1. Focuses on the interaction between 2 people.

2. Each commuunication act reflects the nature of those relationships

3. As relational partners interact they change their relationship, and as their relationship changes, so does how they interact.

4. Communicators' perceptions and actions influence the outcome of the interaction.

• Non-verbal communication that either supplements what is being said or indicates that what is being said is not meant. 
• Communicating about communicating. 
• Allows members to state their needs, clarify confusion, and establish more constructive relational patterns.

1. Family cohesion

2. Family adaptibility

1. DISENGAGED: Members maintain extreme separateness and independence. Experience little belonging or loyalty.

2. CONNECTED: Members experience emotional independence as we as some sense of involvement and belonging.

3. COHESIVE: Members strive for closeness, loyalty, and togetherness, with emphasis on some individuality.

4. ENMESHED: Members experience extreme closeness, loyalty, dependence, and almost no individuality.

• The amount of change in a family's leadership, role regulations, and relationship roles.
• How family systems manage stability and change.
• Effective adaptations relies on shared meanings and effective communication.

1. RIGID: Members experience low levels of change, as well as authoritarian leadership and strict rules and roles.

2. STRUCTURED: Members experience more moderate levels of change as well as limited shared decison making and leadership and relatively stable roles and rules.

3. FLEXIBLE: Members experience high levels of change, shared decision making, and shifting rules and roles.

4. CHAOTIC: Members experience very high levels of change as well as non-existent leadership. Confusing and variable rules and roles.

• Relationships are built on a history of struggle as well as pleasure and a continued interplay between opposing tendencies.
• The dialectic interplay involves dialectic tensions and family functions that are managed through verbal and non-verbal communication.

1. Family Images

2. Family Themes

3. Boundaries

4. Biosocial issues

• An image that captures the family's core values.
• Relationship patterns can be viewed as simple to root metaphors. 
• In a functional family, members' metaphors should be similar 
• Is both idealistic and idealized.

• Capture a fundamental view of reality and a way of living with this world view.
• Carries beliefs that guides the families actions
• Represent patterns of feelings, motives, fantasies, conventionalized understandings

• There are internal and external boundaries.
• Meant to protect member's self-identities. Should be age and role appropriate.
• Closed, rigid boundaries resist the flow of information and people across them.
• Physical and psychological boundaries strongly influence the interpersonal communication that occurs within a family system.

1. Flexible families will experience a greater variety of images, themes, boundaries and responses to biosocial issues.

2. Members' communication behaviours reflect the family's strongly held values.

3. Communication serves as the means by which families establish their patterns of cohesion and adaptability, and develop their images, themes, boundaries and responses to biosocial issues.

1. STABLE SATISFACTION OF SEX NEED: A partnership provides the the appropriate mechanism to regulate sexual behaviour.
2. REPRODUCTION/PROCREATION: Contributes to the continuity of the family and perpetuates the human race.
3. PROTECTION AND CARE OF THE YOUNG: It is the family which provides care, protection, security, and fulfills all other needs to help the child fit into society.
4. SOCIALIZING FUNCTION: Members teach norms, values, beliefs, and ideals of society. The family culture is passed along through the socialization process.
5. PROVISION OF A HOME: Members depend on home for comfort, protection, peace which provides both mental and emotional satisfaction.

1. ECONOMIC FUNCTION: Family fulfills all the economic needs of its members such as food, clothing, shelter.

2. EDUCATIONAL FUNCTION: Family provides basis for the child's formal learning and gives the child his/her basic training in the social attitudes and and habits.

3. RELIGIOUS FUNCTION: Through the family, the religious inheritance is passed on to the next generation.

4. RECREATIONAL FUNCTION: Family serves as a centre for recreational activities.

5. PROTECTIVE FUNCTION: Family has the responsibility of maintaining good health for its members.

• Refers to family/families in which a person is raised. 
• Considered to be the earliest and most powerful source of influence on one's personality and primary source of expectation on how a family should function.

• Language attitudes and role-bound behaviours move from a family of origin, to a newly emerging family system.
• Behaviours that are passed from generation to generation.

1. Behavioural endocrinology

2. Behavioural genetics

3. Evolutionary psychology

4. Behavioural psychopharmacology

• Refers to critical factors, such as common ancestry, language, nationality and beliefs.
• A family's ethnic heritage dictates the communication norms, which can be maintained for generations.
• Multiracial/ethnic families are especially disclosure dependent.

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