Social Bonding and Affiliation Motivation

Social Bonding and Affiliation Motivation

Ludwig-­‐Maximilians-­‐Universität Allgemeine Psychologie II Sommersemester 2014

Dozent: Dr. Felix Schönbrodt Vladislav Tsekov 10923779

30.08.2014

This text, unless explicitly stated, is based on the following work:

Heckhausen, H., Heckhausen J., (2008). Social Bonding: Affiliation Motivation and Intimacy Motivation. Motivation and Action (pp. 184-­‐202). New York, NY: Springer.

All acknowledgments go to the authors.

Table of Content:

1. Introduction

1. Genesis of Social Bonding

1. Survival
2. Reproduction
3. Monogamy

1. Can all people form healthy relationships?

1. Trust
2. Attachment

1. Affiliation Motivation

1. Hope vs. Fear
2. Can we measure our motivation?

1. Me and others

Introduction

We, human beings, tend to spend most of our lives in the company of others. We begin our incredible journey as being part of society right from the moment we are born – doctors, nurses and parents are there to help us through the difficulties of the first minutes. This is not only good for the baby’s abilities to adapt to social situations, but is also critical for its survival – the chances that a person can survive on his own in the first years of life are very much close to zero. This justifies our enormous desire to seek contact, support and closeness to other people. Even if we try to take things to extremes and accept an egocentric perspective, whereby we are constantly putting ourselves in the center of the world, we soon appear to realize that even our very own intimate memories most often include our closest friends and relatives. Having taken all that into consideration, I believe it’s safe to say why we put so much thought and energy in the people surrounding us. If we take a closer look at our emotions, we can logically argue that most of them have developed as a response to our social environment and they help us interact better and easier with others. But are we all the same in the matter of our emotional responses? Do we all experience the contact to other people in the same way? Are we all happy to meet new people and create healthy relationships or are there people that tend to get anxious rather than excited, aggressive rather than pleased? In order to answer these questions more effectively, it is necessary to introduce a newly coined construct that has been the subject of rigorous examination and testing throughout recent years: Affiliation Motivation (AM). It essentially tries to explain why people respond so differently to the exact same situations. Before we begin our exploration of Affiliation Motivation let’s arm ourselves with a formal definition of the construct: