Amy Muise and Emily Impett in August Issue of Social Psychological and Personality Science

Amy Muise, Emily A. Impett, Aleksandr Kogan and Serge Desmaraisin have published a paper in the August issue of Social Psychological and Personality Science, titled "Keeping the Spark Alive: Being Motivated to Meet a Partner's Sexual Needs Sustains Sexual Desire in Long-Term Romantic Relationships." The current study draws upon existing research and theory on both communal relationships and approach-avoidance models of social motivation to test the hypothesis that individual differences in the motivation to meet a partner's sexual needs, termed sexual communal strength, predict heightened feelings of sexual desire in long-term partnerships. In a 21-day daily experience study of 44 long-term couples, individuals higher in sexual communal strength engaged in daily sexual interactions for approach goals, and in turn, reported high levels of daily sexual desire. Sexual communal strength also buffered against declines in sexual desire over a 4-month period of time. These associations held after controlling for general communal strength, relationship satisfaction, sexual frequency, age, and whether or not the couples had children. These findings demonstrate the utility of extending theories of communal motivation to the sexual domain of relationships.

Click here to view the published article.
Posted on Sep 08, 2012 by admin

Congratulations to Recent Graduates of the SPA Program!

Congratulations to Alexa Tullett, Jessica Remedios, Jenny Gutsell and Judith Gere for successfully defending their dissertations and completing the PhD program. These most recent graduates of the SPA area will be starting new and exciting positions in September 2012:

Alexa Tullett - Assistant Professor, University of Alabama
Jessica Remedios - Assistant Professor, Tufts University
Jenny Gutsell - Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Toronto at Scarborough
Judith Gere - Postdoctoral Fellow, Penn State University

We wish Alexa, Jessica, Jenny and Judith all the best in the future. Great work! 

Posted on Aug 22, 2012 by admin

Bonnie Le awarded Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship

Bonnie Le was awarded a Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship in the 2011-2012 competition. The Vanier scholarships are awarded to doctoral students who demonstrate a high level of academic excellence, research potential, and leadership.

Posted on Jul 24, 2012 by admin

Emily Impett in August issue of Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

Emily Impett, in collaboration with Amie Gordon from the University of California, Berkeley, has published a paper in the August issue of Journal of Personality and Social Psychology titled "To Have and to Hold: Gratitude Promotes Relationship Maintenance in Intimate Bonds." This multi-method series of studies merges the literatures on gratitude and risk regulation to test a new process model of gratitude and relationship maintenance. We develop a measure of appreciation in relationships and use cross-sectional, daily experience, observational, and longitudinal methods to test our model. Across studies, we show that people who feel more appreciated by their romantic partners report being more appreciative of their partners. In turn, people who are more appreciative of their partners report being more responsive to their partners' needs (Study 1), and are more committed and more likely to remain in their relationships over time (Study 2). Appreciative partners are also rated by outside observers as relatively more responsive and committed during dyadic interactions in the laboratory, and these behavioral displays are one way in which appreciation is transmitted from one partner to the other (Study 3). These findings provide evidence that gratitude is important for the successful maintenance of intimate bonds.

 Click here to view a PDF of the article

 

Posted on Jul 19, 2012 by admin

Elizabeth Page-Gould in July Issue of Social Psychological and Personality Science

Elizabeth Page-Gould has published an article entitled, "To whom can I turn? Maintenance of positive intergroup relations in the face of intergroup conflict" in the July issue of Social Psychological and Personality Science. A mixed sample of students and community members from the Scarborough neighbourhood of Toronto provided demographic information about their 6 closest friends and the quality of each friendship, which were later used to estimate cross-ethnic friendships. Next, participants reported on every social interaction they had with another person over a ten day period, including whether they experienced any conflict during the interaction. Cross-ethnic friendship predicted very different reactions to conflict with people of other ethnicities. Participants who had no cross-ethnic friends avoided interethnic interactions the day after they had experienced a conflict with someone of another ethnicity. However, people who had close cross-ethnic friends did not avoid future interethnic interactions after an interethnic conflict; rather, they approached people of other ethnicities more after an interethnic conflict, specifically because they responded to interethnic conflict by seeking more social support from outgroup members. This cross-ethnic support seeking behaviour buffered them from the process of post-conflict interethnic avoidance. This research sheds light on how people with positive intergroup orientations (i.e., close cross-ethnic friends) are able to maintain their positive attitudes in the face of negative intergroup experiences.

Click here to view a PDF of the article.
Posted on Jul 12, 2012 by admin

<< Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 Next >>