Do people realize how their partners make them feel? Relationship enhancement motives and stress determine the link between implicitly assessed partner attitudes and relationship satisfaction.

Abstract

Do people realize the evaluative feelings that are spontaneously activated by their partner? If so, do they use those evaluations when judging their romantic relationships? To answer these questions, we investigated the association between automatic partner attitudes and judgments of relationship satisfaction in 7 studies. Study 1 was a meta-analysis of 86 correlations that revealed a very weak association between implicitly and explicitly assessed relationship evaluations, and Studies 2a-2c revealed that people failed to accurately report their automatic partner attitudes even when specifically asked to do so. Consistent with the idea that such inaccuracy emerged in part because motivational factors led people to override their automatic attitudes, Studies 3 and 4 demonstrated that automatic partner attitudes better aligned with relationship judgments when people were incentivized with money (Study 3) and had dissolved their relationship (Study 4). Nevertheless, consistent with the idea that overriding automatic attitudes requires the opportunity to deliberate, Studies 4 and 5 demonstrated that automatic partner attitudes better aligned with relationship judgments when people experienced more stress at the daily level (Study 4) and yearly for two years (Study 5). In Study 5, the interaction between stress and automatic attitudes emerged controlling indicators of negativity and was further moderated by relationship enhancing motivations among wives. These studies (a) help explain why automatic partner attitudes predict self-reported relationship satisfaction over time and (b) provide support for theories of social cognition suggesting that people have access to implicitly assessed attitudes that is obscured by motivations and opportunities to deliberate.

Implicit Ambivalence: A Driving Force to Improve Relationship Problems

“…First, future research should examine whether explicit ambivalence has similar implications and whether implicit ambivalence offers incremental predictive validity beyond such effects. Given that different types of measures (implicit vs. self-report; Hicks et al, 2020) and different types of ambivalence (objective vs. subjective, explicit vs. implicit; (van Harreveld et al, 2015;Zayas et al, 2017) are weakly associated and frequently have different effects, we expect implicit ambivalence does in fact offer incremental predictive validity, but future work would prove informative. Second, future research may also benefit from examining how implicit ambivalence relates to or translates into explicit ambivalence, which prior work suggests may occur when individuals have more tolerance for conflicting feelings (e.g., dialectical thinkers; Shiota et al, 2010), reduced opportunities to engage in motivated reasoning (e.g., under stress; Hicks et al, 2020), or external threats making their ambivalence salient (e.g., attractive alternatives; Zoppolat et al, 2021).…”

How both partners’ individual differences, stress, and behavior predict change in relationship satisfaction: Extending the VSA model

“…Capturing any tendency for stress to predict behavior, either directly or in interaction with enduring qualities, may require capturing stress experienced at the moment that behavior is enacted. Indeed, prior research has shown that measures of such acute stress have been related to adaptive processes in prior work (49)(50)(51). Acute stressful events may exert such effects because they minimize cognitive capacity and make people more reactive to salient stimuli in the moment (52).…”

Gratitude Increases Recipients’ Commitment Through Automatic Partner Evaluations, Yet Unreciprocated Gratitude Decreases Commitment Through Deliberative Evaluations

“…Future research might benefit by identifying contexts in which this cost of gratitude outweighs the benefits. For example, given that people rely on automatic evaluations more when they lack the cognitive resources to access deliberative evaluations (McNulty & Olson, 2015), the costs of unreciprocated gratitude that emerge through deliberative evaluations might be greater when intimates have the ability and motivation to deliberatively evaluate their relationships (see also Hicks et al, 2020).…”