Self-Perception In Romantic Relationships

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Bonnie and Clyde, Adam and Eve, Beyonce and Jay-Z – these are six individuals, but perhaps more conspicuously, they conjure up an image of three couples, each better recognized as a unit than is any individual member of the dyad alone. Indeed, when individuals become romantically involved, they often morph into a single entity in the eyes of others; for example, celebrities Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie earned themselves the single moniker of “Brangelina” when they started dating, exemplifying this phenomenon of thinking about romantic couples as a unit rather than just as separate individuals. Yet, despite rife anecdotal evidence such as these compound couple nicknames, psychological theory and research have paid relatively little attention …show more content…

Assuming that couples are cognitively represented as distinct dyadic units, these mental representations should influence how people perceive both their own couples as well as other couples in the social world. Thus, the present studies adopted both a self-perception and social-perception approach to examining dyadic-level …show more content…

Between the individual and group levels, however, couple units are also frequently encountered social targets in everyday interpersonal life, but research has much less to say on perception of these social entities. Of the work that has addressed this general line of inquiry, disparate strands in the literature support the general notion of couple-level identities A particularly relevant strand is work by Sedikides, Olsen, and Reis (1993) who reasoned that, considering the ubiquity of couple units in the social environment, creating a single mental representation of a dyad benefits perceivers by enabling cognitive parsimony. Couple units should therefore hold a unique status within perceivers’ mental space, leading people to naturally use relationship categories when encoding information about couples. Consistent with this, when participants read a randomized series of details about hypothetical individuals, they tended to encode those facts according to whether the individuals were described as romantically paired. Thus, when participants were able to cluster the individuals into couple units, they demonstrated better memory for previously learned facts about those targets in a subsequent recall

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