It Happened to a Friend of Mine: The Influence of Perspective-Taking on the Acknowledgement of Sexual Assault Following Ambiguous Sexual Encounters

Failure to acknowledge that one has been the victim of sexual violence is an important, yet understudied, barrier that prevents women from seeking appropriate support following sexual violence. Drawing from a literature of demonstrating the benefits of self-distancing when evaluating emotionally charged personal information, the effects of self-distancing on acknowledgement of sexual assault were tested. Four experimental studies (Ntotal=1,609) manipulated perspective-taking, either by asking women to imagine a series of hypothetical sexual encounters as experiences that happened to themselves or to their friends, or by asking women to describe a sexual experience from a first-or third-person perspective. Findings from the studies suggest that taking another person’s perspective can help women to label ambiguous sexual experiences as more inappropriate and coercive. Notably, this did not seem to stem from women downplaying or dismissing experiences when they imagined themselves, as they reported anticipating more negative and less positive emotions in the scenarios where they imagined themselves compared to a friend. Nonetheless, in spite of the stronger anticipated negative emotional response when imagining themselves, women were less open to information about resources associated with sexual assault and support when they imagined themselves compared to a friend. This pattern of findings replicated for own, past sexual experiences but only to the extent that women spontaneously engaged in distanced perspective-taking themselves. This research suggests in addition to using contextual information to disambiguate and determine whether a sexual experience was inappropriate, taking a distanced perspective might provide a route through which women can come to terms with the experience and open up to the use of community-based services and sexual assault resources

Socially connected and COVID-19 prepared: The influence of sociorelational safety on perceived importance of COVID-19 precautions and trust in government responses.

COVID-19 caused unprecedented social disruption the likes of which many people had not seen since the Second World War. In order to stop the spread of the virus, most nations were required to enforce strict social distancing precautions, including orders to shelter in place and national lockdowns. However, worries over whether citizens would become fatigued by precautions that constrain personal liberties made some governments hesitant to enact lockdown and social distancing measures early on in the pandemic. When people feel that their social worlds are responsive to their needs, they become more trusting and more willing to sacrifice on behalf of others. Thus, people may view COVID-19 precautions more positively and be more trusting in government responses to such an event if they are inclined to see their sociorelational world as supporting their connectedness needs. In the current study (N = 300), UK residents who were more satisfied that their close others fulfilled their connectedness needs at the start of the government-mandated lockdown, perceived COVID-19 precautions as more important and more effective than those who were relatively dissatisfied in how their connectedness needs were being met, and reported greater trust in the government’s management of the pandemic. These effects persisted in a follow-up one month later. Implications for how society and governments can benefit from the investment in social connectedness and satisfaction, and future directions are discussed

Do older adults construct more emotionally gratifying social environments than younger adults? Evidence from a social network decision task

Do older adults construct more emotionally gratifying social environments than younger adults? According to socioemotional selectivity theory (SST), older adults actively construct their social environments to satisfy emotional goals, drawing closer to gratifying close others and pruning less rewarding persons. Yet, there is a scarcity of direct evidence showing that older adults indeed construct more gratifying social environments by pruning negative persons and by drawing closer to positive persons. We employed a novel social network decision task to study age-related differences in the emotional composition of social environments that people construct and associations with emotional experience. In three studies, participants spanning the adult age range constructed hypothetical social environments, choosing among players according to their performance on word search puzzles and valenced feedback provided by the players about the participants’ own performance. Positive valence players always provided positive feedback, whereas negative valence players always provided negative feedback. Our findings partially support SST but draw a theoretically important distinction between pruning existing social environments and constructing new social environments. When pruning an existing social environment, older adults maintained more positive as well as more negative valence players. Conversely, when required to include players to construct their social environment, older adults produced more positive social environments by excluding negative valence players. The social environment participants constructed was associated with their emotional experience, but our findings suggest that emotion drives gratifying social choices rather than vice versa. Implications for lifespan theory of motivation are discussed

Home is Where the Heart is: Implications of Dyadic Acculturation for Migrant Couples' Personal and Relational Well-being

Acculturation—the process through which people adopt the sociocultural values of their heritage and settlement cultures—is a complex experience, particularly within family structures. Although the consequences of acculturation gaps between parents and children have been studied extensively, the consequences for migrant couples are often overlooked. We propose that acculturation gaps in migrant couples are likely detrimental for personal and relational well-being. To test this, a study of 118 migrant couples with the same heritage culture and now living in the UK was conducted. Acculturation gaps in our studies were conceptualised as both within-person and within-couple, and their impact on personal well-being and relationship quality was tested using APIM. Results suggest that although within-couple acculturation gaps negatively impacted personal well-being, they were not necessarily harmful to relationship quality. Interestingly, within-person acculturation gaps had dyadic consequences, with one person’s specifically contributing to their partners’ personal well-being

Come on, give it to me baby: Self-esteem, narcissism, and endorsing sexual coercion following social rejection

Endorsement and acceptance of sexually coercive strategies as a means to an end contributes to the global problem of sexual victimization. The current research tests how personality traits that make people sensitive to rejection (i.e., self-esteem) and predisposed to non-communal attitudes (i.e., narcissism) interact with a situational factor—perceived social rejection—to predict when people endorse the use of sexual coercion. This work also explores whether different facets of narcissism better predict endorsement of coercion than others. Participants in two online studies (Ntotal = 740), completed background measures including the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale and the Narcissistic Admiration and Rivalry Questionnaire. Next, participants were randomly assigned to write about a recent incident of rejection or acceptance by a close other. Finally, endorsement of sexual coercion was measured using a questionnaire (adapted from Shackelford & Goetz, 2004). Consistent with predictions, across two studies, single (but not romantically attached) people with high narcissism and low self-esteem were more likely to endorse sexual coercion following reminders of rejection by close others. Our findings demonstrate that personality and situational factors interact to predict endorsement of sexual coercion, and that focusing on either alone might obscure the path to understanding the “whos” and “whens” of sexual assault

Hand-in-hand in the golden years: Cognitive interdependence, partner involvement in retirement planning, and the transition into retirement

This research examined the influence of cognitive interdependence—a mental state reflecting a collective representation of the self-in-relationship—on the anticipation for and experiences with the transition into retirement. Among soon-to-be retirees (Study 1), greater cognitive interdependence was associated with seeing partners as more instrumental to one’s goals both pre- and post-retirement, anticipating greater goal alignment post-retirement, and having directly involved partners in retirement planning to a greater extent than those relatively lower in cognitive interdependence. Among recent retirees (Study 2), retrospective cognitive interdependence was associated with post-retirement goal alignment and goal instrumentality, and the extent to which they believed they had directly involved their partners in retirement planning. However, it was post-retirement goal alignment that was associated with greater ease of retirement and subjective well-being. Finally, soon-to-be retirees relatively high in cognitive interdependence responded to concerns about their retirement (i.e., goal discordance and high retirement ambivalence) by wanting to involve their partners in their retirement plans to a greater extent (Study 3). These studies highlight the importance of romantic partners across the lifespan, and how partners might influence retirement planning, the transition to retirement, and well-being among recent retirees

Implicitly imprinting the past on the present: Automatic partner attitudes and the transition to parenthood

A new model is proposed to explain how automatic partner attitudes affect how couples cope with major life transitions. The Automatic Partner Attitudes in Transition (APAT) model assumes that people simultaneously possess contextualized automatic attitudes toward their partner that can differ substantively in valence pre- and post-transition. It further assumes that evaluatively inconsistent pre- and post-transition automatic partner attitudes elicit heightened behavioral angst or uncertainty, self-protective behavior in response to risk, and relationship distress. A longitudinal study of the transition to first parenthood supported the model. People with evaluatively inconsistent automatic partner attitudes, whether more negative pre-transition and positive post-transition, or more positive pre-transition and negative post-transition, exhibited heightened evidence of cardiovascular threat discussing conflicts, increased self-protective behavior in response to parenting-related transgressions in daily interaction, and steeper declines in relationship well-being in the year following the transition to parenthood

The Social-Safety System: Fortifying Relationships in the Face of the Unforeseeable

A model of the social-safety system is proposed to explain how people sustain a sense of safety in the relational world when they are not able to foresee the behavior of others. In this model, people can escape the acute anxiety posed by agents in their personal relational world behaving unexpectedly (e.g., spouse, child) by defensively imposing well-intentioned motivations on the agents controlling their sociopolitical relational world (e.g., President, Congress). Conversely, people can escape the acute anxiety posed by sociopolitical agents behaving unexpectedly by defensively imposing well-intentioned motivations on the agents controlling their personal relational world. Two daily diary studies, a longitudinal study of the 2018 midterm election, and a 3-year longitudinal study of newlyweds supported the hypotheses. On a daily basis, people who were less certain they could trust their romantic partner defended against acutely unforeseeable behavior in one relational world by affirming faith in the well-intentioned motivations of agents in the alternate world. Moreover, when people were more in the personal daily habit of finding safety in the alternate relational world in the face of the unexpected, those who were initially uncertain they could trust their romantic partner later evidenced greater comfort depending on their personal relationship partners