This review specifies how individuals' relationship power (actor power) and their partners' power (partner power) influence distinct behaviors in close relationships. High-power actors can promote their own needs, whereas low-power actors must inhibit their needs or enact aggression or manipulation to fight for their needs. Actors must also accommodate the needs of high-power partners but can neglect or may feel obliged to protect low-power partners.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe continued prevalence of sexism and gender inequalities across the world is a priority for research. We meta-analyzed all research since the inception of ambivalent sexism theory (1996-2023) that measured hostile sexism (i.e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPers Soc Psychol Bull
April 2025
Power emerges from the relational dynamics between two people, but it is often studied as a feature of the individual. The current studies apply a dyadic perspective to show that core relational beliefs not only shape actors' relationship power but also generate behaviors that constrain their partner's power. Across five studies with Israeli, German, and New Zealand couples (total 1,256 dyads), greater attachment avoidance and anxiety were associated with lower actor power.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPeople disclose many aspects of their sexuality to close partners, such as their sexual attitudes, history, and behaviors, which is established to be beneficial for their own and their relationship well-being. However, evidence on the extent to which people engage in sexual self-disclosure and the predictors (i.e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPeople in the LGBTQIA+ community (i.e., lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, asexual, and other gender/sexual minorities) experience greater rates of intimate partner aggression (IPA) than the general population and have fewer help-seeking pathways available.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe examined associations between sexist beliefs and tolerance of violence against women in India using a nationally representative probability sample of adults ( = 133,398). Research consistently indicates that hostile sexism fosters tolerance of violence against women. However, benevolent sexism is sometimes associated with higher tolerance and sometimes with lower tolerance of violence.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Pers Soc Psychol
February 2023
Interpersonal power involves how much actors can influence partners (actor power) and how much partners can influence actors (partner power). Yet, most theories and investigations of power conflate the effects of actor and partner power, creating a fundamental ambiguity in the literature regarding how power shapes social behavior. We demonstrate that actor and partner power are distinct and have differential effects on social behavior.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAust N Z J Public Health
October 2022
Objective: We investigated the characteristics of loneliness by identifying distinct 'profiles' of loneliness and investigating transitions between those loneliness profiles over two years.
Method: We conducted Latent Transition Analyses on two years of data from the New Zealand Attitudes and Values Study (N=15,820) and modelled how people's health and age were associated with changes in profile membership.
Results: Four loneliness profiles emerged: 'low-loneliness' (58% of the sample), 'high-loneliness' (5%), 'appreciated outsiders' (28%; perceived acceptance from others but felt like social outsiders), and 'superficially connected' (9%; lacked acceptance from others but felt socially included).
The current research examined the phenomenon of fading affect bias - the tendency for affect associated with negative events to fade more than affect associated with positive events - within the context of romantic relationships. Participants recalled and evaluated positive and negative relationship-specific and non-relationship autobiographical events. Participants also completed measures of attachment avoidance and anxiety.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntimate relationships are a principal source of emotional support, which fosters recipients' health and well-being. Yet, being in a position to provide support can be stressful, particularly if people are burdened with their own emotional difficulties, and such stress may interfere with people's ability to behave in emotionally supportive ways. Three dyadic studies tested whether greater depressive symptoms were associated with experiencing stress when in a position to provide support to intimate partners, and whether greater stress in turn predicted partners receiving less emotional support.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIs having children related to benevolent sexism? Two theoretical accounts-benevolent sexism as role justification and benevolent sexism as a mating strategy-suggest the possibility of a positive and bidirectional association. Gender disparities in childrearing could prompt inequality-justifying endorsement of benevolent sexism and/or endorsing benevolent sexism could promote traditional gender roles that facilitate having more children. We assessed the bidirectional associations between individuals' number of children and their endorsement of benevolent sexism over a two-year period in a large national panel sample of New Zealanders (N = 6,017).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground And Purpose: Brain tissue-resident microglia and monocyte-derived macrophages (MDMs) are innate immune cells that contribute to the inflammatory response, phagocytosis of debris, and tissue repair after injury. We have previously reported that both microglia and MDMs transition from proinflammatory to reparative phenotypes over days after an intracerebral hemorrhage (ICH). However, their individual functional properties in the brain remain largely unknown.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFGiven the powerful implications of relationship quality for health and well-being, a central mission of relationship science is explaining why some romantic relationships thrive more than others. This large-scale project used machine learning (i.e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHostile sexism expresses derogation of women's competence emphasizes that women will exploit men's relational dependence. Men who endorse hostile sexism perceive their female partners more negatively, but do these negative perceptions stem from motives for dominance or insecurities about dependence? We tested both perspectives by assessing bias in perceptions of partners' behaviors that challenge (criticism, instruction, taking over) versus affirm partners are (love, care, availability). Both members of 100 heterosexual couples reported how much they received and enacted these behaviors in (a) a lab-based discussion and (b) six monthly retrospective reports about an ongoing important goal.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPurpose: To compare visual outcomes, quality of vision and patient satisfaction between a blended apodized diffractive bifocal lens combination and bilateral implantation of an extended depth of focus intraocular lens (IOL).
Patients And Methods: Subjects implanted with either the blended bifocal (Blended) or bilateral extended depth of focus (EDOF) IOL combinations were examined 3 to 24 months after second eye surgery. The primary outcome measure was the patient's best distance-corrected near visual acuity (VA) at 40cm.
Greater habitual emotional suppression (ES)-assessed by the suppression subscale of the emotion regulation questionnaire (ERQ-ES; Gross & John, 2003) and the Courtauld emotion control scale (CECS; Watson & Greer, 1983)-is associated with a range of negative outcomes, which are assumed to arise because habitual ES measures capture the tendency to use ES in response to emotions. The current studies directly test whether habitual ES measures actually capture the response-focused use of ES when emotions arise within social interactions. We conduct these validation tests by integrating measures of habitual ES with naturalistic assessments of negative emotions and the situational use of ES during emotionally relevant interactions with romantic partners (Study 1, = 200; Study 3, = 170) and social interactions with close others in daily life (Study 2, = 430).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMaintaining autonomy in interdependent relationships is challenging, particularly for people high in attachment avoidance, who prioritize independence. Invisible support involves indirect, subtle behaviors that minimize the salience of dependence and encourage self-driven problem solving and thus should facilitate autonomy. The current research tested whether partners' invisible support during couples' discussions of personal goals (N = 200 dyadic discussions) facilitated goal-related autonomy immediately and across time for recipients high in attachment avoidance.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe current research examined the links between depressive symptomology and anxiety on the fading of affect associated with positive and negative autobiographical memories. Participants (N = 296) recalled and rated positive and negative events in terms of how pleasant or unpleasant they were at the time they occurred and at the time of event recollection. Multilevel mediation analyses identified evidence that higher levels of depressive symptoms were directly associated with lower affect fade for both negative and positive memories.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPers Soc Psychol Bull
July 2019
Indirect support seeking involves sulking, whining, and/or displaying sadness to elicit social support. Ironically, this strategy tends to backfire by prompting rejection from close others. The current research examines how low self-esteem contributes to the use and relational consequences of indirect support seeking during couples' interactions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPers Soc Psychol Bull
July 2019
We examine how relational needs underlie sexism by conducting a meta-analysis ( k = 22; N = 4,860) on the links between adults' romantic attachment and endorsement of ambivalent sexism. Results across two random-effects meta-analytic methods supported that men's and women's attachment anxiety predicted stronger endorsement of both benevolent sexism and hostile sexism. Simultaneously, men's attachment avoidance predicted lower endorsement of benevolent sexism, and for men in relationships (vs.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMacrophages are a source of both proinflammatory and restorative functions in damaged tissue through complex dynamic phenotypic changes. Here, we sought to determine whether monocyte-derived macrophages (MDMs) contribute to recovery after acute sterile brain injury. By profiling the transcriptional dynamics of MDMs in the murine brain after experimental intracerebral hemorrhage (ICH), we found robust phenotypic changes in the infiltrating MDMs over time and demonstrated that MDMs are essential for optimal hematoma clearance and neurological recovery.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPers Soc Psychol Bull
August 2017
Prior research on effective support interactions in intimate relationships often focuses on support provision rather than how people seek support. The current study investigated how differences in relationship autonomy-authentic and self-determined relationship motivations-predicted the behavior and outcomes of couples ( N = 80) in support interactions. Results indicated that support seekers' motivation and behavior were the primary contributor to effective support interactions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThere is debate about the abstractness of young children's self-concepts-specifically, whether they include representations of (a) general traits and abilities and (b) the global self. Four studies (N = 176 children aged 4-7) suggested these representations are indeed part of early self-concepts. Studies 1 and 2 reexamined prior evidence that young children cannot represent traits and abilities.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Loneliness has many negative physical and mental health ramifications and is most prevalent among vulnerable social groups. However, little is known about how loneliness is grouped within the population and the characteristics of those groups.
Methods: We conducted a Latent Profile Analysis on 18,264 participants from the fifth wave of the New Zealand Attitudes and Values Study to identify the number of distinct loneliness profiles in the population.