Exchange, romantic, and communal cognitive schemata in intimate relationships

This study presents a theory of cognitive relational schemata. It is a theory about the contrasting ways people may construe intimate relationships. Three internal models of intimate relating are proposed for study and named exchange, romantic, and communal.;Studying and delineating relational schemata may help identify dysfunctional patterns of beliefs and expectations for counseling applications. To this end, the associations between the three relational schemata and the quality of love in an intimate relationship were examined.;The study used R. J. Sternberg's Triangular Theory (1986) to conceptualize and assess love. Measures for passion, intimacy, and commitment were reformulated from earlier research to provide an independent test of Sternberg's three-component theory. To tap the negative aspects of relationship absent from his work, a fears of intimacy scale and a distress scale were developed.;The Relationship Questionnaire, a 132-item self-report instrument was designed that included the love and schemata measures and questions on personal and relationship demographics. The questionnaire was distributed on three college campuses to student, staff, and faculty volunteers currently involved in a love relationship, who ranged in age from 16 to 70 years (N = 99).;Data analyses investigated the validity and reliability of the various constructs and their measures and the relationships among the scores on the love components, fears of intimacy, and distress scales, and the relational schemata subscales. The data were generally supportive of the relational schemata theory, Sternberg's formulation of love, the fears of intimacy and distress as two separate negative aspects of relationship, and the hypothesized relationships between the schemata and love. Internal consistency for the love, fears, distress, and the revised exchange and communal subscales was high.;The exchange schema was negatively correlated with intimacy and positively correlated with the fears of intimacy and distress. Conversely, the communal schema was positively correlated with both intimacy and commitment and negatively correlated with the fears of intimacy. Results pertaining to the hypothesized positive association between passion and the romantic schema showed that only the limerent elements of passion were correlated in the predicted direction with two factors that corresponded to subcomponents of the romantic schema.