Love, Intimacy, and Conflict in Social and Developmental Psychology

This article discusses the theories of love and intimacy in relationships and inter-group conflicts in social and developmental psychology. It explores the different types of adult relationships and their advantages and disadvantages. The article also covers the Realistic Group Conflict Theory and Social Identity Theory.

Introduction to Social and Developmental

Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION...........................................................................................................................3
TASK 1............................................................................................................................................3
TASK 2............................................................................................................................................7
CONCLUTION ............................................................................................................................10
REFERENCES..............................................................................................................................10

INTRODUCTION
Love, adult relationship and intimacy are closely related to each other. Psychologist have
said that a healthy and good love relationship comprises of passion, commitment and decision.
Infatuation is one more variety generally observed in adolescence involves only passion not
intimacy and commitment thus called puppy love also. Adult relationship is something that is
being expressed in full fledge. Sometime adult relationship is in being single hood and enjoying
being in own space leading to satisfying lifestyles. Two most common relationship in adulthood
which last longer are live-in relationship where unmarried people live together with mutual
decision and spend their time and another one is marriage where people grow together healthier
and happier(Sprecher, Wenzel and Harvey, 2018). With time the cycle of love changes and
became more ostensive by middle adulthood and signifies as complete love which is admirer and
free hearted. The transformation of young to elder age involves shift in dense social relation, and
a change of attention from quantity to quality. Elder relationship focuses on maintaining the
mutual support among them. The Inter-group conflicts are the conflicts within the groups
generally arose due to lack of communication, feeling of being superior, harmful act of fast, etc.
The following writing is going to involve various theories regarding love and intimacy in
relationship and conflict behaviour .
MAIN BODY
TASK 1
Love is a unconditional emotion of humans. Many psychologist and researcher proposed
various theories to explain emotional attachment and love. Some of them are theory of liking vs
loving, color wheel model theory, attachment theory, triangular theory, theory of compassionate
vs passionate.
The theory of liking vs loving was presented by Zick Robin, this theory concluded that
the difference between liking a person and loving a person are based on a combination of three
principle which are attachment, caring and passion. A person really like someone if the they
enjoy spending time with them. Moreover when someone feels strong desire of contact and
intimate, also cares equally about the needs of other then the person loves the other person.
Another theory is color wheel model of love, presented by John Lee defines the three different

styles of love which are Eros, Ludos and storage. This are Greek words which means passionate,
play and natural impulsiveness.
One of the theory named as Triangular Theory of love, developed by Robert Strengberg
got influenced by the above mentioned theory which is theory of liking vs loving and color wheel
model of love theory(Li, Jiang and Wang, 2022). With reference to triangular theory of love,
there are three essential components which are involved in love cycle, these are passion
components, commitments components and intimacy components. Passion relates to attraction
towards physical appearance, drags that leads to romance, sexual attainment and related sights in
love relationship. Commitment relates to maintaining the romance and intimacy relates to
triggers that results in feeling of connected, quality of being bounded and feeling of being
bounded. This build or strengthen the tight bond between the two individuals. These three
component defines the amount of love that one can experiences. Combination of these three
components results in different types of love(Jarvis and Verhagen, 2020). For example,
compassionate love will be a result of combination of intimacy and commitment while
combining the passion and intimacy leads to romantic love. According to these theory,
relationship that consist of two or more components are more persisting than those which consist
of single components. These theory also focuses on combination of all these component and
termed it as consummate love which is strongest and persisting in all form and found
rarely(Sternberg, 2018).
The style of love is represented by the shape of triangle which may varies in the cycle of
love:
 Non Love: absence of all components of love
 Infatuated Love: passion without intimacy and commitment
 friendship: intimacy without passion and commitments
 Empty love: commitment without intimacy and passion
 Fatuous love: passion and commitment, no intimacy
 Romantic love: passion and intimate and no commitments
 Consummate love: represented a ideal love. Complete form of love consisting of all
components of love.
Adulthood sexuality reflects growing and maturing and very expressive. Some of the
adult relationships are:

 Single-hood: most the adults are leading the single lifestyles with satisfying and awarding
life. Adults feels that single-hood give them control over their personal space and
freedom. Most singles are sexually active and dates with preferred sexual partner and
remains singles for other unlike other who are in relationship. About 26 % of men and
19% of women are peacefully leading their single-hood lifestyles.
 Cohabitation and Marriage: these are two most common long term relationships. When
unmarried people are living together and fulfilling their sexual desire then they are called
cohabiter. Most accepted long term relationship is Marriage, which is advantageous as
married couples approaches a healthier and happier life than be never married. Marriages
are happier in early stages but become satisfactory with parental responsibilities and
stability in finances. Marriages have some disadvantages as well as numbers of problems
and conflicts arises with time. Differences over household responsibilities, finances and
sex leads to everyday quarrel in lifestyles.
 Extramarital affairs: Involvement in extramarital affairs is due to extreme problem in
marital life where one or both the spouses engage themselves in extramarital affairs.
However there is a violation of trust and commitment between the spouse if either of
them engage themselves in Non consensual extramarital sexual activity. When one or
both partner cheat on each other than marriage will generally leads to divorce.
 Divorce: termination of marriage by legal procedure is termed as divorce and happens
when significant conflicts happens between the marriage. It can lead to financial hardship
, health and mental problem.
 Friendship: most human relationship involve causal association and are not totally
involve in passion, commitments or intimacy. According to Strengberg, intimacy without
passion and commitment are characterized as friendships. Friends normally comes from
same background and share same interest and enjoys spending times with each other.
For many middle age couple, passion disappear as both the partner are more into
commitment and intimacy. Eventually love neither need to be end in this way nor due to change.
Instead, many middle aged couple explore an effective way to communicate their thoughts
easily, tried several methods to revitalize their passion again, increasing their emotional stability
and connectivity and tried to grow together(Pontinha and do Vale, 2019). This understanding
between the people leads to wonderful and happening lifestyles. Sometimes when the fire of

passion dies, or facing rough phase in daily basis then the partner decides to move to a new
relationship leading to either extramarital affairs or Divorce. This are the two disadvantages of
unhappy and unsatisfactory marital life. Most couple argue and quarrel and very few of them try
to understand and resolve the issues. Whatever the age group is, friends are healthy alternative to
family and cognizance. People often strengthen some of the closest bonds between friends during
their middle adulthood. They typically maintain very close and strong bond with their grown up
children, some of them live out their youthful fantasises through their children.
Taking about the older adults, it is seen that the passion entreaty does not decline with the
age, there is non such age where intimacy or physical intimacy is inopportune. However the
health complication and emotional instability that generally happens in older age can disturb the
growing and supporting intimate relationships(Aumer and Erickson, 2022). The way of
expressing intimacy is also changed with ageing. It has been found that people who live a active
lifestyles and have good interaction with other people spend their life healthier and happier as
well as longer life also. For connecting with the people they prefer to join classes of their choice,
engaging themselves in their hobbies, practice some spiritual and religious work, joined some
social group. Even those, who are at home and can not go outside due to their health issue can
also interact with others by communicating through phone and e-mail and by allowing people to
have visit them. Intimacy, specially physical intimacy may be gone due to various reason like
Disorders (such as erectile dysfunction and arthritis limits the movement), changes due to age
like decrease in sex Hormone, lack of privacy, disaggrement in expectations between partners,
shifted to other form of intimacy such as massaging, touching, verbal expressions of affections
which expresses caring nature and familiarity with their partners, and most common Is due to
loss of their partner. These are the barrier of intimacy inn older adults. At the same time, a
healthy sexual relationship are maintained by many elderly couples(Lee and Hsieh, 2022). Self-
esteem and physical health are improved and depression can be prevented with the help of
intimacy. If older people have engage themselves with new partners should practice safe sex due
the reason that they are procuring sexually transmitted diseases, which are risky infections
whatever the age may be. Older people that living their life alone prefer to spend their time with
pets as it give them the feeling of concatenated and strong-mindedness.
In context of present case study of the family, it is obvious that there is good relation
between Jill and Steve as their family are looking happy and both the parents are appreciating

their relationship. Grandparents are telling that how their commitments towards each other fulfils
their lives and how their intimacy has converted into other form like talking,touching and
spending time together and doing their hobbies. They said the Jill and Steve that in this age the
relationship needs commitment the most where as Jill ans Steve said that they are enjoying their
relationship. There relationship has each components which shows there healthy relationship.
they are enjoyed their adulthood relationship to fullest and now happily living their middle hood
relationship. They are enjoying their feeling and responsibilities of being a parents as well. They
share how their relationship has pass a phase of passion, commitment and intimacy as well.
TASK 2
A very long and enrich history is present behind the social psychology of intergroup
relations. From the beginning it focuses or give special attention towards prodigy such as
prejudice, discrimination, racism, conflicts and stereotyping and thus it became a very interesting
area of research. The actual focus is on interrelation of people appertaining form group and
beholding. One of the most common definition of intergroup relations states that Relationship
between two or more than two groups and their respective members signifies Intergroup
relations. Whenever a person pertaining from one group interact individually or all together with
another group or its pertaining members in relation of their identification in group then there is
representation of intergroup behaviour. The main assumption of maximum theory was that
people have something wrong as a person so that they behave in such a negative and
contemptuous behaviour(Gove, 2018). Summing up, the focus of analysing these theory was on
the person, its behaviourism and the personality traits, which could unquestionably lead the
person to demarcate and prejudiced.
In spite of that, the differences in the individuality and personality approaches for
prejudice and discrimination could not settle for negative behaviourism occurring in many
societies throughout the world. So new new approaches and theorise were come with the
objective of explaining the relationship between the inter-group highlighted with prejudice,
discriminate and conflict also. The first attempt to explain prejudice and discrimination come to
us by Muzafer Sherif.
Realistic group conflict theory
In the process of theorizing about inter-group conflicts, author claimed statement was that
In terms of functional relations, the social groups are related to each other and are thus

interdependent. Groups set up their goals and strive hard to achieve them are also the
assumptions of author. A cooperative and positive relationships are maintained when the two or
more than two groups have goals which do not interfere with each other and are positively
interdependent. However when the goals are same for the different groups, then there
interdependence will be incompatible and competition may rises. Antagonist relation are the
result of these competition over limited resources thus creating differences among the groups
which could results in violence and conflicts(Van Rossem, 2019). In spite of the fact that this
theory has given enormously towards the intergroup relationship, some drawback about the this
theory should be clear cut. Firstly, there are many examples of intergroup conflict happening
worldwide that was not happening due to realistic reasons. In the experiment conducted by the
author with 22 boys, it can be easily proven that with minimal group example, categorization of
members of group will result in intergroup discriminations. Secondly, authors conceptualization
does not contends the role of group membership, authentication for the formation, defence and
resolution of conflicts. Social identity dynamics and intergroup processes to a secondary level
gets eliminated due to the main focus of this theory was on realistic and objective conflicts.
Therefore, change in social identity, development and processes underlying the structure are not
taken into contemplations. The only possible way of resolving conflicts according to this theory
are fair partition of limited resource and objective which are responsible for creation of conflicts
and superior goals.
Social identity theory
social identity theory is the study of the interaction between personal and social identities.
The aim of these theory is to lay down and predict the conditions under which person are able to
think about themselves as an individual or as a member of group. Social identity theory initiated
from the assurance that for implanting value in social situations group member will help them.
Group membership guide people to determine who they are and how they relate to each others. It
was developed initially as an integrative theory as it wishes to join the in between processes and
behavioural motivation(Hogg, 2018). Its primary focus was on conflicts and relations between
intergroup. For that reason, the theory was initially termed as social identity theory of inter-group
relations. The theory social identity was beamed to describe how individual create and elaborate
their place in society. Three psychological processes are considered in context to this theory:
social categorization, social identification and social comparison.

The tendency of people to see themselves as well as others in terms of demanding social
categories refers to social categorization. For example one think a person certainly as as lawyer,
painter or a cricket fan as well. Social identification reflects the odds and ends that an individual
generally do not see situation socially and act as detached observers. They typically view other
person or a group own the basis of their own sense of who they are and how they correlates to
others around them and the process through which individual can determine the approximate
worth or social standing of a specific group and its members(Belavadi and Hogg, 2019). For
example, teacher have higher social standing than the peon of the same school and comparatively
the school teacher have lower social standing in context to head of the school.
The outcome of these three process which are social categorization, identification on
social level and comparison based on social ground, can be seen as someone's social identity. An
individual knowledge of familiarity to social group, along with some valuation and emotional
significance of respective membership of group. The character and person's motivation also
determine the social identity of an individual or a person's group membership(n Rossem, 2019).
A positive image of group is generally maintained by the people's. As a consequences of social
identity, individual are determined to pursue for positively traits, behaviour and attitudes that can
be found as characteristics in groups. The motivation regarding positive social identity is
thought to present in root of intergroup conflicts, as a part of dis-benefited group, there is hunger
forb improvement of their social standings where as a member of benefited group there is hunger
of maintaining the benefited positions(Chadborn and Reysen, 2018). There are three type of
strategies for improvement in status regarding social identity: mobility of an individual,
competition on social basis and social creativity.
Mobility of an individual allows people to trail improvement in individual irrespective of
group. Social competition is a strategies at a group level to come along and join their forces to
help others to improve joint performances and outcomes. When the peoples self concepts or
perspectives are the basis of their social group membership than it signifies social
identity(Wilton-Harding and Windsor, 2022). For example, religions, occupations, sexual
orientation, ethnic group, etc.
In relation to present case study, conflicts between the teachers and administration shows
that their must be antagonistic relationship where the resources are limited but due to
interdependent of each other group creates a conflicts in-spite of having the same goals. The

teachers and administration member should practice the theory of social identification as this
allow them to think themselves as an individual or as group member(Messis and Nilsson, 2019).
Social identification practice allow to see odd and end of an individual which generally work as
detached observer. This will restrict the the members to judge the others on the basis of their own
sense. This will results in familiarity behaviour in group.
CONCLUTION
Adult relationship is something that is being expressed in full fledge. With time the cycle
of love changes and became more ostensive by middle adulthood and signifies as complete love
which is admirer and free hearted. there are three essential components which are involved in
love cycle, these are passion components, commitments components and intimacy components.
For many middle age couple, passion disappear as both the partner are more into commitment
and intimacy. The way of expressing intimacy is also changed with ageing. Intimacy may be
gone due to various reason like Disorders, shifted to other form of intimacy such as massaging,
touching, verbal expressions of affections which expresses caring nature. Antagonist relation are
the result of these competition over limited resources thus creating differences among the
groups which could results in violence and conflicts. A cooperative and positive relationships
are maintained when the two or more than two groups have goals which do not interfere with
each other and are positively interdependent. social identity theory has aim of to lay down and
predict the conditions under which person are able to think about themselves as an individual or
as a member of group.
REFERENCES
Books and Journals

Aumer, K. and Erickson, M.A., 2022. The Good and Bad of Love and Hate. The Moral
Psychology of Love, p.57.
Belavadi, S. and Hogg, M.A., 2019. Social categorization and identity processes in uncertainty
management: The role of intragroup communication. In Advances in group processes
(Vol. 36, pp. 61-77). Emerald Publishing Limited.
Chadborn, D. and Reysen, S., 2018. Moved by the masses: A social identity perspective on
inspiration. Current Psychology, 37(3), pp.625-631.
Gove, W.R., 2018. The effect of age and gender on deviant behavior: A biopsychosocial
perspective. In Gender and the life course (pp. 115-144). Routledge.
Hogg, M.A., 2018. Social identity, self-categorization, and the small group. In Understanding
group behavior (pp. 227-253). Psychology Press.
Jarvis, R. and Verhagen, D., 2020, September. Composing in spacetime with rainbows: spatial
metacomposition in the real world. In Proceedings of the 15th International Conference
on Audio Mostly (pp. 175-182).
Lee, C.T. and Hsieh, S.H., 2022. Can social media-based brand communities build brand
relationships? Examining the effect of community engagement on brand love.
Behaviour & Information Technology, 41(6), pp.1270-1285.
Li, X., Jiang, Q. and Wang, K., 2022. Likes or Views? Making Recommendations More
Effective through Social Features from Construal Level Perspective.
Messis, C. and Nilsson, I., 2019. Eros as passion, affection and nature: Gendered perceptions of
erotic emotion in Byzantium. In Emotions and gender in Byzantine culture (pp. 159-
190). Palgrave Macmillan, Cham.
Pontinha, V.M. and do Vale, R.C., 2019. Brand love measurement scale development: an inter-
cultural analysis. Journal of Product & Brand Management.
Sprecher, S., Wenzel, A. and Harvey, J., 2018. Insider perspectives on attraction. In Handbook of
relationship initiation (pp. 302-318). Psychology Press.
Sternberg, R.J., 2018. Creative giftedness is not just what creativity tests test: Implications of a
triangular theory of creativity for understanding creative giftedness. Roeper Review,
40(3), pp.158-165.
Van Rossem, A.H., 2019. Generations as social categories: An exploratory cognitive study of
generational identity and generational stereotypes in a multigenerational workforce.
Journal of Organizational Behavior, 40(4), pp.434-455.
Van Rossem, A.H., 2019. Generations as social categories: An exploratory cognitive study of
generational identity and generational stereotypes in a multigenerational workforce.
Journal of Organizational Behavior, 40(4), pp.434-455.
Wilton-Harding, B. and Windsor, T.D., 2022. Awareness of age-related change, future time
perspective, and implications for goal adjustment in older adulthood. Aging & Mental
Health, 26(6), pp.1189-1197.