The Influence Of Loneliness On The Decisions Of Heterosexual Friends In Different Self States

Wonderful love is full of temptation to everyone,especially for college students.Healthy romantic relationships not only can improve the well-being of college students,but also can promote the development of education.A threshold of getting a period of romantic relationship is decisions in romantic relationship,and the consequence of a successful romantic relationship decisions is happiness;otherwise,the failing one often lead to pain.Therefore,although love is beautiful,there is a prerequisite that you must firstly make a wise decision in romantic relationship.Loneliness is a kind of negative emotions,resulting from lacking a satisfying relations.The theory of relational loneliness insist that loneliness would have negative effect on physical and mental health,while the evolutionary theory of loneliness contend that loneliness can act as a kind of signal that you are in dilemma for lacking the communications with others and remind you to rebuild the social relations;and,from this perspective,loneliness may be a important role in a people's development.So,do loneliness have a positive or negative effect on romantic relationship decisions? Unfortunately,there aren't any answers about this question can be found in the previous researches.Thus,the aim of the present research is to explore the role of loneliness in romantic relationship decisions.Specifically,the objective of this study is to examine that individuals “become more lonely because of loneliness” or “speak out love just because of loneliness”.And on this basis,the present research will preliminary explore the mechanism of the effect of loneliness on romantic relationship decisions.In order to realize these objectives,the present research applied the scene task paradigm of romantic relationship decisions on the basis of revising it,and adopted five factor mixed design: 2(gender: male vs female)×2(loneliness: yes vs no)×2(the state of self: actual-self vs ideal-self)×2(stages of decisions: the process of building relations vs the process of maintaining relations)×2(task characteristic: initiative vs adventure).Formal experiment include two research:In the first research,the mainly objective of this study designed is to examine the effect of loneliness on romantic relationship decisions in the circumstance of actual self.The results revealed that:(1)It is the initiative,not the adventure,that is effected by loneliness in the romantic relationship decisions,and those participants who aren't lonely are more initiative than those participants in lonely group in the romantic relationship decisions;(2)Male is more initiative and adventurous than female in the romantic relationship decisions;(3)The interaction between gender and loneliness is statistically significant,that is,only male participants who aren't lonely are more initiative than those male participants in lonely group in the romantic relationship decisions;(4)No matter who is male or female,the initiative in the process ofmaintaining relations is significantly greater than the initiative in the process of building relations,and the amplification between the two process for female is significantly greater than for male;meanwhile,both for male and female,the adventure in the process of maintaining relations is significantly lower than the adventure in the process of building relations,and the decline from building to maintaining has no statistically significance between male and female.To further examine the potential mechanism of the effect of loneliness on romantic relationship decisions,we conducted the second study in two weeks after the first study.The method of the study is to induce the ideal self in aspect of participants' interpersonal competence in order to remove the effect of interpersonal competence on romantic relationship decisions,hence,we can indirectly explore the simple effect of loneliness on romantic relationship decisions,and we found that:(1)In the circumstance of ideal self,there is no statistically significance between those participants who are lonely and those participants who aren't lonely both in initiative and adventure;(2)The state of self has only significantly effect on the process of building relations in romantic relationship decisions;and the participants when he is in ideal self are more initiative and adventurous than when he is in actual self;(3)The scores participants got in initiative is significantly greater than they got in adventure;(4)For the initiative in the process of building relations,the state of self have greater influence on female than male.According to the results above,we can concluded that:(1)Loneliness can hinder male individuals to successfully build romantic relationship with others mainly via lowering their initiative in the process of building relations;(2)The ideal self has no effect on the relation between loneliness and romantic relationship decisions;(3)Romantic relationship decisions include different process,involving different psychological process;(4)Male is more initiative and adventurous than female in romantic relationship decisions.