Perceived partner responsiveness is the discloser’s own rating of how the other person received what was said. Laurenceau, Barrett and Pietromonaco reported in 1998 that it works as a partial mediator between disclosure and the closeness felt in an interaction. A chat export keeps the disclosure and keeps the reply, and keeps no rating of either, so the mediating quantity is the one part of the model a file cannot carry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The 1998 studies that tested this variable took every one of their measures from the people who were in the interactions, immediately afterwards, for a week or two. The rating a participant gave the other person’s response is the measure itself, rather than a score an outside reader worked out later. The gap between a rating given at the time and a record read afterwards is the subject of this page.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The abstract of Laurenceau, Barrett and Pietromonaco’s 1998 paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology<\/a> states that for each interaction, participants reported on their self-disclosures, partner disclosures, perceived partner responsiveness, and degree of intimacy experienced in the interaction. All four of those quantities came from the participant.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The word perceived is not decoration. The variable sits in the person who disclosed something, as their reading of what came back, and not in the reply as an object anyone else could pick up and score. Two people in the same exchange could rate the same response differently, and the model is built on the discloser’s rating.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The same abstract names the model being tested as H. T. Reis and P. Shaver’s 1988 interpersonal process model of intimacy, which it describes as suggesting that both self-disclosure and partner responsiveness contribute to the experience of intimacy in interactions. That description of the 1988 model is secondary here: it is quoted from the 1998 abstract, because Reis and Shaver’s own 1988 text could not be resolved to a live page for this article.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The abstract calls the method an event-contingent diary methodology, in which participants provided information immediately after their social interactions over one week in Study 1 or two weeks in Study 2. Two studies tested the model this way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That design puts the measurement next to the event. The person who was in the interaction answered while it was fresh, and the unit being analysed was the single interaction rather than the relationship or the month, which the abstract makes explicit when it reports results at the level of individual interactions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Every measure the abstract lists came from the participant, and it describes no transcript and no outside coder. It also reports no participant count and no number of interactions, so the only figures stated here are the one and two week spans it gives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The finding, in the abstract’s words, is that the results strongly supported the conceptualization of intimacy as a combination of self-disclosure and partner disclosure at the level of individual interactions, with partner responsiveness as a partial mediator in this process.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Partial is the load-bearing word. A partial mediator accounts for some of the link between two things and not all of it, so what the abstract reports is that part of the connection between what was disclosed and the closeness reported ran through the perceived response, and part of it did not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That bounds the claim this page can make. It is not a finding that a disclosure does nothing on its own and the response does everything, and anyone carrying the idea that far has gone past what the abstract reports. Disclosure and partner disclosure were themselves the combination the results supported.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The abstract writes the mediator as partner responsiveness in its findings sentence and as perceived partner responsiveness in its list of what participants reported, and the item that was actually measured is the perceived one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The abstract adds that in Study 2, self-disclosure of emotion emerged as a more important predictor of intimacy than did self-disclosure of facts and information. It reports that as a comparison between predictors in one of the two studies, without giving the sizes, and Study 1 is not included in the claim.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This part of the result points at content rather than at a rating. The two kinds of self-disclosure the abstract separates, emotion on one side and facts and information on the other, are distinctions in what was said, and what was said is the part a file of messages holds. What the ranking predicted, though, was a rating of intimacy that the file does not contain, so the predicted half of the comparison is missing from the record even where the disclosures themselves are on the page.<\/p>\n\n\n\n An export is a list of turns with times attached. For a disclosure and the reply to it, the file holds the wording of both. The quantity the model needs is a third thing: the discloser’s rating of that reply, given at the time, and there is no field anywhere in an export that holds it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The asymmetry is specific rather than general. A record is stronger than a diary in the places a diary is weak, because it has the exact wording of both turns and can run across months instead of one or two weeks. It is empty in exactly the place the diary was the instrument.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The substitution worth naming is this one. A person reading the thread can form a view about whether a reply looks responsive, and that view belongs to the reader, while the model’s variable belongs to the discloser. Swapping one for the other quietly changes which quantity is under discussion, and the 1998 studies measured only the second.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is why some concepts read off a written record more easily than others. What gets disclosed, how wide the topics run and how far they go are properties of the turns themselves, which is the ground that social penetration theory and its breadth and depth<\/a> describes, and a thread carries them. A rating of a response is not a property of the turns. Related readings of the same gap appear in what happens to backchannel responses in chat<\/a> and in the hyperpersonal model, on why text can feel closer than talk<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For Portraitor<\/a> the gap above is not an editorial choice about this concept. It is the shape of what the product is handed, and three clauses on its own live pages fix that shape.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The first is the subject. The home page’s own step asks which person in the conversation you want to analyse and says to pick the one person you want a Portrait of, that their messages are read, and that everyone else stays context, while a separate line on the same page says the analysis works from the conversation from both sides: so the other side is read as context for one participant rather than as a second subject. That is also how analysing your own messages works<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The second is the input. The privacy policy states that chat exports often contain photographs, videos and voice recordings, that the Service never opens them and never transmits them, and that only the written messages are read, on the device, with only their masked text sent, which means nothing from outside the written turns reaches the analysis at all; the home page adds that the uploader accepts a .txt, .html, .json or .zip file, so the input is a file rather than a live connection to an account.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The third is the masking. The privacy policy states that before any part of the conversation is transmitted, the browser removes names, email addresses, telephone numbers, postal addresses and credentials and replaces them with anonymous placeholders, entirely on the device, and says in its own words that this removes who is speaking while it does not remove what was discussed, with the list that matches each placeholder back to a real detail never leaving the device. What the masking step removes<\/a> is set out separately.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Put together, the written turns are the whole of the input. A rating that one of the people in the conversation gave a reply was never part of the written turns, so it is not a thing a reading could recover by being more careful, and no account access or longer file would add it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The limits run in both directions, and the first set belongs to the studies. Every one of the four quantities in the 1998 abstract was reported by the participant, including the intimacy that was the outcome, so the result describes relations among a person’s own reports and the abstract does not say an outside rating of any response was taken.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The diary ran one week in Study 1 and two in Study 2, so nothing in the abstract speaks to longer spans. The mediation was partial, so the model as tested does not support the stronger claim that a response settles how close an exchange feels. And the studies were about social interactions in general, with the abstract saying nothing about written or online exchanges, so carrying the concept to a message thread is an extension made here rather than a finding reported there.<\/p>\n\n\n\nA form filled in after each interaction, for one or two weeks<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Partial mediation is the result, and partial is doing work<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Emotion beat facts and information in the second study<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
A thread holds both turns and neither rating<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
One person, written turns only, and no name attached<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Self-report is the limit at both ends of this<\/h2>\n\n\n\n