Understanding the Role of Automatic Partner Attitudes in Relationship Functioning

Project Information

AutoRelationPun

Grant agreement ID: 101030641

DOI

10.3030/101030641

Project closed

EC signature date 22 March 2021

Start date 1 September 2022

End date 31 August 2025

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Total cost

€ 253 052,16

EU contribution

€ 253 052,16

Coordinated by

STICHTING RADBOUD UNIVERSITEIT
Netherlands

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - AutoRelationPun (Understanding the Role of Automatic Partner Attitudes in Relationship Functioning)

Reporting period: 2024-09-01 to 2025-08-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Romantic relationships are essential for promoting health and reducing mortality risks. However, remaining satisfied with a long-term romantic partner is notoriously difficult, as illustrated by the fact that divorce rates hover around 30-50% in most industrialised societies. Although research shows that how partners respond to one another defines well-functioning relationships, the origins of such crucial behaviour remain largely unknown. How can we explain why partners behave the way they do? We argue that studying automatic partner attitudes (i.e. one's spontaneous evaluations toward the partner), as assessed by implicit measures, is key to better understand and promote the functioning and the well-being of relationships. Because they are less sensitive to the positive illusions and other motivated reasoning processes that are ubiquitous in relationships, we posit that automatic partner attitudes reflect the pattern of affective experiences that people encounter with their partner and, thus, are the primary source of behaviour toward that partner. The overarching goal of the present project was to tackle this issue and test the crucial role of automatic partner attitudes for relationship functioning in two lines of research, using a combination of fine-grained longitudinal, observational and experimental methods. In the first line of research, we identified how these attitudes form and affect behaviour in dyadic interactions. Sampling real-life experiences from romantic couples over different time spans revealed that automatic partner attitudes uniquely capture the accumulation of relationship experiences over time and, in turn, predict certain behaviours that are central for relationship functioning. In the second line of research, we sought to intervene on such attitudes to improve relationship satisfaction. While both interventions improved relationship satisfaction, they did not affect automatic partner attitudes or behaviours. Taken together, these findings indicate that automatic partner attitudes play a central role in close relationships, but also highlight the challenge of directly targeting such attitudes through short-term interventions. By taking this integrative approach, the project advances research in relationship science, social cognition, and attitudes, while also informing strategies that can help couples and benefit society.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

To achieve the objectives of both research lines, we have conducted an intensive 9-month longitudinal intervention study among 125 romantic couples. This study examined how automatic partner attitudes relate to relationship experiences and affect relationship behaviours through videotaped interactions, daily, weekly, and monthly reports, while also testing the effectiveness of two interventions that target such attitudes. The longitudinal assessments revealed that automatic partner attitudes fluctuated based on the accumulation of both positive and negative relationship experiences over time, particularly those charged with strong affect. This pattern suggests that automatic partner attitudes may reflect one’s history of relationship experiences, and perhaps more accurately than self-reports. Moreover, automatic partner attitudes also uniquely predicted a variety of behaviours critical for relationship functioning and well-being, even when self-reported attitudes did not. Specifically, automatic partner attitudes more strongly predicted spontaneous behaviours exhibited in videotaped conversations and in daily diaries, as well as more general behaviours in situations where opportunities for effortful processing were limited. Importantly, these behavioural effects appeared to have downstream consequences for satisfaction: more positive automatic partner attitudes were associated with more functional (and less dysfunctional) behaviours toward the partner, which in turn predicted higher relationship satisfaction over time. Then, we implemented two experimental manipulations to test the causal role of automatic partner attitudes: a relational-expansion procedure to examine whether engaging in new and exciting activities with the partner can enhance automatic partner attitudes and in turn improve relationship functioning and well-being; and a mindfulness training protocol to examine whether such training enables participants to become more aware of their automatic partner attitudes and better equipped to accept and regulate them and in turn promote relationship quality. While both interventions appeared to improve relationship satisfaction, they did not seem to affect automatic partner attitudes or behaviours. That is, couples benefited from both the relational-expansion procedure and mindfulness training, but these effects were not explained by more positive attitudes or greater awareness and regulation of automatic attitudes. Overall, the findings suggest that automatic partner attitudes play a central role in romantic relationships. However, interventions designed to enhance or better regulate such attitudes proved challenging, indicating that longer or more intensive approaches may be needed to effectively leverage automatic partner attitudes for relationship well-being. These results have been disseminated through presentations at conferences, invited talks, and local events. A theoretical review that critically discusses evidence on the sources and antecedents of automatic partner attitudes in close relationships, identifies unanswered questions, and proposes a comprehensive agenda for future research, has also been published in open access.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

This longitudinal intervention study is the first to examine how automatic partner attitudes, as assessed by three distinct implicit measures, form and impact relationships in everyday life, while also intervening on such attitudes to test their causal power. This is a significant innovation because most prior research on automatic partner attitudes has been correlational and fragmented, typically focusing on one type of relationship experience or behaviour, and relying on only one implicit measure. The study combines both in-lab and at-home sessions to take advantage of the controlled laboratory environment while capturing participants' experiences in their natural settings. The in-lab sessions involve videotaped interactions to provide objective behavioural indicators, whereas the at-home sessions involve daily diaries and monthly reports that offer a detailed understanding of how relationship processes fluctuate on a day-to-day basis while also tracking changes over longer periods. Further, our relational-expansion procedure was the first to test whether ecologically valid interventions can enhance automatic partner attitudes and, in turn, improve relationship functioning and well-being. Similarly, our mindfulness intervention was the first to examine whether people can become more aware of and better regulate their automatic partner attitudes, and whether this can benefit their relationship. Such empirical tests were important since it had long been assumed that both relational-expansion and mindfulness effects might operate through either more positive or more awareness and better regulation of automatic partner attitude—two assumptions for which we did not find strong support so far. Our data thus advance the field by emphasising the importance of designing intensive intervention materials to improve relationships through automatic partner attitudes.

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