A 1997 survey of Canadians revealed that bullying occurs once in every seven minutes on the playground and once in every twenty-five minutes in the classroom (Craig and Peplar, 1997). It is my feeling that educators need to be positively proactive and pursue interventions in the classroom, that have the potential to improve relationships, discipline and respect in order to reduce this statistic. This study explored how the adults and students in an individual grade one classroom might build positive relationships in the classroom community. The study was based on the discipline policy of my school division, as stated in the “School Divisions Standard of Behavior” (2006) document and the ideas of Michelle Borba explained in “The Accentuating Respect and Defusing Disrespect Model” (Borba, 2007). Action research data, obtained from the participants, indicated that respect grounded in positive relationships and effective discipline can be introduced to students in an intense one month program, but requires an ongoing relationship between the child and the adult and life-long learning in order to be maintained. / October 2008

There is ample evidence to suggest that, in the context of dating relationships, female-perpetrated intimate abuse is as common as male-perpetrated intimate abuse (e.g., Archer, 2000). Despite awareness of this fact, female-perpetrated intimate abuse remains an understudied area. The current study adds to the available literature on female-perpetrated intimate abuse by examining Dutton’s (2007) theory of the Abusive Personality in a sample of 914 women who had been involved in dating relationships. This is the first study to examine all elements of the Abusive Personality in women simultaneously. Consistent with the Abusive Personality, recalled parental rejection, borderline personality organization (BPO), anger, and trauma symptoms all demonstrated moderate to strong relationships with women’s self-reported intimate psychological abuse perpetration. Fearful attachment style demonstrated a weak to moderate relationship with psychological abuse perpetration. With the exception of fearful attachment, all elements of the Abusive Personality demonstrated a relationship with women’s self-reported intimate violence perpetration. However, these relationships were comparatively weak. A potential model for explaining the interrelationships between the elements of the Abusive Personality was tested using structural equation modeling. This is the first study with either sex to examine all elements of the Abusive Personality simultaneously using structural equation modeling. Consistent with the proposed model, recalled parental rejection demonstrated a relationship with BPO, trauma symptoms, and fearful attachment. Also consistent with the model, trauma symptoms demonstrated a relationship with anger, and BPO demonstrated strong relationships with trauma symptoms, fearful attachment, and anger. Additionally, anger itself had a strong relationship with women’s self-reported perpetration of intimate psychological and physical abuse. Contrary to the proposed model, fearful attachment had a non-significant relationship with anger – when this relationship was examined using structural equation modeling. Based on findings from the current study, fearful attachment has a weaker relationship with college women’s perpetration of intimate abuse than it does with clinical samples’ perpetration of intimate abuse. Following a discussion of the results, limitations of the study are discussed in conjunction with possible future directions for this line of research.

Three correlational studies and 2 experiments examined the influence of agreeable people’s trust on their close relationships. Studies 1-3 employed correlational methods to examine the association between agreeableness and interpersonal trust (felt security; Study 1) and the applicability of the dependence regulation model (Murray, Holmes, & Griffin, 2000) to the romantic relationships of agreeable people (Studies 2 & 3). Studies 4 and 5 employed experimental methods that manipulated felt security (trust) to examine how relationship threats differentially affect agreeable versus antagonistic people (those low in agreeableness). Results indicated that not only does felt security consistently mediate the association between agreeableness and important relationship quality variables, but that this is a causal association. That is, these studies provide evidence that agreeable people have better relationships than antagonistic people because they are chronically more trusting, and hence, less prone to seeing signs of rejection where none exists.

People with low self-esteem (LSEs) often have doubts about how much their romantic partners love and value them. These doubts, which undermine their relationships, are difficult to overcome because LSEs tend to downplay the meaning of positive behaviour and resist positive feedback from their partners. In Study 1, I provided evidence for the notion that LSEs’ “insensitivity” to acceptance is a form of motivated self-protection, rather than a pervasive negative bias. In Studies 2-4, I investigated whether LSEs could be induced to take their partners’ kind words to heart by manipulating how abstractly they described a recent compliment. LSEs felt more positively about the compliments, themselves, and their relationships – as positively as HSEs felt – when they were encouraged to describe the meaning and significance of the compliments. The positive effects of this abstract reframing intervention were still evident two weeks later, in both participants’ self-reported thoughts and feelings about their relationships and in partners’ reports of participants’ behaviour towards them. Study 5 demonstrated that the abstract reframing intervention prevented LSEs from taking a relationship threat to heart and lashing out at their partners. Taken together, the present studies show that when prompted to reframe affirmations from their partners, LSEs feel just as secure and satisfied with their romantic relationships and behave as positively towards their partners as HSEs do.

The purpose of the present study was to assess the developmental and current relational variables that play a role in the development and maintenance of academic identity. Specifically, I was interested in identifying variables that are related to adopting a more autonomously motivated academic identity as previous research indicates that engagement in more autonomously motivated activities is related to greater mental and physical health and greater persistence and performance within the activity. The current study considered the role of developmental autonomy support as well as pressure and control from current relational partners in relation to participants’ current motivation towards their schoolwork. Results showed support for the developmental hypotheses, such that greater autonomy support was significantly associated with greater autonomous motivation towards academics. Pressure and control from current relational partners was not consistently related to participants’ relative autonomy, but was in many instances related to amotivation, such that greater pressure was related to greater amotivation.

Three correlational studies and 2 experiments examined the influence of agreeable people’s trust on their close relationships. Studies 1-3 employed correlational methods to examine the association between agreeableness and interpersonal trust (felt security; Study 1) and the applicability of the dependence regulation model (Murray, Holmes, & Griffin, 2000) to the romantic relationships of agreeable people (Studies 2 & 3). Studies 4 and 5 employed experimental methods that manipulated felt security (trust) to examine how relationship threats differentially affect agreeable versus antagonistic people (those low in agreeableness). Results indicated that not only does felt security consistently mediate the association between agreeableness and important relationship quality variables, but that this is a causal association. That is, these studies provide evidence that agreeable people have better relationships than antagonistic people because they are chronically more trusting, and hence, less prone to seeing signs of rejection where none exists.

People with low self-esteem (LSEs) often have doubts about how much their romantic partners love and value them. These doubts, which undermine their relationships, are difficult to overcome because LSEs tend to downplay the meaning of positive behaviour and resist positive feedback from their partners. In Study 1, I provided evidence for the notion that LSEs’ “insensitivity” to acceptance is a form of motivated self-protection, rather than a pervasive negative bias. In Studies 2-4, I investigated whether LSEs could be induced to take their partners’ kind words to heart by manipulating how abstractly they described a recent compliment. LSEs felt more positively about the compliments, themselves, and their relationships – as positively as HSEs felt – when they were encouraged to describe the meaning and significance of the compliments. The positive effects of this abstract reframing intervention were still evident two weeks later, in both participants’ self-reported thoughts and feelings about their relationships and in partners’ reports of participants’ behaviour towards them. Study 5 demonstrated that the abstract reframing intervention prevented LSEs from taking a relationship threat to heart and lashing out at their partners. Taken together, the present studies show that when prompted to reframe affirmations from their partners, LSEs feel just as secure and satisfied with their romantic relationships and behave as positively towards their partners as HSEs do.

The purpose of the present study was to assess the developmental and current relational variables that play a role in the development and maintenance of academic identity. Specifically, I was interested in identifying variables that are related to adopting a more autonomously motivated academic identity as previous research indicates that engagement in more autonomously motivated activities is related to greater mental and physical health and greater persistence and performance within the activity. The current study considered the role of developmental autonomy support as well as pressure and control from current relational partners in relation to participants’ current motivation towards their schoolwork. Results showed support for the developmental hypotheses, such that greater autonomy support was significantly associated with greater autonomous motivation towards academics. Pressure and control from current relational partners was not consistently related to participants’ relative autonomy, but was in many instances related to amotivation, such that greater pressure was related to greater amotivation.

The partners of people with low self-esteem (LSEs) are just as loving and generous as the partners of people with high self-esteem (HSEs; Campbell, Simpson, Boldry, & Kashy, 2005; Murray et al., 2000). Nonetheless, LSEs persist in underestimating their partners’ regard (e.g., Murray, Holmes, & Griffin, 2000). In this research, I propose a model of attribution inversion, which predicts that LSEs will invert the positive attributions for a partner’s sacrifice that would be predicted by classic theory (Kelley, 1967), because of the risk associated with interpreting a partner’s sacrifice too positively. In Study 1, LSEs worried more than HSEs about their partners’ sacrifices. In Studies 2 and 3, LSEs experienced more anxiety over a large (but not small) sacrifice relative to HSEs, and attributed less caring motives to their partners. Studies 4 and 5 demonstrated my proposed mechanisms: Offering one’s partner an exchange of favors (Study 5)—thereby reducing exchange concerns—or experimentally increasing LSEs’ caring attributions (Study 4) eliminated LSEs’ tendency to be more cautious than HSEs about their partners’ sacrifices, suggesting that exchange concerns and doubts about caring drive LSEs’ typical caution. Finally, Study 6 demonstrated that caution is not unique to LSEs. Under a cognitive load manipulation, HSEs were just as cautious, but were apparently able to override that automatic inclination when given sufficient time and resources. Overall, my research suggests that the discounting of a partner’s sacrifices is one route by which low self-esteem is self-perpetuating even with a loving partner.

Research has shown that forgiveness promotes individual psychological well-being as well as positive relationship functioning. Moreover, couples themselves report that forgiving is one of the most important reasons that their relationships stand the test of time (Fenell,1993). However, the partner behaviours that facilitate, or even thwart, forgiveness in romantic relationships have been the subject of limited empirical research. In the current study, I investigated the effects of two sets of partner behaviour—offers of amends and expressions of responsiveness (i.e. understanding, validation, care)—on forgiveness for real-life hurtful events in romantic relationships. Sixty-four couples participated in a lab-based, experimental study in which I manipulated whether the partner who disclosed feelings about an unresolved, hurtful event (“victim”) received a videotaped response from his/her partner in which this partner (“offender”) expressed: 1) responsiveness only, 2) amends only, 3) both responsiveness and amends, or 4) neither responsiveness nor amends (control group). Trained coders provided micro-ratings of offenders’ specific responsive (e.g., perspective-taking) and amends (e.g., apology) behaviour as well as macro-ratings of more global displays of these behaviours (e.g., overall understanding, overall remorse). Victims also completed measures of relationship satisfaction, event severity, perceptions of their partners’ amends, perceptions of their partners’ responsiveness, and forgiveness. The findings suggest that event severity moderates the effectiveness of the general act of offering amends and/or responsiveness in promoting forgiveness. When event severity was high, the experimental manipulation of the presence vs. absence of amends and of responsiveness did not affect forgiveness. However, it did affect forgiveness for less severe events. Specifically, expressions of amends, responsiveness and their combination yielded similarly more forgiveness than no response at all. These effects were iv mediated by the victim’s perceptions of the offender’s responsiveness to his/her experience of the hurtful event. Further, results indicated that the victims’ perceptions of the offenders’ responsiveness could be promoted, or thwarted, by the content of the offenders’ amends. Micro-ratings of offenders’ amends behaviour demonstrated that when event severity is low, more elaborate offers of amends, in particular remorse, increase the victims’ perceptions of partner responsiveness, which in turn, facilitate forgiveness. To the contrary, when event severity is high, offering more elaborate offers of amends has no effect at all in facilitating victims’ perceptions of responsiveness, and expressing more remorse in particular, may backfire. Finally, the associations between coders’ ratings of the offenders’ behaviour with the victims’ perceptions suggested that the victims’ perceptions, especially of responsive behaviour, are perhaps largely self-construed.