Belongingness and the Perception of Congruence, Resonance, and Affectionate Communication

Dyadic goal interdependence means that people in relationships experience a push and pull of individual goals with what the partner wants to do. Transactive goal dynamics theory points to goals as linked (TGD; Fitzsimons & Finkel, 2018), like how the perception of a relationship affects the way that people in that relationship pursue relational motives (e.g., Knobloch & Solomon, 2002). Goal pursuit is defined by the context of the relational situation as either a proximal sought outcome, or are a secondary general desire (Wilson, 2014, p. 63-65). A major puzzle is how communication can effectively be used between two people who have an array of different goals in mind and competing ideas about how to frame the relationship (e.g., McLaren et al., 2014). Moreover, goal coordination is a subtype of goal interdependence that is largely temporally extended and general (e.g., Baldwin, 1995) beyond one single conversation. So, learning how these factors work together is about making measurements, but also about understanding relational communication through the eyes of the dyad. The body of literature on interpersonal communication is ripe for the basis of a future goal-directed biological communication paradigm. In a variety of ways, conceptualizations of how goals and communication work explain that relational partners hold and pursue interdependent goals (Fitzsimons & Finkel, 2018). Wherever goal-directedness is salient in the dyadic system, relational partners are said to make observations about the effect that their goal tactics have according to the goal-planning-action model (Dillard, 1990; Dillard et al., 1989). What is unknown is whether specific traits make it more likely for goal interdependence to be positive and how the perception of that positivity in goal coordination leads to state communication patterns. I wonder if communication research ought to address this research gap by investigating the goal of interpersonal belongingness, the plan of goal coordination, the assessment of positivity resonance, and actions of affectionate communication.