Running head: PREDICTING SOCIAL INTIMACY 1 Predicting Social Intimacy: Exploring Contribution of Romantic Relationships and Interpersonal Dependency to and Gender Differences in Social Intimacy

The present study sought to predict social intimacy using relationship and interpersonal predictors. A second purpose of this study was to determine whether there were any gender differences using these predictors. The participants in this study consisted of 455 undergraduate students, who were surveyed using a demographic questionnaire, Miller’s Social Intimacy Scale, dating subscale of the DAQ, and Interpersonal Dependency Inventory. A series of regression analyses were run, and found that romantic relationship predictors and interpersonal dependency predictors did significantly predict social intimacy. This study also found that this model had a better fit for males, than females, though they did not have any structural differences in the regression weights. PREDICTING SOCIAL INTIMACY 3 Predicting Social Intimacy: Exploring Contribution of Romantic Relationships and Interpersonal Dependency to and Gender Differences in Social Intimacy By nature humans are social creatures, and as social creatures we rely on our relationships we have with other humans to see us through our lives. These relationships we experience with other people have been referred to as intimacy. Miller and Lefcourt (1982) defined social intimacy as the closeness we experience with others (e.g. significant others, family members, and friends). In later research she was able to support her hypothesis that people who have lower levels of social intimacy are more prone to higher levels of emotional disturbance and have lower coping abilities when negative life changes occur (Miller, n.d.). Others have continued her research and reported similar findings in studies ranging from looking at how couples cope with the stress of having a chronically ill child (Walker, Johnson, Manion, & Cloutier, 1996) to understanding motivations of sexual offenders (Marshall, Champagne, Brown, & Miller, 1998) It should not be surprising that social intimacy and romantic relationships are related. In order to have a romantic relationship there must be some form of social intimacy or closeness with another individual. There have been many studies that have examined the relationship between social intimacy and romantic relationships. One such study looked at how single individuals and those in relationships imagined intimacy with media figures of the opposite gender, and found that single individuals reported greater imagined intimacy with media figures than those in relationships (Greenwood & Long, 2010). Another study found that relationship length was negatively correlated with passion, yet positively correlated with commitment (Ahmetogul & Chamorro-Premuzic, 2010). PREDICTING SOCIAL INTIMACY 4 Another aspect to social intimacy is interpersonal dependency. Interpersonal dependency is defined as a complex of thoughts, beliefs, feelings and behaviors revolving around needs to associate closely with valued other people (Hirschfeld et. al., 1977). Previous research has not looked at the direct relationship between interpersonal dependence and social intimacy, however there is research to support the relationship through indirect relationships. There have been connections made between loneliness and interpersonal dependency (Prichard & Yalch, 2009). Another study reported moderate negative correlations between social skills and interpersonal dependency and found that interpersonal dependency acts as a moderator between social skills and depression (Huprich, Clancy, Bomstein, & Nelson-Gray, 2004). Another study reported a strong relationship between interpersonal dependency and unfriendly perception of social relationships, and concluded that interpersonal dependency was significantly related to social perception, friendly relationships and emotions (Wang et. al., 2014). It has long been believed that men and women view intimacy differently, and the widebelieved assumption is that women tend to view intimacy as an emotional thing, whereas men view intimacy in a more physical way. These are conflicting views are often explained by societal acceptable gender roles, as one study found that men are judged more negatively by other men when the express emotional intimacy (Gaia, 2013). A study comparing middle age men and college age men and the effect gender roles had on social intimacy; found that middle age men expressed significantly lower amounts of social intimacy than the college age men (Mahalik, Locke, Theodore, Cournoyer, & Lloyd, 2001). Another study found that most of the data from their study supported these claims above, however they also reported conflicting data on a few aspects of emotional social intimacy in what women reported (Hook, Gerstein, Detterich, & Gridley, 2003). PREDICTING SOCIAL INTIMACY 5 The purpose of the present study is to predict social intimacy using romantic relationship predictors and interpersonal dependency and determine any gender differences that may be present in social intimacy using those predictors. The five research questions in this study are: 1) Do relationship and interpersonal dependency predictors significantly predict social intimacy? 2) Does the relationship model account for the same amount of variance as the full model? 3) Does the interpersonal dependence model account for the same amount of variance as the full model? 4) Is there a difference between the predictive utility of the relationship model and the interpersonal dependency model? 5) Are there gender differences in the fit of the full model?