor of psychology at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. To address this geographic gap, Freedman and co-author Darcey Powell, an associate professor of psychology at Texas AM University-Corpus Christi, designed a project comparing behaviors across twelve countries.
“In this set of studies, Darcey Powell and I wanted to gain an understanding of whether ghosting is commonly used across 12 countries that spanned multiple continents,” Freedman said. “We also wanted to examine people’s attitudes, intentions, and behaviors in regard to ghosting in both friendships and romantic relationships in these 12 countries.”
Cultural backgrounds often shape how people navigate social rejection and manage their interpersonal networks. People in some societies prioritize social harmony and group cohesion, which might influence whether they view abruptly ending a relationship as offensive. Another factor is relational mobility, which describes how easily individuals in a society can choose and form new relationships.
In their first study, Freedman and Powell recruited 885 young adults between the ages of 18 and 29. The participants lived in Canada, Kenya, Mexico, Nigeria, South Africa, and the United States. They read a specific description of ghosting and answered questions about their familiarity with the concept.
The participants rated the acceptability of ghosting on a one to seven scale. They also estimated their likelihood of doing it on a zero to 100 percent scale and reported their past experiences with friends and romantic partners. In their statistical models, Freedman and Powell accounted for the age and gender of the participants.
The data from the first study showed that the concept of ghosting is widely known, with roughly 96 percent of participants recognizing the behavior. People in different regions sometimes used alternative slang, such as the word “mizing” in South Africa, to describe the act of ignoring someone. Freedman and Powell found that participants from Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa reported higher levels of acceptance for the practice than participants from the United States, Canada, and Mexico.
Freedman and Powell also found differences in how people intended to act in the future. Participants across all six countries were more likely to say they would ghost someone in a short-term relationship, estimating a 52 percent likelihood on average, compared to just a 20 percent likelihood for a long-term relationship. Generally, participants reported a higher likelihood of ghosting friends than romantic partners, a trend most prominent in Canada and Mexico.
Looking at past behavior, people in Kenya reported the highest rates of cutting off a romantic partner. About 54 percent of the Kenyan participants had ghosted a romantic partner, compared to 30 percent of participants in the United States. In the United States and Canada, ghosting a friend was generally more common than ghosting a romantic partner. In Canada, about 51 percent of participants reported ghosting a friend, compared to 31 percent who had ghosted a romantic partner.
For their second study, Freedman and Powell surveyed a broader age range of 1,741 adults with an average age of 31. This sample included participants from Brazil, Ghana, India, Indonesia, Kenya, the Philippines, and Ukraine. Survey materials were translated into the most popular local language for each country.
Similar to the first study, participants read a description of ghosting and answered questions about their knowledge, attitudes, future intentions, and past behaviors. Freedman and Powell once again controlled for participant age and gender in their statistical analyses to ensure these demographic factors did not skew the outcomes.
In this second group, 75 percent of the participants had heard of the specific term ghosting. Awareness varied by location, as over 35 percent of participants in Brazil and Ukraine had not heard of the concept before taking the survey. Acceptability also varied widely across these nations. Participants from the Philippines and Brazil rated ghosting as less acceptable than participants from the other five countries in the group.
Future intentions to cut off contact followed a similar pattern to the first study. People estimated an average 49 percent likelihood of ghosting a short-term partner or friend, compared to an average 31 percent likelihood for long-term relationships. Participants from Kenya reported the highest intentions to ghost overall, while participants from Brazil reported the lowest intentions.
When looking at past actions, Freedman and Powell observed a disconnect between people’s attitudes and their actual behaviors. The data provides evidence that high acceptability in a culture does not guarantee the behavior will be widespread. Participants in India reported some of the highest levels of acceptance for ghosting, but they were the least likely to have actually ghosted a romantic partner, with roughly 16 percent reporting the behavior. In contrast, participants from Brazil had low intentions and low acceptance, but roughly 53 percent still reported cutting off friends in the past.
Reflecting on the overall results of both studies, Freedman noted that the terminology and frequency of the practice shift depending on the geographic context. “We found that ghosting is a widely known type of social rejection, though it sometimes goes by different names depending on country/region,” Freedman said. “However, individuals’ familiarity with the term ‘ghosting,’ how they feel about it, and how likely they are to have ghosted or been ghosted varies by country.”
The consistency of specific regional trends across both the younger and older participant groups stood out to Freedman and Powell. “For example, we found higher rates of ghosting and of ghosting acceptability with participants from Kenya compared to other countries,” Freedman explained. The authors hope this initial exploration opens the door for more focused examinations of specific global populations.
“Our cross-national work aimed to serve as a foundational step, such that future research could use it as a springboard to explore potential cross-cultural differences between select countries,” Freedman said. Interpreting these country-based differences as strict cultural rules would be a mistake. A person’s geographic location is a broad proxy for a complex mix of social expectations and personal mobility.
National borders do not perfectly align with psychological traits, such as a preference for independence or a desire for group harmony. Future research could measure specific cultural values directly to see how they relate to relationship decisions.
The samples relied on people who were already registered on online survey platforms. This approach means the participants might not accurately represent the broader populations of their respective countries. Collecting data from more diverse, nationally representative groups could provide a more accurate picture of global relationship trends. It is also possible that translating the survey into local languages slightly altered the meaning of relationship terms, which could influence how participants responded.
The study, “A Cross-National Comparison of Ghosting Knowledge, Attitudes, Intentions, and Behaviors in Friendships and Romantic Relationships Spanning Twelve Countries,” was authored by Gili Freedman and Darcey N. Powell.
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#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #GhostingStudy #CrossNationalResearch #RelationshipTrends #GhostingAttitudes #RomanceAndFriendships #CulturalDifferences #InterpersonalRelationships #GlobalRelationships #GhostingBehavior #SocialRejection
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New Couple Blissfully Unaware Relationship Won’t Survive First Game Night
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As near I can tell, a lot of us have a self identity in which we're not needing close relationships with others.
I suspect we misunderstand ourselves a whole lot.
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CW: marriage
Went and saw Midwinter Break.
It's a small tale.
Set in the present.
The acting, dialogue and camerawork are so good that they were pretty much invisible to me.If you're doing, or have done, marriage then I'm interested in what you feel about the movie and the subjects raised.
"What of the subjects raised are most important in your view?"
#Marriage #InterpersonalRelationships #Friendships #MidwinterBreakMovie
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@GreenRoc @wdlindsy
I'm not clear there is much love and compassion within the circles of Trump's Administration, if love is considering the current and future welfare of another and weighting that strongly when choosing an action.AIUI transactional relationships, which seem the norm around Trump, don't consider the future welfare of the other party in the deal.
#USPol #InterpersonalRelationships #TransactionalRelationships #Love
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Hello to new followers! Just so you know - these are my top things to toot about/things I'm passionate about:
- #HumanRights
- #Cats
- #Environmentalism
- #SocialJustice
- #EcoJustice
- #DisabilityRights
- #StopRacism
- #misogyny
- #CancelBillionaires
- #DisbandRCMPCIRG
- #DefundRCMP
- #CorporateGreed
- #Equity & #FairWages
- #Geopolitics
- #CPTSD #PTSD & #AdultADHD
- #Trauma #Recovery #InterpersonalRelationships
- #Art & #Music
- #Psychology & #neuroscienceThis is my nutshell quickie.
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Book recommendations
https://embrace-autism.com/book-recommendations/
#Interpersonalrelationships #Neurodiversitymovement #Non-binarygender #Autismawareness #Autisminfemales #Neurodivergence #Neurodivergent #Neurodiversity #Transgenderism #Autisticwomen #Relationships #Camouflaging #Adultautism #Literature #Resources #Masking #Books #LGBTQ -
It’s not BPD; it’s autism
https://embrace-autism.com/its-not-bpd-its-autism/
#Borderlinepersonalitydisorder(BPD) #BorderlinePersonalityDisorder #Interpersonalrelationships #Emotionaldysregulation #Personalitydisorders #Emotionalreactivity #Sensorysensitivity #Socialintelligence #Emotionregulation #Psychometrictest #Specialinterests #Suicidalideation #Childhoodtrauma #Autisticwomen #Co-occurrence #Meta-analysis #Self-identity #WilliamMandy #Abandonment #Suicidality #Socialcues #LauraHull