Automatic Inattention to Attractive Alternative Partners Helps Male Heterosexual Chinese College Students Maintain Romantic Relationships

Abstract

Heterosexual individuals may possess evolved psychological mechanisms that help protect their ongoing romantic relationships against external threats from other attractive individuals. The current study used love priming and a dot-probe task to examine the attentional bias associated with long-term relationship maintenance by comparing between 52 single heterosexual men and 57 heterosexual men in exclusive romantic relationships, in the Chinese context. The results showed that single men responded to love priming with greatly increased attention to and difficulty disengaging from attractive women, whereas committed men were largely inattentive to attractive alternatives irrespective of the situation. The present findings provide evidence on the domain of relationship maintenance from a Chinese cultural context, and suggest that Chinese men protect an ongoing relationship by being automatically inattentive in early-stage attentional processing to attractive women who could serve as attractive alternatives.

Manipulation of Self-Expansion Alters Responses to Attractive Alternative Partners

“…task that has proven successful in several previous studies of interest in potential alternatives (e.g., Maner et al, 2008). That is, although the predicted pattern was found for memory, it was not significant for attention.…”

“…Prior to viewing the trait/photo pairs participants were told that they would take part in a subsequent memory test so they should try to remember as many of the photo-attribute pairings as possible. Participants then completed a dot-probe computer task used to measure visual attention to attractive alternatives (for a complete description, see Maner et al, 2008or Maner et al, 2009. Finally, following the attention task, approximately 12 min after initially encoding the photo/trait pairs, participants were tested on their recall for the attributephoto pairings by viewing each of the 10 photos (10 s each) on a computer screen and listing (on paper) the associated trait for each photo.…”

“…Romantic love also seems to reduce attention to alternatives, and perhaps deters infidelity. Maner et al (2008) found that priming thoughts and feelings of romantic love for one's current partner reduced attention to photos of physically attractive alternatives in a visual cueing measure. In this study, participants were assigned to either a romantic love condition (in which they wrote a brief essay about a time they experienced strong feelings of love for their current partner) or a control condition (in which they wrote about a time they felt extremely happy).…”

“…There were 10 photos total-5 associated with traits the participant had rated characteristic of the partner; 5 with traits the participant had rated as not characteristic of the partner. The 10 attractive, opposite-sex faces were adapted from past research (e.g., Maner et al, 2008Maner et al, , 2009. Mean attractiveness ratings (1-7 scale) were 4.16 for female photos, and 4.06 for male.…”

“…12 blocks of videos were followed by 3 photos of faces (sometimes all male, sometimes all female, but never mixed). These photos were successfully used in past studies (e.g., Maner et al, 2008;Maner et al, 2009) to measure visual attention to attractive faces. 4 blocks (38 s videos) per video type (selfexpansion, love, neutral), 2 followed by male and 2 followed by female faces (5 s presentations each).…”