Shelly Gable: UCLA Dept. of Psychology

Social bonds are potent sources of both pleasure and pain; yet despite the precarious balance of interpersonal incentives and threats, across the life span people are tenaciously motivated to form and maintain strong and stable social bonds. Although myriad evidence supports the existence of a need for relationships, proportionately little work has investigated the regulatory processes involved in establishing, maintaining, and dissolving social bonds from a motivational or goal theory perspective. A critical dimension of motives and goals is their focus. Social motives and goals can be focused on the incentives and desired end-states of relational bonds—approach—or social motives and goals can be focused on the threats and undesired end-states of relational bonds—avoidance. And, work on motives and goals has shown that the approach/avoidance distinction has important implications for behavior, affect, well-being, and health, but this research has not focused explicitly on social motives and goals. And, close relationships research has often targeted either the incentives (e.g., intimacy) or the threats (e.g., insecurity) associated with social bonds, but rarely has examined them in tandem. Given that interpersonal relationships present us with both threats and incentives, research on motives, goals, and the regulation of social behavior needs to simultaneously address the approach dimension and the avoidance dimensions of social behavior. In this talk I will present data from several studies in which we test aspects of approach—avoidance model of social motivation in an effort to understand how humans weigh social incentives and threats and how approach and avoidance motivation influence attention, cognition, affect, and behavior in the context of social bonds.