UNIT III

Building and Maintaining

Relationships
Activity: Make-A-List
 Mechanics:
 List
all your positive and negative traits
and make your classmates list all your
positive and negative traits as well.
Activity: Make-A-List
 Process Questions:
 How well did you know yourself before the
activity? After the activity?
 How well did you think other people know
you before the activity? After the activity?
 How did looking at their list about you
make you feel?
Video Presentation entitled: 6 Tips
on How to Have a Strong
Relationship
 Process Questions:
 Why is it important to make our
relationships stronger?
 What is your and your partner’s role in a
romantic relationship?
 How do you make your relationship
stronger?
Lesson 9
Personal Relationships of
Adolescents
 “Humans are by nature
too complicated to be
understood fully. So, we
can choose either to
approach our fellow
human beings with
suspicion or to approach
them with an open mind,
a dash of optimism and a
great deal of candor.”

- Tom Hanks
Personal Relationships of
Adolescents
 The Social Self:
 Adolescents’ lives revolve around
themselves as well as the people around
them.
 How you feel, how you think, and how
you behave can all have an effect on
your family members, your friends, and
even that new person you find yourself
liking.
Personal Relationships of
Adolescents
Personal Relationships of
Adolescents
 The Social Self:
 Try completing the sentence: “I am ____.”
 Your answer – what you know or believe about
yourself – will give you an insight into your self-
concept.
 Your self-concept consists of two elements.
 First, is self-schemas or how you define yourself.
 These greatly affect how you perceive, remember,
and evaluate yourself and others.
 The second element is your possible self or who you
might become.
 It includes the self we dream of becoming someday.
Personal Relationships of
Adolescents
Personal Relationships of
Adolescents
 Development of the Social Self:
 What determines self-concept?
 Although genetic influences play a part, social
experience is also a factor, such as your roles as a
high school student or friend.
 Your social self is also influenced by social
comparisons, or comparing yourself to others and
seeing how you differ.
 Self-concept is also determined by how other
people think of us.
 Culture also plays a role in defining one’s identity.
Personal Relationships of
Adolescents
Personal Relationships of
Adolescents
 Self-Knowledge:
 How well do you actually know yourself?
 Why did you fall in love with that person?
 When asked why we feel or act the way we
do, we are usually able to give accurate
answers.
 But when influences upon our behavior are
subtle or unconscious, our explanations may
differ because we may dismiss factors that
matter and focus on ones that don’t.
Personal Relationships of
Adolescents
 Self-Knowledge:
 Self-esteem is the overall sense of self-
worth that we use to evaluate traits or
abilities.
 You may have low or high self-esteem.
 Social rejection motivates us to meet
others’ expectations, therefore
maintaining or increasing our self-esteem.
Personal Relationships of
Adolescents
Personal Relationships of
Adolescents
 Perceived Self-Control:
 Stanford psychologist Albert Bandura defines self-
efficacy as how competent and effective we feel
when doing a task.
 How does it differ from self-esteem?
 It is worth noting that self-efficacy, like self-esteem
grows with accomplishments.
 Locus of control is the extent to which people
perceive control.
 The internal locus of control refers to the belief that
you are in control of your own destiny while external
locus of control refers to the feeling that outside
forces determine your fate.
Personal Relationships of
Adolescents

Albert Bandura is a
Canadian-American
psychologist who is the
David Starr Jordan
Professor Emeritus of
Social Science in
Psychology at Stanford
University.
Personal Relationships of
Adolescents
 Perceived Self-Control:
 The perceived lack or loss of control over a
situation may also lead to learned
helplessness, which occurs when multiple
attempts to improve a situation have no
effect and there is a subsequent sense of
resignation.
 In contrast, self-determination is developed
when you are successfully able to practice
personal control and improve your situation.
 Personal Relationships of
Adolescents
Seligman’s
learned
helplessness
experiment.
Learned
helplessness
occurred when
dogs perceive
they could not
escape the
shocks, even if
they were given
opportunities to
escape after the
experiment.
Personal Relationships of
Adolescents
 Self-Serving Bias:
 Most people exhibit self-serving bias, or the
tendency to see yourself in a favorable light.
 We often take credit for our success and attribute
failure to external factors.
 This phenomenon is called self-serving attributions.
 We also have this sense of optimism that leads to
believe we are immune to misfortune, so we tend not
to take precaution.
 However, defensive pessimism, or anticipating
problems and lowering expectations to prepare for
the worst, can help us avoid unrealistic optimism.
Personal Relationships of
Adolescents
Personal Relationships of
Adolescents
 Self-Presentation:
 Self-presentation refers to our desire to present a
favorable image to other people (external) and to
ourselves (internal).
 We adjust our words and actions to create an
impression that will suit our audiences.
 One example of this phenomenon is self-
handicapping, wherein you protect your self-
esteem with behavior that will conveniently
excuse failure.
 False modesty, self-serving bias, and self-
handicapping prove how important self-image is
to us.
Personal Relationships of
Adolescents
 Social Beliefs and Judgments:
 How we perceive information, as well as how we
process it, is guided by our preconceptions.
 Through our beliefs, we construe reality and
respond to it as such, and not as how it actually is.
 Priming can unconsciously affect how people
think as well as how they would act.
 Preconceptions are powerful, because they
influence our attitudes, our perceptions of others,
and others’ perception of ourselves.
Personal Relationships of
Adolescents
 Social Beliefs and Judgments:
 How we interpret everything is a result of our
beliefs.
 They are so strong, as shown by a
phenomenon called belief perseverance,
and they persist despite contrary evidence.
 We use schemas, emotional reactions,
expertise, and unconscious thinking in how we
judge the world and how we decide from
those judgments; how this all happens is partly
controlled and partly automatic.
Personal Relationships of
Adolescents
Personal Relationships of
Adolescents
 Attributions:
 We endlessly ask ourselves why things happen
the way they do, especially when they are
unexpected or negative.
 If someone you like smiles at you, would you
think that they are just being friendly or would
you rather think that they like you too?
 Misattribution, or wrongly attributing an action
to an incorrect reason, happens more than
you think
Personal Relationships of
Adolescents
Personal Relationships of
Adolescents
 Attributions:
 Attribution theories analyze how we explain
and infer from people’s actions.
 We attribute people’s behavior sometimes to
internal causes, or dispositional attributions,
and sometimes to external causes, or
situational attribution.
 Traits are easily inferred from people’s actions,
or what we call as spontaneous trait
inference, as well.
Personal Relationships of
Adolescents
 Attributions:
 Three factors influence our attributions, according to Harold Kelly’s
theory of attributions or the covariation model: consistency,
distinctiveness, and consensus.
 Attributions have three dimensions: stability, locus and control.
 If you examine your attributions using these dimensions, you can
predict how you would respond to success and failure.
 Using our “commonsense” to explain behavior logically (as
attributions are known as “commonsense psychology”), is not always
right.
 People ignore possible causes of behavior if there are other, more
known causes.
 We underestimate the importance of situations on behavior, as well
as overestimate the part dispositions play, such as attitudes and
traits.
 The tendency to write off situations in favor of dispositions is called
the fundamental attribution error, or the correspondence bias.
Personal Relationships of
Adolescents
 Personal Relationships of
Adolescents
Harold Kelley was an
American social
psychologist and professor
of psychology at the
University of California, Los
Angeles. His major
contributions have been the
development of
interdependence theory,
the early work of attribution
theory, and a lifelong
interest in understanding
close relationships
processes.
Personal Relationships of
Adolescents
 Attributions:
 We make attribution error because how we
observe others is different from how we
observe ourselves.
 Because we know ourselves more than we
know others, we focus on how situations
influence our behavior.
 If you are upset, the situation is making you
upset; but if you see another person upset,
you may assume they have a temper.
Personal Relationships of
Adolescents
 Prejudice:
 Prejudice is a preconceived negative attitude
(combination of feelings, beliefs, and behavior)
towards a group and its individual members.
 Stereotypes are beliefs about another group that
may be accurate, inaccurate, or over-
generalized.
 Discrimination is unjustified, negative behavior
towards a group or its members, and often rooted
in prejudicial behavior.
 Racism and sexism are institutional discriminatory
behavior, but there may be instances that they
aren’t intentionally prejudiced.
Personal Relationships of
Adolescents
 Prejudice:
 Prejudice exists in explicit (conscious) and
implicit (automatic) forms.
 People may retain from childhood
automatic fear or dislike of a group of
people, but this may change as we form
new habits through practice.
Personal Relationships of
Adolescents
 Prejudice:
 Prejudice comes in many forms including:
 Race:
Personal Relationships of
Adolescents
 Prejudice:
 Religion:
Personal Relationships of
Adolescents
 Prejudice:
 Obesity:
Personal Relationships of
Adolescents
 Prejudice:
 Sexual Orientation:
Personal Relationships of
Adolescents
 Prejudice:
 Gender Identity:
Personal Relationships of
Adolescents
 Prejudice:
 Age:
Personal Relationships of
Adolescents
 Prejudice:
 Immigrant Status:
Personal Relationships of
Adolescents
 Prejudice:
 Socially, prejudice stems from unequal status.
 Groups with social and economical superiority will often use
prejudicial beliefs to justify their privilege and position.
 How does the way we think about the world influence prejudice?
 Research shows that we simplify our environment by categorization
through stereotyping.
 Sorting people into categories exaggerates similarities within groups
and differences between them.
 The just-world phenomenon is the tendency to believe that the world
is just and that people get what they deserve.
 Research suggests that this explains why people are indifferent to
social injustice not because they aren’t concerned, but because
they don’t see any injustices.
Personal Relationships of
Adolescents
 Aggression:
 Aggression is physical or verbal behavior
that is intended to cause harm.
 It manifests in two ways: hostile aggression
which springs from anger with the goal to
injure, and instrumental aggression, which
is also meant to injure but as a means to
achieve an end.
 There are three theories on aggression:
Personal Relationships of
Adolescents
 Aggression:
 Instinct Theory and Evolutionary Psychology:
 Commonly associated with Sigmund Freud and
Konrad Lorenz, it argues that aggression is
instinctive (innate, unlearned, and universal).
 If not released, it builds up within until it explodes or
a stimulus triggers it, similar to a dam bursting.
 Aggression is biologically influenced by genetics
(a person’s temperament at a young age usually
endures), biochemical influences (alcohol,
testosterone, poor diet), and the brain.
 Personal Relationships of
Adolescents

Konrad Zacharias Lorenz

was an Austrian zoologist,
ethologist, and
ornithologist. He is often
regarded as one of the
founders of modern
ethology, the study of
animal behaviour.
Personal Relationships of
Adolescents
 Aggression:
 Frustration-Aggression Theory:
 Frustration is anything that prevents us from
attaining a goal, arises from the gap between
expectations and attainment, or when we
compare ourselves with others.
 This causes anger and hostility, and the anger
may provoke aggression.
 In some cases, people displace or redirect
their aggression to another target that is safer
or more acceptable.
Personal Relationships of
Adolescents
 Aggression:
 Social Learning Theory of Aggression:
 Albert Bandura believes that aggression is
learned behavior or watching others act
and observing the consequences.
 Through this, we sometimes learn that
aggression has its rewards.
 Family, subculture, and the mass media
also influences aggressive behavior.
Personal Relationships of
Adolescents
Personal Relationships of
Adolescents
 Aggression:
 There are factors that influence aggression:
 Aversive incidents – This includes pain, heat or
discomfort, and personal attacks (verbal or
physical)
 Arousal – Sexual or otherwise (as anger), can
amplify one another. When combined with hostile
thoughts and feelings, may result in aggressive
behavior.
 Aggression cues – The sight of a weapon, for
instance, is an aggressive cue that increases the
likelihood of aggressive behavior.
Personal Relationships of
Adolescents
 Aggression:
 Pornography and sexual violence – Research
shows that viewing scenes of sexual violence
(i.e., a man overpowering and arousing a
woman) can distort perceptions of women’s
response, and increase aggression towards
women. Evidence suggests that viewing
sexual violence also reinforces and increases
the acceptance of the rape myth (the belief
that women would welcome sexual assault
and “no” doesn’t really mean “no”).
Personal Relationships of
Adolescents
 Aggression:
 Television and the internet – Studies have shown
that heavy exposure to violence on TV is
correlated with aggressive behavior.
 Video games – Violent video games may increase
aggression even more than television because it
desensitizes players (i.e., seeing other people less
human), and the experience involves more active
participation.
 Group influence – The act of diffusing responsibility
among groups can amplify aggressive reaction
(i.e., youth gangs, rioters).
Personal Relationships of
Adolescents
 Aggression:
 The catharsis hypothesis says that aggression
is reduced when one “releases” aggressive
energy either by acting aggressively or
fantasizing aggression.
 Expressing aggression to catharsis actually
breeds more hostility.
 The social learning approach suggests that
aggression can be controlled by
counteracting factors that influence or
provoke it.
Personal Relationships of
Adolescents
 Helping:
 There are three theories that explain what
motivates us to help people:
 Social-exchange theory assumes that the act
of helping is motivated by a desire to
maximize rewards.
 These rewards may be external (i.e. helping to
boost self-worth) or internal (your own
personal traits or emotional state, such as
guilt).
Personal Relationships of
Adolescents
 Helping:
 Reciprocity norm pertains to the
expectation to help those who have
helped us.
 When people are unable to help back,
they may feel demeaned by accepting
help, which explains why people with high
self-esteem are often reluctant to ask for
help.
Personal Relationships of
Adolescents
 Helping:
 Social-responsibility norm is an expectation to
help others, even if they cannot reciprocate,
such as those who are victims of
circumstance (i.e., typhoon victims).
 If we feel that their situation is brought about
by their own choices, we often say it’s the
person’s fault so we do not feel compelled to
help.
Personal Relationships of
Adolescents
 According to evolutionary psychology,
there are three types of helping: Selection
of kin (wherein evolution predisposes us to
care for our close relatives); reciprocity
(helping with the expectation of
eventually getting help in return); and
group selection (when groups are in
competition, groups that mutually support
each other outlast groups that don’t).
Personal Relationships of
Adolescents
 Helping:
 Daniel Baston theorizes that our willingness to help others is
influenced by both selfish and selfless considerations.
 Why don’t bystanders offer help during an emergency?
 The bystander effect states that a person is less likely to help when
there are other bystanders.
 Personality research has shown that some people are consistently
more helpful than others, and that personality influences how
people react to certain situations.
 In terms of gender, men were shown to be more helpful when the
situation was deemed more dangerous.
 Women are slightly more likely to help in safer situations, such as
volunteering.
 Highly religious people are reported to be more charitable, and
likely to volunteer and help a stranger in need.
Personal Relationships of
Adolescents
 Liking and Attraction:
 There are several factors that lead to friendship and
attraction between two people:
 Proximity refers to geographical nearness and the
best predictor of whether two people are friends.
 More than that, frequent interaction allows people to
explore similarities and sense one another’s liking.
 Even just the anticipation of interaction boosts liking.
 Mere exposure is the tendency of something to be
more likeable after someone has been repeatedly
exposed to it.
Personal Relationships of
Adolescents
 Liking and Attraction:
 Physical attractiveness, whether we like it or not, attractiveness
is a good predictor of how frequently someone dates.
 The matching phenomenon occurs when people tend to
choose someone whose attractiveness roughly matches their
own, but in cases when someone is less attractive, the latter
often compensates with other qualities.
 The physical attractiveness stereotype is the assumption that
physically attractive people possess other desirable traits.
 Studies show that there is some truth to this, in that attractive
people were found to be more outgoing and self-confident
because they are valued and favored.
 Therefore, it is simply not about how you look but rather, how
people treat you and how you feel about yourself.
Personal Relationships of
Adolescents
 Liking and Attraction:
 Look back to a time when you developed a crush on someone.
 Maybe as you grew to like them, their physical imperfections
weren’t so noticeable.
 Discovering similarities with someone also makes them more
attractive.
 Furthermore, the more in love people are, the more physically
attractive they find someone, and less attractive they find all
others.
 This begs the question, do opposites really attract?
 Complementarity, or the tendency of two people to complete
what is missing in the other, may develop as a relationship
progresses.
 But people are more likely to be attracted to and marry those
whose needs and personalities are similar to theirs.
Personal Relationships of
Adolescents
 Love and Commitment:
 Love, as you probably already know, is
more complex than just liking someone.
 Psychologist Robert Sternberg views love
as a triangle with three components:
 Intimacy refers to the feelings of closeness
and connectedness in relationships, which
include experienced happiness, high
regard, and mutual understanding.
Personal Relationships of
Adolescents
Robert J. Sternberg
is an American
psychologist and
psychometrician.
He is Professor of
Human
Development at
Cornell University.
Prior to joining
Cornell, Sternberg
was president of the
University of
Wyoming.
Personal Relationships of
Adolescents
 Love and Commitment:
 Passion refers to the feelings of romance,
physical attraction, and sexual arousal in a
relationship.
 Passion may draw two people into a
relationship, but intimacy sustains the
closeness.
 This can also work the other way around, such
as when two close friends develop physical
attraction towards each other that wasn’t
immediately there.
Personal Relationships of
Adolescents
 Love and Commitment:
 Decision/Commitment consists of two
aspects: short-term or the decision to love
someone else, and long-term or the
commitment to maintain that love.
 This component is essential for getting through
hard times in a relationship.
 The interrelationships of these three
components gives rise to different kinds of
love.
Personal Relationships of
Adolescents
 Love and Commitment:
 Nonlove – The absence of all three components and pertains to
casual, everyday interactions that do not include love at all.
 Liking – Refers to feelings of friendship, such as closeness,
bondedness, and warmth. It involves only the intimacy component.
 Infatuated love – “Love at first sight” by experiencing passionate
arousal without the intimacy and the decision/commitment
components. These can arise quickly, and dissipate just as
immediately.
 Empty love – This kind of love arises when one is committed to loving
someone, but both the intimacy and passion components are
absent. It is found in stagnant relationships that have been going on
for years, but have lost the physical attraction and emotional
involvement they once had.
Personal Relationships of
Adolescents
 Love and Commitment:
 Romantic love - A combination of the intimacy and
passion components. Put simply, it is liking and being
physically attracted to someone. When intense,
passionate love becomes lukewarm, this triggers
disillusion, especially for those who believe romantic
love is essential for a marriage and its continuation.
 Companionate love – Evolves from a combination of
the intimacy and decision/commitment
components. Unlike the wild emotions of passionate
love, companionate love is a deep, steady, and
affectionate attachment that is just as real. This is
often seen in stable, long-term marriages and can
last a lifetime.
Personal Relationships of
Adolescents
 Love and Commitment:
 Fatuous love – A combination of the passion and
decision/commitment components, and often
manifests in whirlwind romances. Commitment is
made based on passion, but the relationship isn’t
stable because there is no intimacy (i.e., they
have nothing in common).
 Consummate love – A full combination of all three
components, and the kind of love many of us
aspire for in romantic relationships. Maintaining this
kind of love is more difficult than achieving it.
Personal Relationships of
Adolescents
 Love and Commitment:
 A majority of adults exhibit secure attachment or an
attachment rooted in trust that sustains relationships in time
of conflict.
 Other adults exhibit avoidant attachment (i.e., resistance to
being close to others), and they have a tendency to be
less invested in relationships and are more likely to leave
them.
 Insecure attachment is marked by anxiety or ambivalence,
wherein individuals are less trusting and fearful of a
partner’s interest in someone else, thus making them more
possessive and jealous.
 The equity principle of attraction states that the outcome
people receive from a relationship is proportional to what
they each put into it.
Personal Relationships of
Adolescents
 Love and Commitment:
 Self-disclosure is being able to reveal intimate aspects of oneself to
others, as often seen in deep, companionate relationships.
 The disclosure reciprocity effect is the tendency to match the self-
disclosure of one’s partner.
 Love does not always last.
 The end of relationships is usually a sequence of events that begin
with focusing on the loss of a partner, followed by deep sadness,
and eventually, detachment or letting go of the old and focusing
on someone new.
 During adolescence, teenagers such as yourself naturally feel
romance.
 Because this is an emotion that is so powerful, it can fool anyone
into thinking that they and their significant other are in a healthier
relationship than it actually is.
 Maybe this is why, as old adage says, love is blind.
Personal Relationships of
Adolescents
 Love and Commitment:
 There are seven qualities of a healthy relationship:
 Mutual respect – You and your significant other
should respect each other’s likes as well as your
dislikes. They should be into you for you, and vice-
versa.
 Trust – Jealousy is a natural feeling, but what is
important is how you or your significant other react
to it.
 Honesty – This goes hand-in-hand with trust. You
and your significant other should be honest; if one
is caught lying, trust is no longer there.
Personal Relationships of
Adolescents
 Love and Commitment:
 Support – A great boyfriend or girlfriend
would support you in both good times
and in bad, as well as push you to be the
best version of yourself that you can be.
 Fairness/Equality – In your relationship, are
you the giver or the taker? A great
relationship consists of understanding,
compromise, and balance.
Personal Relationships of
Adolescents
 Love and Commitment:
 Separate identities – You and your boyfriend
or girlfriend should be two separate people
with two separate identities that you together
both respect and maintain. If you lose yourself
in a relationship, it is an unhealthy one.
 Good communication – This is the most
important aspects of a healthy relationship.
You and your significant other should be able
to communicate your issues openly and
effectively.
Activity: Reflection
 Mechanics:
 Based on your lists during the first activity
and what you have learned about liking
and love, describe what you should look
for in a long-term partner as well as in a
long-term relationship. If you like someone
or are in a relationship, does this person or
the relationship you are in fit the
description? Write it down on a whole shit
of paper.
Activity: Reflection
 Process Questions:
 What are the ways to make a romantic
relationship stronger?
 When do you know that he/she is the
one?
 How do you maintain a romantic
relationship?
Video presentation entitled:
How to Get over Rejection
 Process Questions:
 What is the importance of rejection in
romantic relationships?
 How does rejection strengthen your
personal relationship?
 Why do you need to acknowledge your
emotions when you are rejected?
Mini-PT#1: Meme-Making
 Mechanics:
 Create a clever and artistic meme about the
topic. You may bring all your art tools and
materials.
 Criteria:
 Relevance to the topic – 40 pts.
 Creativity – 20 pts.
 Audience impact – 20 pts.
 Originality – 20 pts.
 Total - 100 pts.