Long-distance relationships can form stronger bonds than face-to-face ones

Long-distance couples disclose more and idealize partners' behaviors

2013-07-18

(Press-News.org) Washington, DC (July 15, 2013) – The long-distance relationship has plagued college students and people relocated for work for ages. These relationships are seen as destined to fail, but are they actually creating stronger bonds than a geographically closer relationship? A recent paper published in the Journal of Communication found that people in long-distance relationships often have stronger bonds from more constant, and deeper, communication than normal relationships.

Crystal Jiang, City University of Hong Kong and Jeffrey Hancock, Cornell University, asked dating couples in long-distance and geographically close relationships to report their daily interactions over different media: face-to-face, phone calls, video chat, texting, instant messenger, and email. Over a week, they reported to what extent they shared about themselves and experienced intimacy, and to what extent they felt their partners did the same thing. When comparing the two types of relationships, Jiang and Hancock found that long-distance couples felt more intimate to each other, and this greater intimacy is driven by two tendencies: long-distance couples disclosed themselves more, and they idealized their partners' behaviors. These two tendencies become more manifested when they communicated in text-based, asynchronous and mobile media because they made more efforts to overcome the media constraints.

Long-distance relationships have been unexplored for years. One of the reasons is that the general public believes it is rare and not normal. Previous studies have focused on how couples cope with problems, such as jealousy and stress, but until recently, several studies have shown that long-distance relationships are not always problematic. Some surveys even indicate that long-distance couples have equal or better relationship qualities than geographically close couples. This study was designed to observe what exactly happens in long-distance relational communication, particularly in comparison to geographically close ones.

Long-distance romance is much more common nowadays. Couples get separated for a variety of reasons, due to modern mobility, and they choose to maintain the relationships through all kinds of communication technologies. Recent statistics show that 3 million married couples in the US live apart; 25- 50% college students are currently in long-distance relationships and up to 75% of them have engaged in one at some point. On the other hand, people think long-distance relationships are challenging.

"Indeed, our culture, emphasizes being together physically and frequent face-to-face contact for close relationships, but long-distance relationships clearly stand against all these values. People don't have to be so pessimistic about long-distance romance," said Jiang. "The long-distance couples try harder than geographically close couples in communicating affection and intimacy, and their efforts do pay back."

### "Absence Makes the Communication Grow Fonder: Geographic Separation, Interpersonal Media, and Intimacy in Dating Relationships," by L. Crystal Jiang and Jeffrey T. Hancock. Journal of Communication, Volume 63 Number 3, pages 556-577. doi:10.1111/jcom.12029 Contact: To schedule an interview with the author or a copy of the research, please contact John Paul Gutierrez, jpgutierrez@icahdq.org.

About ICA The International Communication Association is an academic association for scholars interested in the study, teaching, and application of all aspects of human and mediated communication. With more than 4,300 members in 80 countries, ICA includes 26 Divisions and Interest Groups and publishes the Communication Yearbook and five major, peer-reviewed journals: Journal of Communication, Communication Theory, Human Communication Research, Communication, Culture & Critique, and the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. For more information, visit http://www.icahdq.org.

ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:

Why crop rotation works

2013-07-18

Crop rotation has been used since Roman times to improve plant nutrition and to control the spread of disease. A new study to be published in Nature's 'The ISME Journal' reveals the profound effect it has on enriching soil with bacteria, fungi and protozoa. "Changing the crop species massively changes the content of microbes in the soil, which in turn helps the plant to acquire nutrients, regulate growth and protect itself against pests and diseases, boosting yield," said Professor Philip Poole from the John Innes Centre. Soil was collected from a field near Norwich ...

Widely used pesticide toxic to honeybees

2013-07-18

PENSACOLA, Fla.—Forthcoming research in the journal Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry analyzes the physiological effects of three separate pesticides on honey bees (Apis mellifera). An international research team ¬- Drs. Stephan Caravalho, Luc Belzunces and colleagues from Universidade Federal de Lavras in Brazil and Institut Nationale de la Recherche Agronomique in France - concludes that the absence of mortality does not always indicate functional integrity. Deltamethrin, fipronil and spinosad, widely used pesticides in agriculture and home pest control, were ...

Bearing witness to the phenomenon of symmetric cell division

2013-07-18

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (July 18, 2013) – Writing in his journal about the scientists of his era, Henry David Thoreau bemoaned their blindness to significant phenomena: "The question is not what you look at, but what you see." More than 150 years later, his words still ring true. For more than a century, scientists have been peering through microscopes, carefully watching cells divide. Until now, however, none has actually seen how human cells manage to divide into two equally-sized daughter cells during mitosis. "This is so obvious when you look at it, but no one ever noticed ...

How mice teach us about disease

2013-07-18

Researchers have created a large new resource of more than 900 genes switched off one-at-a-time in mice to discover which genes are important for a wide range of biological functions such as fertility or hearing. This resource, known as the Mouse Genetics Project, screens for characteristics and early signs of disease, revealing many new functions for well-known genes, as well as for genes with no previously-known role in disease. Many of these variations in body function are likely to underlie human diseases. The human genome has more than 20,000 identified genes, ...

Movement without muscles study in insects could inspire robot and prosthetic limb developments

2013-07-18

Neurobiologists from the University of Leicester have shown that insect limbs can move without muscles – a finding that may provide engineers with new ways to improve the control of robotic and prosthetic limbs. Their work helps to explain how insects control their movements using a close interplay of neuronal control and 'clever biomechanical tricks,' says lead researcher Dr Tom Matheson, a Reader in Neurobiology at the University of Leicester. In a study published today in the journal Current Biology, the researchers show that the structure of some insect leg joints ...

Electronic monitoring systems can improve health care hand hygiene compliance

2013-07-18

AKRON, Ohio, (July 18, 2013) – GOJO Industries, a leader in hand hygiene and skin health and inventors of PURELL® Hand Sanitizer, conducted an independent research study at the John Peter Smith Hospital in Fort Worth, Texas to determine the impact on hand hygiene compliance rates when the hospital hand hygiene program included an electronic compliance activity monitoring system. The compliance technology system used in the study was the GOJO SMARTLINK Activity Monitoring System. Results of the study were presented at the APIC 2013 Conference. The authors concluded ...

An important discovery at the Montreal Heart Institute: A new approach to treat the most common heart valve disease in Western countries

2013-07-18

Montreal, Canada, July 18, 2013 – A study conducted by the team of Dr. Jean-Claude Tardif, Director of the Research Centre at the Montreal Heart Institute (MHI), has led to the discovery of a new approach to treat aortic valve stenosis through the administration of a compound that prevents valve deterioration and can even reverse the progression of the disease. A condition that is characterized by a narrowing of the aortic valve and that affects approximately 150,000 Canadians , aortic valve stenosis is the most common type of heart valve disease in Western countries. The ...

An effective initial polytherapy for infantile spasms

2013-07-18

Adrenocorticotropic hormone is recommended worldwide as an initial therapy for infantile spasms. However, infantile spasms in about 50% of children cannot be fully controlled by adrenocorticotropic hormone monotherapy, seizures recur in 33% of patients who initially respond to adrenocorticotropic hormone monotherapy, and side effects are relatively common during adrenocorticotropic hormone treatment. Feiyong Jia and colleagues from the First Hospital of Jilin University used combined therapy with adrenocorticotropic hormone, topiramate, vitamin B6, and immunoglobulin in ...

Abnormal activation of the occipital lobes in major depressive disorder patients

2013-07-18

A recent study published in the Neural Regeneration Research (Vol. 8, No. 18, 2013) combined cognition tasks and functional MRI, and designed multiple repeated event-related tasks; additionally, using the International Affective Picture System-based event-related tasks, this study investigated brain functional characteristics of major depressive disorder patients exhibiting, negative bias brain imaging changes and cognitive dysfunction, as well as their relationship based on biased quantitative data. Results show that (1) the number of error responses was calculated to ...

New evidence for warm-blooded dinosaurs

2013-07-18

University of Adelaide research has shown new evidence that dinosaurs were warm-blooded like birds and mammals, not cold-blooded like reptiles as commonly believed. In a paper published in PLoS ONE, Professor Roger Seymour of the University's School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, argues that cold-blooded dinosaurs would not have had the required muscular power to prey on other animals and dominate over mammals as they did throughout the Mesozoic period. "Much can be learned about dinosaurs from fossils but the question of whether dinosaurs were warm-blooded or ...

Long-distance relationships can form stronger bonds than face-to-face ones

ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:

LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES: