Early 20th century Empirically studying interpersonal relationships and social connection traces back to the early 20th century when some of the earliest focuses were on family relationships from a sociological perspective—specifically, marriage and parenting. In 1938 the
National Council on Family Relations (NCFR) was formed and, in 1939, what is now the
Journal of Marriage and Family (JMF) was established to publish peer-reviewed research with this emphasis. In the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, researchers such as
John Bowlby,
Harry Harlow,
Robert Hinde, and
Mary Ainsworth began pursuing the study of mother–infant attachment. In 1949,
Reuben Hill developed the ABC-X model, which is a theoretical framework used to examine how families manage and adapt to crises given the resources they have. Then, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the purview of relationship research began to expand more, beyond the idea of just family research. In 1959,
Stanley Schachter published the book
The Psychology of Affiliation: Experimental Studies of the Sources of Gregariousness, where he discussed humans' general affiliative needs and how they are intensified by biological responses (e.g., anxiety and hunger). That same year,
Harold (Hal) Kelley and
John Thibaut published a book,
The Social Psychology of Groups, that outlined
interdependence theory—an interdisciplinary theory that would become an essential framework for understanding close relationships from a cost-benefit perspective in the years to come. However, this prior interest in relationships was infrequent, and it was not until the late 1960s and early 1970s that the study of relationships truly began to blossom and gain popularity, which was in large part due to the influence of
Ellen Berscheid and
Elaine Hatfield.
1960s to 2000s Roughly two decades after the aforementioned work of Hill and a decade after the works of Schachter, Kelley, and Thibaut, Ellen Berscheid and Elaine Hatfield (professors at the Universities of Minnesota and Wisconsin, respectively) began studying how two individuals become attracted to one another. Yet, their work went beyond just attraction and began to explore other domains such as the processes of choosing a romantic partner and falling in love, and the centrality of relationships in human health and well-being. Meanwhile, researchers from across different disciplines had begun to dedicate themselves to the study of relationships. Along with the fast growing interest came high-impact works.
Urie Bronfenbrenner's late 1970s and mid-1980s social–ecological model established key principles that researchers would eventually use ubiquitously to study the impact of socio-contextual factors on relationships.
Graham Spanier published the Dyadic Adjustment Scale (DAS) in JMF, which is currently the most widely cited scale of intimate relationship quality.
John Bowlby's attachment theory, formalized in the late 1960s and early 1970s, laid the groundwork for the study of parent–child relationships and also helped shape the study of adult relationships in the field. Notably, in 1983, Harold Kelley, Ellen Berscheid,
Andrew Christensen, Anne Peplau and their colleagues wrote the book
Close Relationships, which provided a comprehensive overview of the field of relationship science in its early stages, and identified the typologies of relationships studied. Also in the 1980s and into the 1990s,
Toni Antonucci began exploring friendships and
social support among adults, while
Arthur Aron was examining the role of relationships with romantic partners, siblings, friends, and parents in individual self-expansion. Additionally, Thomas Malloy and David Kenny developed the social relations model (an early analytic approach to understanding the roles of a person and their partner in their interactions) and Kenny later published his work on Models of Non-independence in Dyadic Research in 1996. With a growing interest in
marriage and family therapy in relationship science, in the late 1980s and 1990s, researchers such as Howard Markman, Frank Floyd, and Scott Stanley began developing romantic relationship (with a primary focus on marriages) interventions; specifically, in 1995, Floyd and colleagues published the program they developed, called Prevention Intervention and Relationship Enhancement (PREP). Interest in and development of relationship education programming increased in the 2000s due to state and federal
Healthy Marriage Initiatives, which allocated grant funding to support programming that would impact disadvantaged communities. Although there were many theoretical and empirical contributions of the 1970s and 80s, the professional evolution of relationship science was simultaneously taking place. The first international conference specifically dedicated to relationship processes took place in 1977 in Swansea, Wales, hosted by
Mark Cook (a social psychologist) and Glen Wilson (a psychotherapist). In 1982, the first of the eventually bi-annual International Conference of Personal Relationships (ICPR) took place in Madison, Wisconsin, under the direction of Robin Gilmour and
Steve Duck, with about 100 attendees. Two years later, in 1984, the International Society for the Study of Personal Relationships (ISSPR) was borne out of the ICPR and the
Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, the first peer-reviewed journal unique to the field of relationship science, was established. Then in 1987, the Iowa Network of Personal Relationships (which would later be known as the International Network of Personal Relationships; INPR) was formed and Hal Kelley was elected president of ISSPR that same year. Here, Berscheid took the opportunity to close out the 20th-century with an overview of the field's past, present, and future. She described the uniqueness and benefits of a well-integrated interdisciplinary field and the advancements that have cemented the field as an "essential science".
2000s The year 2000 included new developments in the field such as Nancy Collins and Brooke Feeney's work on partner support-seeking and caregiving in romantic relationships from an attachment theory perspective, and Reis, Sheldon, Gable, and colleagues' article "Daily Well-being: The Role of Autonomy, Competence, & Relatedness". A couple of years later, Rena Repetti,
Shelley Taylor, and Teresa Seaman published work that addressed some of Berscheid's 1999 article concerns as well as used health psychology perspectives to inform relationship science. They empirically demonstrated the negative effects of family home environments with significant conflict and aggression on the mental and physical health of individuals in both childhood and adulthood. In 2007,
Harry Reis published "Steps Toward the Ripening of Relationship Science", an article inspired by Ellen Berscheid's 1999 article, that recapped and made suggestions for furthering the field. Reis argued the need for integrating and organizing theories, for paying more attention to non-romantic relationships (the primary focus of the area) in research and intervention development, and the use of his theory of perceived partner responsiveness to enable this progress. Additionally, in 2018, Emily Impett and Amy Muise published their follow-up to Berscheid's article, "The Sexing of Relationship Science: Impetus for the Special Issue on Sex and Relationships". Here, they called on the field to draw more attention to and place greater weight on the role of
sexual satisfaction; they identified this area of research as nascent but fertile territory to explore sexuality in relationships and establish it as an integral part of relationship science. == Types of relationships studied ==