This thesis investigated the possibility of experimentally increasing intimates' use of relationship maintenance responses, the strategies thought to sustain romantic relationships. Because research has demonstrated that constructs, traits, and goals can all be primed in order to affect behavior, priming participants' relationship commitment and satisfaction, two correlates that promote such strategies, was anticipated to similarly result in changes in maintenance responding. The first three studies demonstrated greater maintenance responses in women when they first thought about their commitment and satisfaction, but saw no effects in men. In an attempt to explain this gender difference, a theory involving relationship identification, a factor thought to underlie commitment, was proposed. General relationship identification, or the incorporation of important relationships into the self-concept, is seen more in women than it is in men. The theory was that the commitment and satisfaction prime actually served as a relationship reminder and activated the self-concepts of those who identify with their relationships, namely women. Subsequently encountering relationship threats was therefore experienced as threatening to the self-concept, and because people are motivated to protect their self-concepts, they engage in greater relationship maintenance responding. To first test this theory, in Study 3 a simple factual relationship reminder was shown to be as effective as the relationship commitment and satisfaction prime at raising women's maintenance responding. In Study 4, further demonstrating the role of chronic relationship identification, only those women high in chronic relationship identification showed the effect obtained in the previous studies. The involvement of self-protection was again shown in Study 5, when women who were given the opportunity to defend their self-concepts, without defending their relationships, displayed lower main
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.85056 |
| Date | January 2004 |
| Creators | Burton, Kimberly, 1976- |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Doctor of Philosophy (Department of Psychology.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 002177967, proquestno: AAINR06280, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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