Journal of Social and Personal Relationships

Although the interchange between clinical and social psychological research has been fruitful in the study of cognition in marriage, it has recently waned. This article therefore illustrates the value of continued interplay between developments in the social cognition and marital literatures, focusing on the role of context in understanding marriage. Several studies show how construct accessibility, including the construct of marital quality, provides a context that influences judgments of partner behavior, the stability of marital quality, and observed marital behavior. The effects of context on reported marital quality are also examined. Finally, an expanded interplay between social cognition and marital research is illustrated using as examples self-evaluation maintenance processes and goals analysis. It is concluded that the social cognitive perspective has the potential to provide a different understanding of marital cognition in the new millenium.

This research examined the role of cognitive and behavioral accommodation in two studies. In study 1, participants responded to hypothetical negative behaviors from their partners. Study 2 involved the re-coding and reanalysis (using structural equation modeling) of data from a prior study in which married couples had problem-solving discussions and provided reports of their on-line thoughts and feelings. The results from the two studies were mixed, and provided support for both a good communication and a good management model of close relationships. Implications and caveats are discussed.

Traditionally it has been assumed that cognition and emotion are separate and competing forces, with cognition representing rationality and emotion representing irrationality. However, recent theoretical and empirical work has demonstrated the symbiotic nature of the relationship between these complementary ways of apprehending and understanding the world. In this review, we discuss the functionality and logic of emotions and their impact on perception, cognition, and memory in social and personal relationships. Theory and research on the nature and development of emotion knowledge structures and emotional intelligence in relationships is also discussed, along with a consideration of cross-cultural differences in people's understandings about the nature of, and relationship between, thinking and feeling. The article closes with a call for a more integrated understanding of and feeling for the dynamics of social and personal relationships.

We examined the relation between children's social cognitions about playing with girls and boys and their self-reported and actual play partner preferences. A total of 184 young children (92 girls, 92 boys; 41-82 months old) answered questions about their preferences for playing with hypothetical peers, their beliefs about others' approval for their playing with these children, and their predictions of other children's play preferences. To assess actual play preferences, a sub-sample of 40 children was observed in naturally occurring free-play peer interactions. Results showed that children held gender-typed beliefs about other children's play partner preferences and these beliefs were stronger for older children. Children also believed that others would be more likely to approve of their behavior when they played with same-sex peers than with other-sex peers, and this belief was stronger in older children. When asked about their own preferences, children reported strong same-sex play partner preferences, which increased with age. Observations confirmed that children have same-sex preferences. Children's gender-typed cognitions about play partners correlated with play partner preferences: the more gender-typed the belief, the more children preferred same-sex playmates. The relation between age and playmate preference was mediated by children's beliefs about others, suggesting a possible causal link between changing gender cognitions and increased tendencies to prefer same-sex partners. Thus, social cognitions may account, in part, for age changes in sex segregation.

Previous research has demonstrated attachment-schematic processing of attachment-related stories when attachment-related memories are activated before exposure to a story. This study investigated the possibility of obtaining attachment-schematic processing without the activation of attachment-related memories. Undergraduate participants provided attachment style self-ratings and several weeks later read either a positive or negative version of a friendship story. After a distractor task, they took a recall test about the story. Secure and fearful attachment ratings were positively associated with recall of focal story events, relative to peripheral story details, when participants read the negative story. However, secure attachment was associated with recall of focal events involving the friends' joint activities, whereas fearful attachment was associated with recall of those involving their separate activities. These and other results are discussed in terms of attachment-related models of self and other.

The affective priming paradigm developed by Murphy and Zajonc (1993) was adapted to assess an automatic evaluative response to friends (n = 100) or romantic partners (n = 101). It was investigated how a brief presentation of the first names and faces of relationship partners modulated the evaluation of immediately following Chinese letters. The visibility of the primes was manipulated by either masking the primes or not. In the low visibility condition, the Chinese letters were more positively evaluated when they were preceded by the name or face of the relationship partner than when they were preceded by the participant's name or face. In the high visibility condition, a similar but stronger effect was found for face primes, and no effect for name primes. All priming effects were replicated for friends and romantic partners. The short-term stability of individual priming effects was low. No significant relations between priming effects and relationship satisfaction or attachment styles were found. The results suggest that affect is an integral part of the relationship schema, but that the amplitude of this evaluative reaction does not reflect individual differences in relationship satisfaction or attachment styles.

Theoretical models of the interpersonal roots of self-esteem emphasize people's expectations about whether they can anticipate acceptance and affiliation in significant relationships. Men and women (n = 182), of high and low self-esteem, were compared in terms of their if-then expectations regarding interactions with significant others. Participants completed the Interpersonal Schema Questionnaire (Hill & Safran, 1994), which assesses the degree of affiliation and dominance that people expect from others. Overall, participants expected response complementarity, with their own friendliness leading to affiliation from others, and submission leading to dominance. Consistent with interpersonal models of self-esteem, high self-esteem individuals reported greater confidence that being friendly would draw affiliative responses from others. Compared with men, women expected more affiliative responses to their friendly overtures, and also expected affiliative responses to submissiveness.

The romantic ideology is a pervasive construct in Western culture, but we know relatively little about how it influences the unfolding of particular relationships. One purpose of this investigation was to examine how romantic beliefs are related to love for partner, other positive feelings in the relationship, and the stability of the relationship. A second purpose was to examine how romantic beliefs change with the passage of time and with relationship transitions. Longitudinal data from a sample of romantic couples were analyzed to examine these issues. At Time 1, romantic beliefs (Romantic Beliefs Scale) were associated positively with love, satisfaction, and commitment. However, very little evidence was found that romantic beliefs contributed to a change in these feelings over time. Furthermore, partners' romanticism scores were not predictive of whether the relationship lasted or broke up over the 4 years of the study. Participants' scores on the romanticism scale tended to decrease over time, although couples who became engaged during the study did not experience a decrease (or an increase) in their romanticism during the transition. Couples who broke up during the study experienced a substantial decrease in their endorsement of romantic beliefs from before to after the breakup.

This study focuses on beliefs about intimate relationships, and how these beliefs are related to individuals' experiences in ongoing romantic relationships. More specifically, we examined how unrealistic beliefs contributed to commitment and components of the investment model (rewards, costs, match to ideal comparison level, alternatives, investment size, barriers). Two types of beliefs were examined: unrealistic gendered beliefs focused on assumptions about irreconcilable differences in men and women's relational needs, whereas unrealistic relationship-specific beliefs reflected standards about perfection and mindreading in interactions with one's romantic partner. Females' unrealistic gendered beliefs and relationship-specific beliefs were associated with more alternatives, lower match to ideal comparison levels, and lower commitment. Regression analyses indicated that components of the investment model mediated the relationship between (i) commitment and gendered relationship beliefs and (ii) commitment and relationship-specific beliefs for females. Males' gendered beliefs were not related to commitment or any component of the investment model; relationship-specific beliefs were associated with greater costs and greater alternatives. No mediating effects in the relationship between commitment and relationship-specific beliefs were detected for males. The results are discussed in the context of previous research and gender socialization.