Intimate Relationship Maintenance Mechanisms In The Face Of Attractive Alternatives

The establishment and maintenance of close relationship have been shown to be an important contributor to psychological and physical well-being, which plays a critical role in our existence, development and reproduction. However,maintaining relationships is a difficult task. One of the greatest potential threats to the stability of a romantic relationship is attractive others of one’s alternative. The availability of attractive alternatives is thought to cause infidelity, thereby increasing the risk of relationship dissolution. Fortunately, some people are able to resist the temptation of attractive alternatives. As might be expected from a motivated cognition approach to close relationships, individuals in committed romantic relationships will sometimes devalue attractive others, even avoid attention to attractive alternatives at early stages of attentional processing, which can be called as relationship maintenance mechanisms. Psychological mechanisms designed for relationship maintenance may operate at several different stages of cognition. In addition, some studies showed that executive control helps romantically involved individuals to deal with the lure of attractive alternatives and stay faithful. The objectives of the present research were to further explore relationship maintenance mechanisms in the face of attractive alternatives by examining both single participants and those in committed relationships.Althought numerous empirical papers have cited and endorsed the devaluation of alternatives effect, the negative evaluation model has not been validated consistently, it might be influenced by the level of threat awareness and relationship commitment. Given that the type of judgement should matter in the level of threat elicited, in study 1, we recored participants’assessment for pictures of opposite sex in terms of physical attractiveness and desirability as a romantic partner. We found that singles provided the same high ratings in the two terms, but those in committed relationships provided lower ratings of romantic appeal than attractiveness. In addition, level of commitment was shown to predict cognitive assessment for alternative others negatively, low-commitment daters did rate the alternatives as more attractive and romantic appealing than high-commitment daters. These results revealed that the devaluation of alternatives effect depends on the level of threat awareness (social estimate situation) and relationship commitment.Study 2 examined whether individuals in committed relationships were able to perceive beauty quickly and under what circumstances avoid attending to attractive alternatives at early stages of attentional processing. We used priming procedures to activate mental representations associated with mating which means mating opportunity for singles and relational threats to committed individuals. After undergoing priming, participants performed an adapted version of the visual dot-probe procedure used by Maner et al. (2007,2008), allowing us to measure the extent to which attentional adhesion—the extent to which each opposite sex target captures participants’attention. We found that whereas single participants responded to mating primes with greater selective attention to attractive opposite-sex targets (versus less attractive targets), participants already in a committed romantic relationship showed no such bias. This is consistent with the possibility that, as a way of maintaining their relationships, committed people regulate their attention in a way that helps them avoid the temptation of desirable alternatives to their current long-term partner.Executive control is involved in inhibiting a planned or ongoing motor response to changes in the environment or internal state, which core aspects are attention and inhibition processes. It helps committed individuals to deal with the lure of attractive alternatives and stay faithful. In study 3, we applied the stop-signal task to explore the direct inhibition mechanism. We found no difference between singles and committed people in general response inhibition, but only committed people showed a more effective inhibition of attractive alternatives responses than less attractive opposite sex. The results revealed that when inhibiton was clearly required, committed people showed stronger inhibitory action to attractive alternatives that might threaten the stability of the current relationships, which can be incorporated into relationship maintenance mechanisms.In conclusion, the present study explored relationship maintenance mechanisms at several different stages of cognition, included cognitive devaluation based on consciousness, attentional disengagement and inhibitory control in relatively automatic cognitive levels (outside of conscious awareness).