How Maintaining Ambivalent Relationships Affects Health
People often maintain relationships with others who they feel ambivalent toward. A roommate one doesn't completely like, a friend who is also a competitor, or a sibling with whom one often engages in rivalry are just a few examples. Recently, a group of students in Steve Yoshimura's Communication Research Methods course (COMX 460) gathered data from 206 participants who reported on an ambivalent relationship they had - that is, someone who they felt was both helpful and upsetting to them when they needed support from that person. The results showed that simply having an ambivalent relationship was not related to any aspect of psychological well-being. What mattered, however, was how people maintained those relationships. People were best off psychologically when they reported maintaining ambivalent relationships with increased amounts of openness - often talking about the state of the relationship, for example. Conversely, people reported feeling higher levels of negative affect when they reported using higher levels of positivity - trying to make the conversation fun, being very polite, and so on. The researchers conclude that ambivalent relationships can be maintained most functionally by being open about the fact that the relationship is worth having, but is not perfect in some ways. But trying to gloss over the ambivalence of pretending that it might not matter by being excessively positive might only result in greater negative feelings. A copy of the paper, now being reviewed for publication, can be obtained by contacting Dr. Yoshimura at stephen.yoshimura@umontana.edu.