Self-Disclosure Intimacy

Abstract

A 148-item random sample of self-disclosure topics was drawn from the 671-item pool of Taylor and Altman (Note 1) and presented to male and female university students in the U. S. and Australia for ratings of intimacy of content. For S of 13 content categories the same item was regarded as more intimate in opposite-sex than in same-sex conversation. Most items were rated less intimate than in the Taylor and Altman study-evidence that contemporary male students report themselves as more open and disclosing than male students did a decade ago. Sex differences were few, but Austrplians rated items in 7 categories less intimate than Americans did.