Relationship power and betrayal experience as predictors of reactions to infidelity

Explanations for sexual infidelity have been dominated by an evolutionary psychological theory of jealousy that finds its strongest support in research that employs a forced-choice hypothetical infidelity paradigm wherein participants imagine experiencing infidelity and choose whether sexual or emotional infidelity would be more distressing. Robust gender differences that support evolutionary psychological perspectives are consistently found using this paradigm, but recent work suggests that gender differences may be attenuated among actual infidelity victims. However, no research has used the forced-choice paradigm to compare real and hypothetical infidelity. This study uses this paradigm to compare reactions to imagined dating infidelity to those of infidelity victims. No gender differences are observed in response to the forced-choice question among victims of infidelity. Gender differences among participants who imagined infidelity are partially mediated by level of relationship power. Difficulties with the hypothetical forced-choice paradigm and implications for the evolutionary psychological theory of jealousy are discussed.     

Processing "d-linked" phrases

Linguists draw a distinction between two types of interrogatives: discourse linked (d-linked) phrases such as which man, which implies the existence of a set of contextually determined entities (men) from which the speaker is asking for a choice, and non–d-linked interrogatives such as who, which carry no such implication. Two questionnaires and an on-line reading study showed that readers prefer a d-linked phrase more than a non–d-linked phrase as the antecedent for a pronoun, suggesting that d-linked phrases are immediately instantiated in a discourse representation that is checked during the process of pronoun interpretation. Comparable difficulty is not observed for non–d-linked interrogatives. A questionnaire and an on-line listening study also showed that readers and listeners were more willing to accept a grammatical island violation containing a pronoun when the pronoun's antecendent was a d-linked interrogative than when the antecedent was non–d-linked, suggesting that they check a discourse representation for the pronoun antecedent. All results suggest that d-linked phrases are immediately interpreted in a discourse representation, not just in a syntactic representation.     

Children’s Responses to Hypothetical Provocation by Peers: Coordination of Assertive and Aggressive Strategies

Children often respond to aggression by peers with assertive bids or aggressive retaliation. Little is known, however, about whether and how children coordinate these strategies across different types of provocation. The present study examined endorsement of aggressive and assertive responses to hypothetical physical, relational, and verbal provocation in a sample of lower-income children (N?=?402, M age?=?10.21, SD?=?1.46). Latent-profile analysis revealed 3-class models for both aggression and assertion, each reflecting low, moderate, and high levels of endorsement. There was no association between children’s reported use of aggression and assertion. For example, children who endorsed high levels of aggression were equally likely to be classified as low, moderate, or high on assertive responding. For both assertion and aggression, parental ratings of children’s externalizing behavior and social skills differed across the low and high groups. No such differences were found between the low and moderate groups, despite the latter groups endorsing markedly higher levels of assertive and aggressive responses. This pattern of findings may be due, in part, to the situation specificity of children’s responding. Our findings hint at the complexity of children’s behavioral repertoires and contribute to a growing literature that suggests the need for intervention models that consider both social skills and social situations.     

“I’ll never be in a relationship like that again”: Personal growth following romantic relationship breakups

This study investigated the prevalence and correlates of personal growth and distress following romantic relationship breakups. Causal attributions for why the relationship declined and ended, personality factors, gender, and initiator status were examined as correlates of growth and distress in 92 undergraduates who had experienced a recent romantic relationship breakup. In regard to the prevalence of growth, respondents reported, on average, five types of personal growth they thought might improve their future romantic relationships. Correlates of self–reported growth included causal attributions to environmental factors and the personality factor of Agreeableness. Women reported more growth than did men. Factors related to higher levels of distress included causal attributions to the ex–partner and to environmental factors surrounding the previous relationship. The importance of assessing growth following relationship breakups and of accounting for the environmental context of close relationships is discussed.     

Perceived control and posttraumatic stress: A temporal model

In this article we present a temporal model for understanding the relations between perceived control and posttraumatic distress. Although perceived control generally is seen as adaptive, a review of the research using a temporal framework reveals that the relations between different types of control and distress vary greatly. Specifically, present and future control tend to be associated with better adjustment and fewer posttraumatic stress disoorder (PTSD) symptoms, whereas past control tends to be unrelated to distress or associated with more distress. Following this review, we outline an agenda for future research on past, future, and present control and posttraumatic distress using our temporal framework and discuss general methodological issues that need to be addressed in future research.     

Parsing temporarily ambiguous complements

Holmes, Kennedy and Murray (1987) recently claimed that the empirical support for the Minimal Attachment Strategy of sentence parsing had been weakened by results they reported. They found that reading time for an ambiguous string of words did not decrease when it was preceded by an overt complementizer, which should have disambiguated it. Thus, they suggested that results that we (Frazier and Rayner, 1982) earlier attributed to Minimal Attachment were not due to “garden-path” effects, but rather reflected the extra complexity caused by having to process two sets of clausal relations instead of just one. In the present experiment, we replicated their experiment using eye movement data rather than the subject-paced reading task they used. We found that readers processed Nonminimal Attachment sentences with overt complementizers considerably faster than those without a complementizer. Our results showed that the complexity of Nonminimal Attachment sentences cannot be attributed to their clausal status per se. Differences between the tasks that might contribute to the different pattern of results across the experiments are discussed.     

Kierkegaard on the Problems of Pure Irony

Søren Kierkegaard's thesis, The Concept of Irony, contains an interesting critique of pure irony. Kierkegaard's critique turns on two main claims: (a) pure irony is an incoherent and thus, unrealizable stance; (b) the pursuit of pure irony is morally enervating, psychologically destructive, and culminates in bondage to moods. In this essay, first I attempt to clarify Kierkegaard's understanding of pure irony as “infinite absolute negativity.” Then I set forth his multilayered critique of pure irony. Finally, I consider briefly a distinctly theological component in Kierkegaard's critique. I argue that this feature of Kierkegaard's account can and should be distinguished from the broadly ethical critique of pure irony that I sketch in the second section, even if these components of Kierkegaard's position are found together as a unified whole in The Concept of Irony. My overall goal in this essay is to reveal the subtlety and plausibility of Kierkegaard's critique of pure irony. I also attempt to disclose the richness of the Hegelian account of ethical life to which Kierkegaard recurs in his thesis.