Grand gestures may do more than show you are crazy in love. They may also show your dedication and commitment to your partner. Read more.

At some time or another it seems like every couple, jokingly, plays the sex exception game. You know the one, where each of you gets a short list of people you can sleep with (if you get the chance) and your significant other would have to shrug his/her shoulders and say “Ok, that’s a freebie”.

Could building a successful long-term relationship be antithetical to a great sex life? Read more.

In 1998 Judith Rich Harris wrote The Nurture Assumption which made a very simple argument. When it comes to how kids develop parents matter less and peers matter more. Could this be true?

A good friend of mine, Tim Loving, was a part of one of the coolest studies I have ever seen. Tim is a professor who studies relationships at UT Austin. He and his collaborators (who include Janice Kiecolt-Glaser one of the best researchers out there on this topic) did a study of how marital interactions effect wound healing.

A recent Boston Globe article pointed out the increasing frequency of cohabiting couples who have children together. What was once remarkably rare is becoming a more and more common occurrence. In fact the article cites a statistic that shows that 52% of children born out of wedlock are born to couples who are cohabiting. Is this a good thing?

I recently wrote a blog entry on why similarity predicts relationship satisfaction and success. Well last week one of my papers on the topic was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. It asked three questions: a) are romantic couples more similar to each other in personality and emotional experience than they are to other people? b) how does similarity relate to relationship satisfaction? and c) if similarity does relate to relationship satisfaction, then why?

Have more (and better) relationships. The benefits to your health may surprise you.

One of the most influential theories on adult romantic relationships in the last two decades is attachment theory. It all started when Cindy Hazan and Phil Shaver published a paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 1987.

Everyone is subject to racial bias. They often times guide our expectations and behaviors in the world and are engrained very deeply in our psychology. But a new study by researchers at the University of Chicago and The University of Colorado at Boulder offers a way to reduce how much racial bias changes our behavior.

A recent article in the Washington Post by Shankar Vedantam reported some of the benefits of doing altruistic and moral things. In short, more and more research on the brain is showing that doing good makes us feel good (and doing the wrong thing makes us feel bad), and that these altruistic and moral tendencies may be rooted deeply in our biology and our evolutionary past.

…reveal much more about ourselves than we might think. A recent NY Times article provides an overview of the research that has been done by personality psychologists on how people’s stories contain themes and elements that reflect their personality. This idea is not a new one. Everyone knows the archetypal psychotherapist holding up an ink blot and asking “What do you see here?”

Lots of people debate if internet dating works or doesn’t. Recently Dr. Jeff Gavin of the University of Bath did an internet study looking at the success rates of internet dating. Here’s what he found.

Do birds of a feather really flock together or do opposites attract? Are we attracted to people who are similar or who compliment? Although people still have varying opinions on this question the research on the topic is pretty clear. You are more likely to be attracted to and more likely to have a satisfying relationship with someone who is similar. In fact, when Thomas Gilovich (Cornell University), Dacher Keltner (UC Berkeley), and Richard Nisbett (University of Michigan) addressed this topic in their Social Psychology text book (one that is used in psychology classes in many colleges and universities) they concluded that “Similarity is the rule and complimentarity is the exception” (page 102).