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Guerrero, Close Encounters, 6e
SAGE Publishing, 2021
Lecture Notes
Chapter 13: Hurting the Ones we Love: Relational Transgressions
Chapter Outline
I. Hurt Feelings in Relationships
A. Relational Transgressions
1. Relational transgressions occur when people violate implicit or explicit
relational rules. Implicit rules are not formally stated or agreed upon, but
assumed to be understood, while explicit rules are discussed and agreed upon.
2. Different kinds of behavior qualify:
a. Top relational transgressions identified by college students are (1) having
sex with someone else, (2) wanting to or actually dating others, and (3)
deceiving others about something significant.
3. In friendships, betrayal leads to fewer acceptances, trust, and respect, because
when people are betrayed by a friend, they often recast the friend’s entire
personality to frame the friend in a more negative light.
4. Social network may view negatively:
a. Transgression-maximizing messages highlight the negative aspects of
the transgression as well as the partner’s role in causing that negativity.
b. Specific forms of transgression-maximizing messages include blaming
the partner and talking about how hurt one is, which decrease support for
the relationship from the social network.
B. Hurtful Messages
1. Hurtful messages are words that have the ability to hurt or harm in every bit
as real a way as physical objects, a few ill spoken of which can strongly affect
individuals, interactions, and relationships.
2. When college students receive hurtful text messages from a friend, they are
more likely to be hurt and to distance themselves from that friend if they
believe the message was sent with the intention of hurting them.
Guerrero, Close Encounters, 6e
SAGE Publishing, 2021
3. Extent of message perceived as hurtful:
a. First, people tend to get more hurt when they perceive the message to be
intentional.
b. Second, people vary in how much they take things personally.
c. Third, relationship history makes a difference.
C. Responses to Hurtful Messages
1. Active Verbal Responses
a. Active verbal responses focus on confronting one’s partner about
hurtful remarks. Some active verbal responses are more positive than
others, which can lead to an escalation of negativity.
b. Most frequently reported response in adult relationships and parent–child
2. Acquiescent Responses
a. Instead of talking about the hurtful message, people sometimes use
acquiescent responses, which involve giving in and acknowledging the
partner’s ability to inflict hurt.
3. Invulnerable Responses
a. Invulnerable responses also avoid talking about the hurtful message and
involve acting unaffected by the hurtful remark.
II. Deception
• Deception violates both relational and conversational rules and is often considered to
be a negative violation of expectancies.
Guerrero, Close Encounters, 6e
SAGE Publishing, 2021
• Expecting others to be truthful: If people did not expect that most conversations are
truthful, talking to others would simply be too difficult and unproductive because we
would be suspicious all the time.
• Fairly common in romantic relationships:
o People averaged about five deceptions a week with a romantic partner, including
lies, followed by exaggerations and half-truths.
o Women were more likely than men to lie while sexting.
A. Types of Deception
1. Lying is just one way: Deception is defined as intentionally managing verbal
or nonverbal messages so a receiver will believe or understand something in a
way that the sender knows is false.
2. Five primary types of deception:
a. Lies involve making up information or giving information that is the
opposite of (or at least very different from) the truth.
b. Equivocation involves making an indirect, ambiguous, or contradictory
statement, such as saying that your friend’s new hairstyle (which you
hate) is the “latest fashion” when you are asked if you like it.
B. Motives for Deception
1. Maintaining the Relationship
a. People commonly use deception to maintain relationships. The goal is to
preserve the relationship and avoid unnecessary conflict.
b. When people have relationship-focused motives for deceiving a partner,
they typically wish to limit relational harm by avoiding conflict,
relational trauma, or other unpleasant experiences.
2. Managing Face Needs
a. People use deception to manage face needs for both themselves and their
partners. In other words, they engage in deception to make themselves or
their partner look good.
b. When using deception to manage face needs, it makes a difference
whether the motive is focused on saving your own face or saving your
partner’s face.
Guerrero, Close Encounters, 6e
SAGE Publishing, 2021
c. Partner-focused motives are designed to avoid hurting the partner, to help
the partner maintain self-esteem, to avoid worrying the partner, and to
protect the partner’s relationship with a third party.
d. People report using more partner-focused lies with close relational
partners than strangers and in relationships characterized by high levels
of interdependence.
3. Negotiating Dialectical Tensions
a. Tension of autonomy connection is between ideologies that value
autonomy versus ideologies about wanting to be connected to someone
you feel close to, as reflected in communication, including deception.
b. Another dialectic revolves around privacy versus expression. If you want
to manage this dialectic by getting privacy, you might lie and say you
promised a friend that you would not tell a secret.
4. Establishing Relational Control
a. Examples include trying to control your partner’s actions by exaggerating
to make her or him feel guilty or acting like you have better options than
you actually do to make your partner jealous.
b. At the beginning of a potential relationship, you might not want someone
5. Continuing Deception
a. Finally, some people use deception because they need to continue
previous deception. In other words, they lie or conceal in order to prevent
being caught in a previous lie.
b. This can cause the deceiver considerable stress. You have to monitor
what you are saying to maintain an old lie.
C. Deception Detection
1. It is difficult to detect deception in everyday conversations unless one partner
says something that is blatantly false.
Guerrero, Close Encounters, 6e
SAGE Publishing, 2021
2. Behaviors such as speech hesitations and body shifts can indicate general
anxiety, shyness, or discomfort in addition to deception, and stereotypic
behaviors such as eye behavior are often controlled during deception.
3. Perhaps the most reliable method for detecting deception is to compare a
person’s normal, truthful behavior with that individual’s current behavior.
4. Maybe easier in certain contexts:
a. It may be difficult to detect deception in text-only contexts because it is
easier for deceivers to control what they say without having to worry
about showing emotion.
5. Advantages of Relational Closeness
a. Close relational partners have knowledge of the partner’s typical
communication style. Burgoon and her colleagues called this type of
knowledge behavioral familiarity.
6. Disadvantages of Relational Closeness
a. People have a truth bias and expect others to be honest, so they enter
most conversations without suspicion instead of looking for deceptive
behavior.
i. People who are socially attractive are generally seen as less
deceptive, and when they are caught deceiving, people usually
attribute their motives for deception to more benign causes.
ii. Truth bias also makes close relational partners overly confident in
the truthfulness of each other’s statements, causing them to miss
much of the deception that occurs.
b. Deceivers may be especially like to control their behavior to try and hide
nervous or guilty behaviors and appear friendly and truthful when
deceiving someone they know well.
i. People become friendlier and show less anxiety as the interaction
progresses when they deceive relational partners versus strangers.
D. Effects of Deception on Relationships
1. Conflict and relationship breakup: Most people believe that honesty is an
absolutely essential ingredient in the recipe for close, healthy relationships.
Guerrero, Close Encounters, 6e
SAGE Publishing, 2021
2. Partner-focused deceptions acceptable: People can identify situations where it
is important, even ethical, to deceive their partner, often appropriate which
can even help maintain positive relationships.
3. Relationship development and maintenance:
a. First, deception may help couples avoid arguments, thereby promoting
relational harmony.
4. Online daters feel a tension between wanting to be accurate and truthful yet
also wanting to present a positive image that is attractive to others, hence
often presenting images that reflect their ideal self or a potential future
version.
5. Consequences in long-term relationships:
a. When people uncover a significant deception, they usually feel a host of
negative emotions, including anxiety, anger, and distress.
III. Infidelity
• Misrepresenting sexual history: People want their partner to see them as someone who
will be faithful to them, because fidelity and sexual exclusivity are highly valued in
most committed romantic relationships in the United States.
• Strong negative effect on relationships: Cheating on and breaking up with someone are
two of the most hurtful and least forgivable things that can happen in a dating
relationship.
• People who found out through a third party or by witnessing the partner’s infidelity
firsthand were the least likely to forgive their partners and the most likely to say their
relationship had been damaged. People were most likely to forgive their partners when
they confessed on their own.
A. Types of Infidelity
1. Sexual infidelity: refers to “sexual activity with someone other than one’s
long-term partner.”
Guerrero, Close Encounters, 6e
SAGE Publishing, 2021
4. Online infidelity: Defined as “romantic or sexual contact facilitated by
Internet use” that is considered to violate relationship rules regarding
faithfulness.
B. Sex Differences in Reactions to Infidelity
1. Evolutionary hypothesis for infidelity: Predicts that men should get more
upset over sexual infidelity than emotional infidelity, whereas women should
get more upset over emotional infidelity than sexual infidelity.
a. Women know they are the parent of a child, but men are sometimes
uncertain about paternity and therefore are more concerned about sexual
infidelity.
2. Methods supporting evolutionary hypothesis:
a. First method involves having men and women imagine that their partner
either engaged in sexual activity or was in love with someone else and
then measuring their level of distress.
i. Men show greater psychological and physiological distress when
they imagine their partner engaging in sexual infidelity.
ii. Women display more distress when they imagine their partner in
love with someone else.
b. Second method involves having people choose which would make them
more upset--their partner having a one-night stand or their partner falling
in love with someone else.
i. Men identify sexual infidelity as more upsetting whereas women
identify emotional infidelity as more upsetting.
3. Double-shot hypothesis: According to this view, both men and women get
most upset when their partners have engaged in both sexual and emotional
infidelity.
a. When people are forced to choose between whether sexual or emotional
infidelity is more upsetting, they will choose the event that is most likely
to imply that both types of infidelity are occurring.
b. Men choose sexual infidelity as more upsetting because they assume that
their girlfriends or wives would not cheat on them unless they also had
feelings for the man they cheated with.
Guerrero, Close Encounters, 6e
SAGE Publishing, 2021
c. Women choose emotional infidelity because they believe their boyfriends
or husbands would not leave them after having emotionally meaningless
sex, but for someone they love.
4. Using a forced choice format:
a. If instead of choosing which type of infidelity is more upsetting, people
report how jealous or upset they are on a scale, the sex difference
disappears.
b. Both men and women are more upset and jealous in response to sexual
than emotional infidelity.
IV. Jealousy
A. Characteristics of Jealousy
1. Worry about losing something valuable:
a. Jealousy involves worrying about losing something you have and occurs
when people worry that they might lose something they value, due to
interference from a third party.
2. Different than envy and rivalry:
a. Envy occurs when you want something someone else has.
3. Triggered by multitude of behaviors:
a. When people notice that their partner seems interested in others, spends
more time away, communicates with former romantic partners, or seems
preoccupied with work, jealousy may ensue.
4. Ambiguity and lack of context:
a. Thoughts can lead to a feedback loop, where exposure to information on
a partner’s social networking site leads to increased surveillance, which
then leads to even more jealousy.
Guerrero, Close Encounters, 6e
SAGE Publishing, 2021
b. People have stronger jealous reactions if they see private messages
exchanged through direct messaging versus a message posted publicly on
a social networking site.
B. Experiencing Romantic Jealousy
1. Cluster of cognitions and emotions:
a. On the cognitive side, jealous individuals make appraisals about the type
of threat posed and how they might deal with that threat.
b. The primary appraisal people make is about how much of a threat the
rival is, which is sometimes dismissed, and jealousy decreases.
2. Both negative and positive feelings: The emotions most central to jealousy
are fear and anger, followed by other aversive emotions such as sadness,
guilt, hurt, and envy often mark jealousy.
a. People are jealous because they fear losing their relationship, and they
are often angry at their partner for betraying them.
3. Increased passion, love, and appreciation:
a. Jealousy is closely related to love because people would not get jealous if
they did not care about their partners.
C. Communicative Responses to Jealousy
1. Types of constructive responses:
a. Integrative communication is direct, nonaggressive communication that
involves disclosing feelings such as having a calm discussion about
hurtful behaviors and trying to reach an understanding so jealousy is
avoided in the future.
Guerrero, Close Encounters, 6e
SAGE Publishing, 2021
2. Specific destructive responses:
a. Negative communication is comprised of aggressive and passive
aggressive communication that reflect negativity, such as arguing, being
sarcastic, acting rude, ignoring the partner, giving cold or dirty looks, and
withdrawing affection.
b. Counterjealousy inductions involve taking actions to make the partner
3. Avoidant responses:
a. Silence is about decreasing communication, often by getting quiet and
not talking as much as usual.
b. Denial is about pretending not to be jealous, being worried about looking
weak or insecure, and acting like nothing is bothering.
4. Rival-focused responses:
a. Signs of possession involve publicly displaying the relationship so
people know that partner is taken.
b. Derogating competitors is communication designed to cast the rival in a
bad light.
V. Unrequited Love
• Unrequited love is whereby one person, the would-be lover, wants to initiate or
intensify a romantic relationship, but the other person, the rejecter, does not.
• Characterizes several situations:
o Sometimes the two people do not know one another well even though one of them
feels “in love” with the other.
• Would-be lovers have options:
o Approaching the loved one could lead to rejection, humiliation, or, in the case of an
established friendship, the de-escalation or termination of the relationship.
Guerrero, Close Encounters, 6e
SAGE Publishing, 2021
o Rejection is always unpleasant but is especially hurtful when it comes from a
romantic partner as opposed to a friend or acquaintance.
• Difficult for both people: Perhaps surprisingly, rejecters typically report experiencing
more negative emotions than do would-be lovers. Most people in the rejecting position
are kind and try to let the other person down easily.
o Would-be lovers perceive the situation as having either extremely positive or
negative outcomes whereas most rejecters perceive only negative outcomes.
o Rejecter typically feels guilty for being unable to return the would-be lover’s
sentiments, and may feel frustrated and even victimized if the would-be lover is
persistent.
• Problem with polite indirect messages:
o They can be misinterpreted by a hopeful would-be-lover, who still sees a love
relationship as a possibility, since the rejecter did not dismiss them directly.
o If you tell them you are already in a relationship, they may think you will want
them if they break up.
o Eventually, the rejecter may have to resort to harsher and more direct messages if
the would-be lover persists.
• Inappropriate rejection messages:
o Would-be lovers who were friends with the person they were interested in thought
ambiguous messages were especially inappropriate, because friends are presumed
to be able to talk about things openly.
o When people were rejected by a romantic partner, rejection messages that blamed
VI. Obsessive Relational Intrusion
• Persistent pursuit called obsessive relational intrusion or ORI, which refers to
unwanted behaviors that invade someone’s privacy and are used for the purpose of
trying to get close to someone.
• Hyper-intimacy behaviors:
Guerrero, Close Encounters, 6e
SAGE Publishing, 2021
o Focus on expressing attraction in an exaggerated fashion through hyper-intimacy
behaviors is not ORI unless such behaviors are unwanted.
o Telling someone you can’t live without them, constantly trying to talk to someone,
and commenting on their social media all the time are some examples.
• Surveillance and harassment: Monitoring someone’s activities through their social
media, observing someone, showing up places you know someone will be, and getting
information about someone from third parties such as their friends.
• Aggression: Threats and violence, such as damaging someone’s possessions or
threatening to harm their current relational partner.
A. Reasons People Use Obsessive Relational Intrusion Behavior
1. Goal-linking
a. The process of connecting someone to larger goals is called goal-linking.
b. According to this theory, people expend energy to develop or reinitiate
relationships to the extent that they perceive a relationship is desirable
and attainable.
2. Self-Efficacy
a. Refers to the belief that you will be effective in getting what you want. If
people desire a relationship with someone but do not think that it is
attainable, they will give up.
b. Sometimes, however, people continue to believe that a relationship is
attainable even though it is not, in which case ORI is likely to occur.
c. Cultural scripts feed into people’s visions of self-efficacy and work
against the realization that a relationship is unattainable and increase
perceptions of self-efficacy.
3. Rumination and Affective Flooding
a. Rumination is a symptom of being frustrated that you cannot get what
you want, often accompanied by affective flooding, which leads people
to redouble their efforts to get what they want and start feeling better.
4. Rationalization
a. Means would-be-lovers justify their ORI behavior by convincing
themselves that the person they are pursuing actually wants them but
either does not know it yet or is not admitting it.
Guerrero, Close Encounters, 6e
SAGE Publishing, 2021
b. This kind of rationalization can occur when the would-be-lover
encounters an indirect or ambiguous rejection strategy.
VII. Relational Violence
• Violence is one of the least common ORI behaviors, and violence is more likely to
occur in established relationships than in relationships between a would-be-lover and a
rejecter.
• About 16% of married couples, 35% of cohabiting couples, and 30% of dating couples
can recall at least one incidence of interpersonal violence in their relationship over the
past year.
• Gay and lesbian couples report violence rates that are about the same as married
couples; although they report using milder forms of violence than straight couples.
• The most common types of interpersonal violence in romantic relationships include
pushing or shoving one’s partner, forcefully grabbing one’s partner, and shaking or
handling one’s partner roughly.
A. Common Couple Violence
1. Common couple violence occurs when conflict spins out of control and
partners resort to using violence as a way to vent their emotions and try to
control the conflict.
2. One person commits a violent act and the other person retaliates with more
violence, because of which men and women tend to engage in this type of
violence about equally.
B. Intimate Terrorism
1. Individual may use violence to keep a partner from talking to rivals, control
what a partner wears, or force a partner to engage in certain sexual behaviors.
2. One partner is the perpetrator and the other partner is the victim, who engages
in violence usually to protect or defend self from being attacked.
3. Being violent, nice, apologetic, and generous:
a. After hurting their partner, perpetrators might buy their partner flowers or
expensive gifts and say they get violent because they love them so much
and don’t want to lose them.
Guerrero, Close Encounters, 6e
SAGE Publishing, 2021
4. Used more by men than women:
a. Men are more likely to use intimate terrorism than women, but of course
there are times when women are the perpetrators.
