How Americans communicate affection: findings from a representative national sample

ABSTRACT

Humans are highly social beings who need intimate relationships to thrive and survive. Integral to human physical and emotional wellness is the need for affection. A substantial body of evidence has found that expressing and receiving affection with significant others is associated with a multitude of positive health outcomes. The primary goal of the current study was to create a generalizable typology of affectionate behaviors embedded within close relationships and experienced within the daily lives of U.S. American adults from across the country. The study identified 13 discrete forms of daily affectionate communication. Implications for such a typology of daily affection within the United States are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Affection
• affectionate communication
• affection exchange theory

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. These percentages sum to >100 because some participants selected more than one ethnic/racial identity.

2. When using Prime Panels, our survey platform (SurveyMonkey) offers participants the opportunity to make a donation to a charity of their choice in lieu of receiving a direct payment. SurveyMonkey sets the rate of remuneration and Prime Panels is not able to specify the exact amount.

3. We would normally remove cases in which the time to completion was more than 2 standard deviations below the mean, but that was impossible in this case because the standard deviation is less than half of the mean for completion time, so no cases were removed for completion time.

4. An anonymized view of the OSF preregistration is available at https://osf.io/by4va/?view_only=8103f507b0bd4736b381ae3680c31f34

5. To test the feasibility of the online questionnaire, we conducted a small pilot study (N = 48) using undergraduate communication students. There were 11 men, 30 women, and 7 who did not report a gender, ranging in age from 19 to 23 years (M = 21.02 years, SD = 0.95). Most (75%) identified as white/Caucasian, whereas 8.3% were of Hispanic, Latino, and/or Spanish origin; 4.2% were Asian/Pacific Islander; 2.1% were Black/African American; and 2.1% were Native American or Aleut. Most (97.6%) were single/never married, and 2.4% were married. Forty participants self-identified as heterosexual, two as bisexual, and the remainder did not identify a sexual orientation. Participants reported no difficulties completing the online questionnaire or submitting their responses. Most (87.5%) reported having communicated affection at least once within the previous 24-hour period, and when asked how many times they had done so, the modal responses were 4, 5, and 10 (with 7 participants reporting each number). The modal target was a spouse or romantic partner. In the pilot study, the average time to questionnaire completion was 8 minutes, 14 seconds.

6. Cronbach’s alpha is perhaps the most commonly reported measure of internal reliability, yet recent research has advocated substituting McDonald’s omega (ω), which is Cronbach’s alpha’s parent measure (Hayes & Coutts, 2020). Unlike alpha, McDonald’s omega does not assume essential tau-equivalence, which is the assumption that “each item measures the same latent variable, on the same scale, but with possibly different degrees of precision” (Graham, 2006, p. 934).

7. Welch’s t-test is preferred to the more widely known Student’s t-test because it offers a more stable Type I error rate and is more robust to violations of normality and homogeneity of variance (Delacre, Lakens, & Leys, 2017). Moreover, Welch’s t-test outperforms Student’s t-test when sample sizes are unequal, and when data meet the homoscedasticity assumption, Welch’s t-tests loses minimal robustness compared to the Student’s t-test.

8. It should be noted that these data were collected before the imposition of social distancing recommendations or quarantine orders related to the COVID-19 outbreak in early 2020. Face-to-face contact was likely severely limited during the pandemic period.

9. These χ² tests included only those participants who self-identified as either female or male. Frequencies for these behaviors were too low to subdivide the χ² analyses into male-male, female-female, and male-female interaction.

10. The overall percentages of participants’ descriptions reflecting verbal behaviors, direct nonverbal behaviors, and socially supportive behaviors sum to >100 because multiple descriptions included behaviors from more than one general category.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kory Floyd

Kory Floyd is a professor of communication and professor of psychology at the University of Arizona, where Jeannette Maré is a doctoral student.

Mark T Morman

Mark T. Morman is a professor of communication at Baylor University, where Elizabeth Holmes received her master’s degree.