Self-disclosure, responsiveness and intimacy in everyday conversations

Sharing something and feeling known

The paper tested elements of an account of intimacy developed by Reis and Shaver. In their model, a person reveals something personally meaningful, another person responds, and the speaker interprets that response. Closeness involves the experience of having one's disclosure met with understanding, acceptance and care. The model also allows these encounters to accumulate into a broader sense of the relationship. The diaries examined the individual encounters, rather than tracking that longer development.

These qualities give the response a particular meaning. Understanding concerns whether the other person grasps our feelings, needs and situation. Acceptance concerns feeling recognized as a person who is valued. Care concerns the affection or concern we experience from them. Together, they describe what the researchers called perceived partner responsiveness. In this paper, a partner was the person taking part in the interaction, whether or not the relationship was romantic.

The distinction between a response and the way it is received is central to the model. Someone may intend to show care, while the person speaking experiences the reply differently. The researchers were interested in the speaker's experience of the exchange. They measured how responsive the other person seemed, rather than observing the conversation and judging the response themselves.

This also separates two parts of getting to know someone. We can learn personal information about them through what they disclose. We can also experience something about how they relate to us through their response to what we share. The studies examined both parts alongside the closeness people felt.

What changed from one conversation to another

In the first study, 69 university students contributed 1,494 records of interactions between two people over a week. The exchanges could happen during ordinary activities, including work, classes, errands and telephone conversations. For this paper, the researchers focused on interactions between two people that lasted at least ten minutes.

Participants reported how much they had disclosed, how much the other person had disclosed, how accepted they felt and how intimate the interaction seemed. Comparing exchanges within each person's week let the researchers examine something more specific than whether generally open people tended to have close relationships. They could ask whether the same person felt closer in interactions marked by more disclosure. Those encounters could involve different people, however. The comparison did not hold the relationship or conversational setting constant.

Both kinds of disclosure were associated with greater intimacy. People tended to feel closer when they shared more themselves and when they perceived the other person sharing more. Each association remained when the other was taken into account. The pattern included being able to reveal oneself and having access to something personal about the person listening.

Feeling accepted helped account for a small part of these associations. Exchanges with more disclosure also tended to be exchanges in which participants felt more accepted, and acceptance was related to closeness. Yet disclosure retained a substantial association with intimacy after acceptance was considered. The result supported a role for the response without making it the whole explanation.

These were reports of naturally occurring exchanges, with the different ratings made about the same interaction. They could not establish a sequence in which disclosure caused acceptance and acceptance caused closeness. Feeling close could also influence how willing someone was to share or how they experienced the other person's response.

Understanding and care alongside acceptance

The first study measured responsiveness through a single aspect, feeling accepted. The model proposed something broader. In the second study, a different group of 89 university students contributed 3,955 records over two weeks and reported whether they felt understood and cared for as well as accepted.

The main disclosure finding appeared again. Both sharing something oneself and perceiving disclosure from the other person were independently associated with feeling close. With the fuller measure, responsiveness accounted statistically for more of those associations than acceptance alone had in the first study. It still explained only part of the pattern.

Including understanding and care made the researchers' account more precise. A person can consider whether they felt accepted while speaking and also whether the listener understood what they were trying to express. They can distinguish those experiences from feeling that the listener cared about them. The second study brought those aspects together in a measure that more closely matched the proposed model. Understanding and acceptance were closely related in the reports, while feeling cared for overlapped less strongly with either. The distinctions were therefore more than three interchangeable ways of asking whether a conversation had gone well.

This was a change in what the researchers measured, rather than an experiment in which listeners were taught to respond differently. The authors regarded the broader measure as a likely reason for the stronger finding. It supported attending to the range of experiences contained in responsiveness, without establishing that adding a particular response would produce a particular amount of closeness.

What emotional disclosure adds

The second study also separated sharing facts from expressing emotions. Both can reveal something personal. In introducing the distinction, the authors contrasted information about a person's relationship history with the feelings a breakup had left them with. The factual account tells a listener something that happened. The emotional account reveals how the person experienced it.

Emotional disclosure was more strongly associated with intimacy than factual disclosure. When the researchers considered both kinds of disclosure alongside the other person's disclosure, emotional expression remained a significant predictor of closeness. Factual disclosure did not show an independent association in that comparison.

The distinction concerns what each kind of disclosure added to the pattern being studied. It does not establish that facts are unimportant in a conversation. Facts can be part of the account through which someone expresses a feeling. Here, however, the amount of factual information shared did not explain additional differences in closeness once emotional disclosure and the other's disclosure were included.

Perceived responsiveness helped account for part of the emotional-disclosure finding too. When people shared more emotion, they also tended to feel that the other person was more responsive, and those perceptions were associated with greater intimacy. The authors interpreted this as support for the idea that expressing feelings gives a listener an opportunity to understand and respond to something central to the speaker's experience.

The diaries recorded how much people expressed, without preserving the content of each conversation. The findings therefore concern emotional disclosure broadly. They do not identify a particular feeling, topic or degree of intensity as the route to closeness. What the study made visible was the relationship between sharing emotional experience, feeling met by another person and feeling close in that exchange. The amount someone chose to reveal remained part of that particular encounter. These findings do not turn more disclosure into a goal for every conversation.

A pattern with room for differences

Neither study established that one component of intimacy always mattered most. Self-disclosure had the larger direct association in the first study. Perceived responsiveness had the larger direct association in the second. The authors suspected that their improved measure of responsiveness helped explain the difference. The proportion of exchanges with close others was similar in both studies, so that difference in the samples did not account for the result.

There was also variation from person to person in how strongly disclosure, responsiveness and intimacy were related. Being a man or a woman did not significantly explain those differences in the analyses reported. Attachment styles accounted for few differences, and those findings were inconsistent. The average pattern was informative without describing every person's experience in the same way.

The researchers found the same overall pattern when they examined subsets of exchanges with close others, including best friends and romantic partners. That gave the findings relevance to established relationships within these student samples. Their application to older adults in long marriages or to people in other cultural settings remained a question for further research. The researchers also excluded many diaries completed substantially from memory, especially in the second study. That improved the focus on recent encounters while narrowing the group whose experiences were represented.

The response as someone experiences it

The paper's account of intimacy keeps attention on the person receiving a response. Its evidence came from one participant in each exchange, so it described that person's experience of sharing, listening and feeling close. It did not establish whether the other person experienced the conversation in the same way.

That perspective also shaped the authors' discussion of possible applications. They suggested that work intended to support intimacy should attend to disclosure and to the response it receives, with acceptance understood alongside understanding and care. This was an implication they drew from the findings, not an intervention tested by the diary studies.

The distinction is concrete. A listener can hear what happened and learn something new about the speaker. Hearing what the experience meant to that person creates a further opportunity to respond to their feelings. In the model examined here, the response becomes part of intimacy through the speaker's experience of being understood, valued and cared for.