This chapter presents an overview of recent trends and developments in research on close relationships. It is a sequel to the chapters that appeared in earlier editions of this Handbook (Perlman et al., 2018; Perlman & Duck, 2006) and thus reviews the developments in relationships research from 2016 to mid-2023. Drawing on data from a survey of authors of articles published in Personal Relationships and the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships and a bibliometric analysis of these papers, we discuss the scholars who relationship scientists perceive as eminent and who they feel are emerging as influential. We use these data to highlight the major theories, methodological trends, and substantive foci that have been the foundation of relationships research since 2016. Comparison with earlier versions of the chapter reveals stability in the field’s preoccupations but also demonstrates how it has responded to contextual factors within and outside of academia.

Romantic love seems to be a nearly universal phenomenon, appearing in every culture for which data are available and in every historical era. This chapter first reviews research on how ordinary people construe love. Then it turns to how researchers have understood and measured love, organizing its discussion around the theme of types of love. Next it covers the course of love with a focus on falling in love. It then reviews several approaches that have been particularly influential in specifically focusing on understanding the dynamics of romantic love, especially with regard to passionate love. It concludes with a brief review of the work on other kinds of love in relationships. The authors hope that this review has conveyed their view that the study of love is both important and a thriving scientific endeavor, offering both a solid foundation and vast opportunities for significant future work.

Couple conflict has received significant attention in couples research, chiefly because poorly managed conflict raises risk for a host of negative outcomes including relationship dissatisfaction, divorce, domestic violence, occupational impairment, and poor child well-being. Effective conflict management is a central target of couple therapy and relationship education. In this chapter, we define couple conflict, describe the frequency and common topics of conflict, and provide examples of how researchers measure conflict. We then describe different ways that couples manage conflict, highlighting effective and ineffective conflict management behaviors and how they affect relationship functioning. Next, we describe conflict and conflict management among historically underrepresented couples. Last, we present information on relationship interventions that target couple conflict and describe future directions for research on couple conflict.

Failing to impose himself in Vichy, Déat sought his political fortunes in occupied Paris. This chapter covers Déat’s time in Paris, where he founded the Rassemblement National Populaire (RNP) in 1941. After an inauspicious start during which Déat struggled to maintain control of the organization, the RNP came to represent the collaborationist “left” within the field of collaborationism. However, the heteronomous logic of this field, in which the different collaborationist movements competed for German recognition by emulating Nazism, meant that over time the different movements shed their specificity and converged around a common vision of collaborationist fascism. It was through this spiral of radicalization that Déat came to adopt positions, like antisemitism and support for “totalitarianism,” that had been foreign to him just a few years prior. The collaborationist fascism of the RNP was thus not reducible to the neo-socialist past but was an emergent effect of the field of collaborationism.

Research has advanced our understanding of the role of self-disclosure in the initiation, development, maintenance, and ending of relationships. In this chapter, we review theoretical and empirical milestones in our understanding of self-disclosure, particularly its role in relationships. We show that research on self-disclosure has shifted from a focus on the individual to a focus on the interpersonal nature of disclosure processes. Self-disclosure occurs between people and triggers a cyclical process that is specific to a particular relationship with a particular partner. Self-disclosure processes fluctuate over time. They shape, and are shaped by, relationships. We propose that self-disclosure serves as a seismograph of relationship quality. It is essential in interdependent relationships and key to unraveling how people perceive the quality of their relationships. Throughout the chapter, we identify unanswered questions that offer promising avenues for future research.

This chapter is devoted to developing and clarifying one of the most unique and important constructs of attachment theory: the internal working models (IWMs) by which relationships influence other relationships and personality. We begin by describing how IWMs develop, discuss different definitions and conceptualizations of IWMs associated with different developmental stages, and then offer a new way of thinking about IWMs as both implicit and explicit representations that function at different levels of awareness. We then discuss factors that promote stability and change in IWMs, highlighting how earlier experiences with attachment figures may shape subsequent IWMs associated with other attachment figures. We next present a framework outlining the conditions under which IWMs associated with specific attachment figures earlier in life can become “activated” to influence how people think, feel, and/or behave with their current attachment figures. We conclude by proposing several promising directions for future research.

Social networks have always influenced the day-to-day interactions of people, and our chapter highlights the latest research on the significance of these noteworthy social ties in people’s personal relationships. We attend to both romantic relationships and friendship connections, focusing on themes of network effects in relationship formation, maintenance, and dissolution. The findings we review underline the notable ways in which the social environment shapes our closest connections and often strengthens them. We also discuss the extension of network science to investigate marginalized relationships, such as those of sexual minorities, and note the potential for social networks to have a “dark side” in which social connections become problematic. We then address emerging scholarship regarding the positive and negative links between COVID-19 and social networks. Finally, we consider future avenues for research on this notable topic.

This chapter focuses on the production of official records of police–suspect interviews in England & Wales, and the flaws in their current use as criminal evidence. It reveals the importance of the administrative processes undergone by an interviewee’s words post-interview, revealing how they shape – indeed, create – the resulting evidential product, especially through the institutional practice of summarising parts of the interaction. The journey from ‘live’ interaction in an interview room to an official evidential record is largely taken for granted within the legal system, with little-to-no internal or external scrutiny; this chapter argues that it should instead be recognised as a substantial contribution to – and transformation of – the resulting evidence, with all the dangers that potentially entails. Using data from the ‘For The Record’ project, including interview recordings and official police records alongside focus groups with practitioners, it demonstrates the importance for practitioners and researchers alike to pay closer attention to the format of the data they are examining, and to actively reflect on and seek out the many voices and actors which have shaped it.

Interpreting for defendants who are not conversant with the language of the court is a standard service in jurisdictions that have ratified the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. This ensures defendants’ linguistic presence and meaningful participation in the judicial process, thereby protecting their right to a fair trial. Yet, interpreting for jurors is rare, despite their crucial role in determining defendants’ guilt or innocence in criminal jury trials. This qualitative study compares two Hong Kong appellate courts’ divergent decisions and arguments presented in the appeal case which contested jurors’ access to the chuchotage interpretation, which is usually audible only to the defendant. The chapter reflects on the practice of court interpreting in the bilingual legal system of Hong Kong and argues for extending interpreting services to jurors to better safeguard defendants’ right to a fair trial. Given that English is a dominant language in jury trials and the majority of the population is Cantonese-speaking, the discussion links interpreting for jurors to upholding the fundamental principle of trial by peers drawn from a cross-section of the community.

Research concerning the variety of close relationships adults maintain, initiate, cease, and lose during middle and later adulthood has been fast growing in recent decades. Much of the theoretical and empirical work in this field has aimed to overcome views of older age as a time of loss and decline, both individually and socially. Moreover, recent trends have focused on the increasingly diverse experiences of the aging population. This includes not only extended life expectancy – and, importantly, extended healthy life expectancy – but also demographic changes, including larger proportions of racial/ethnic minorities attaining older age; new cohorts of openly LGBTQ adults entering mid and later life, many of whom represent the first generation of same-sex married couples; and the phenomenon of “gray divorce” and romantic repartnering in the years beyond age 50. This chapter will cover both the history and foundations of research on close relationships in middle and later life, as well as these recent trends in the field, finishing with an eye toward future directions as both the aging population and our perceptions of it continue to change.

By opening the ‘black box’ of what is said and done in the trial hearings of the International Criminal Court (ICC), the chapter shows that the syllogistic reasoning found in the ICC’s case law and judicial decisions is not a straightforward application of ‘rules’ to ‘facts’, but a contingent discursive achievement that reflects a particular socio-political environment. The discussion of court transcripts from the cases of a Ugandan rebel commander and a Malian jihadist combines a long tradition of sociolinguistic and linguistic-anthropological work on text trajectories and the ‘instability’ of travelling texts with Koskenniemi’s anti-foundationalist re-specification of legal discourse as a ‘language game’. The chapter shows that, first, the recontextualisation of the everyday lives of perpetrators and victims of international crimes with the abstract legal framework of the Rome Statute relies heavily on commonsense understandings of the relevant legal concepts, and, second, that such judicial ‘fact-finding’ and its attendant discursive transformations in turn inscribe international criminal proceedings in a range of broader (geo)political contexts.

People form different types of relationships with others. One common, valued, type is a communal relationship. In communal relationships, people assume responsibility for one another’s welfare and give and seek responsiveness non-contingently. Here we review ways in which communal relational contexts shape people’s emotional lives. In communal relationships, giving and receiving non-contingent responsiveness is linked to positive emotion, whereas failure to do so or behavior indicative of following inappropriate norms (e.g., norms governing transactional relationships) leads to negative emotion. In addition, the presence of communal partners often reduces threat and enhances the intensity of positive and negative reactions to environmental stimuli. Communal contexts are associated with greater expression of emotions signaling one’s own needs (which partners sometimes socially reference as signs of their own needs) and with expressing more indicative of empathy and care for the partner. All these effects can feed back and strengthen communal relationships.

We examine family systems and family relationships. Using family systems theory (Cox & Paley, 1997, 2003; Minuchin, 1985), we focus on how families are viewed as a hierarchically organized system, comprised of smaller relationships (i.e., subsystems) such as parent–child relationships, embedded within larger systems such as extended families and their broader social ties. We organized the discussion of subsystems as follows: (a) Core subsystems, including relationships of romantic partners, coparenting alliance, parent–children, and siblings; and (b) Subsystems with broader social ties, in the form of extended family and/or intergenerational ties, including coparenting alliances in post-divorce or foster families as well as parents and parents-in-law relationships. We also consider these various subsystems within and across diverse families and family contexts, attending to aspects of gender, family structures, income, sexual orientation, race/ethnicity, cultures, and national origins. We end with suggestions for future research (e.g., combining the lenses of family systems with intersectionality).

This chapter explores the communicative processes involved in producing witness statements in immigration visa applications and appeals settings, focusing attention on the co-constructed nature of the statement. Drawing on a single-case study from two connected advice sessions with a lawyer, refugee client and interpreter, the chapter illustrates how participants work together to prepare a witness statement to counter the immigration authorities’ assertion that the client’s family relationships have been falsified. Analysis focusing on the rhetorical strategies employed in the writing of the statement reveals the fallacy of viewing it as a single-authored text for which the client bears sole responsibility. Rather, the chapter shows how each participant’s authorial voice shapes the co-construction of the witness statement, uncovering how the specialist knowledge and expertise (legal, linguistic, and contextual) of each co-author is necessary to building a successful evidential argument. It also illustrates how the discursive mediation work taking place during the interpreted lawyer–client interaction enhances the credibility and persuasiveness of the client’s statement.

Relationship maintenance scholars have long attempted to understand the processes by which partners foster relationship growth. They have done so by focusing on defining and explaining key maintenance strategies that serve to initiate and preserve romantic relationships. In this chapter, we provide a brief history of the relationship maintenance literature. Then we identify the key theoretical contributions to the current understanding of relationship maintenance and discuss recent theoretical developments and known correlates. We conclude the chapter by highlighting the need to diversify and expand the maintenance literature by identifying possible avenues for future inquiry and proposing ways to integrate work across disciplines.