A paper published last week in the Journal of Communication indicates that couples in long-distance relationships could be more intimate than those in geographically close ones. The researchers, Crystal Jiang and Jeffrey Hancock, think this is because partners could be adapting more optimistically to each other behaviours to compensate for the mediating communication technology’s shortcomings. While the study is definitely not representative because of statistical limitations, it suggests that an erstwhile atypical social interaction could actually have a larger role to play in social networks than thought. Here’s more by me for The Hindu.
