May's edition of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology contains three articles on trust that got me thinking a bit.  It's been said that the qualities that attract you to a potential partner (or friend) may well end up being the very issues that become most problematic in the relationship.  So, for example, one's partner's ability to be spontaneous, emotional, let their hair down & have a great time may later become a real issue over their drinking, extra-marital affairs, and irresponsibility with money.  Or from the other end of the personality spectrum, their reliability and conscientiousness may become a real strain because they later seem over-cautious and kill-joys.  Anyway here's three additional contributions to this debate:

(this blog post is downloadable as a Word doc or as a PDF file)

(this post is downloadable as both a Word doc and as a PDF file).

I read a lot of research. When I find an article of particular interest I download it to my bibliographic database - EndNote - which currently contains over 16,000 abstracts.

(this post is downloadable as both a Word doc and as a PDF file).

I wrote yesterday about conflict and the costs of over- and under-assertiveness.  Today's post adds further thoughts about making conflict constructive.

(this post is downloadable as both a Word doc and as a PDF file).  

Occasional disagreement and conflict are pretty much inevitable.  I scanned Medline for relevant research articles to see if there are any helpful insights that have emerged recently.  As usual when one trawls for information, hundreds of publications emerge.  Here are a few of the areas I found particularly interesting.