Winter 2012 Intimate Relationships Psych Final

Front 1

Enhancement motive in relationships

Back 1

Enhancement bias: believing the best about a relationship. A preference for information that supports and strengthens positive beliefs about a partner and a relationship.

People rate their partners higher on positive qualities than their friends do, and higher than the person would rate him/herself. People also believe their own relationships have more positive qualities than other people's relationships.

Front 2

Accuracy motive in relationships

Back 2

Knowing and being known.

Diagnosticity bias: a preference for information that may indicate important qualities in a partner or a relationship. Analyzing specific behaviors, such as a simple glance - can lead people to read meanings into behaviors that may not actually be there.
Confirmation bias: preference for information that supports what we already know about a partner or a relationship.

Front 3

Justification motive in relationships

Back 3

Being right in relationships.

Self-serving bias: the tendency to take credit for our successes and to blame others for our failures. In distressed relationships, focusing on a partner's negative qualities may increase self-esteem by relieving the individual of any responsibility for the failure of the relationship.

Sentiment override: the tendency for partners' global feelings about their relationships to color their perceptions of specific behaviors and experiences. Example: unhappy partners exaggerate their partner's flaws and overlook their positive qualities.

Front 4

Sentiment override

Back 4

Part of the justification motive in relationships.

Sentiment override: the tendency for partners' global feelings about their relationships to color their perceptions of specific behaviors and experiences. Example: unhappy partners exaggerate their partner's flaws and overlook their positive qualities.

Front 5

Commitment calibration hypothesis

Back 5

threats to a relationship should motivate activities to protect the relationship only if the threat is calibrated to partners' levels of commitment.

Only unhappily married people and happy daters should feel THREATENED By a photo of an attractive person and thus derogate (ignore) them.
HAppily married people, secure in their relationship, and unsatisfied dating people, with little investment in their relationships, should not be threatened by the photos and so should not feel the need to derogate them.

Front 6

Empathy Accuracy Model

Back 6

accounts for situations in which partners should be more or less motivated to attend to and understand what the other is thinking and feeling. People can adopt a strategy of "motivated inaccuracy" - faced with the possibility of threatening information about our partners' feelings, we should be less motivated to try and understand those feelings accurately.

Front 7

Contexts and niches (in which relationships exist)

Back 7

refer to developmental transitions, situations, incidents, and chronic and acute circumstances that spouses and couples encounter.
Example: child dying, one person becoming paralyzed, or even simply having a baby

Front 8

Bronfenbrenner's Social Ecological Model - the circle chart

Back 8

Goes from proximal elements on the inside to distal elements on the outside

Couple is in the center.
Next ring is the Microsystem - Home, Workplace, Church, Peer group, Neighborhood, School. How these places affect the couple
Next ring is the Mesosystem - Interconnection between the community in your microsystem.
Next ring is the Exosystem - Religious hierarchy, Educational system, Government agencies, Transit system, Mass media, Commerce and Industry. Getting more distal.
Next ring is the Macrosystem - Dominant beliefs and ideologies.
Outer ring is the Chronosystem - dimension of time.

Front 9

Stress spillover vs. crossover

Back 9

Spillover - from one place to another. from work to home.

Crossover - from person to person. Between partners.

Front 10

2-year study by Christensen and colleagues

Back 10

Testing the effects of Traditional Behavioral Couples therapy vs. Integrative Behavioral Couples therapy - 2 years after treatment, the couples in the two therapies were largely indisinguishable

Front 11

Halford, Sanders, & Behrens, 2001

Back 11

Testing between primary intervention (control group in which couples read a book and met with a counselor, who led a small-group discussion about the book) and secondary intervention (S-PREP - basically TBCT). Couples were either high risk or low risk

Found that high risk couples in the S-PREP group were more satisfied than high-risk couples in the control group. However, low risk couples in the control group were actually more satisfied than low risk couples in the S-PREP group. Effects of treatment are affected by risk status.

Front 12

percentage of women that leave abusive relationships

Back 12

39%

Front 13

Tesser and Beach study

Back 13

demonstrated that people with mid-level stress tend to have higher marital satisfaction.
People with the lowest levels of stress are unable to recognize why they are in a bad mood, and get irritated with their partners.
People with the highest levels of stress are unable to make adjustments for their stress.