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This study examines if marriage satisfaction is related to how married couples and their friends rate their partners. Findings suggest that people in more satisfying relationships view their partner as having more virtue than their friends perceive, and people in less satisfying relationships perceive less virtue in their partners than their friends perceive.

Research presented concerns the ability of alcohol to exacerbate conflict in relationships. Studies suggest that intoxicated individuals perceive conflict more negatively than their sober counterparts, as well as report lower self-esteem and insecurity in their relationships.

It is proposed that the cognitive structures that help sustain relationships depend on individuals embellishing the significance of virtues and minimizing the significance of faults within hierarchical, integrated representations of their partners. As a means of measuring representation structure, dating individuals were asked to write narratives describing their relationships and their partners' greatest faults and to complete card-sort descriptions of their partners. The results revealed that satisfied individuals find redeeming features in their partners' faults, construct 'yes, but' refutations that minimize specific faults, and link virtues to faults within integrated, more general mental models. Moreover, these structural effects emerged in analyses that controlled for representation content. Impressively, the very stability of relationships depended on individuals forming such integrative mental ties in their representations of their partners.

The transition from acquaintanceship (nonunit) to friendship (unit) was conceptualized in terms of a preunit relationship. The authors theorized that in transitional relationships, discrete interactions are imbued with surplus meaning. Using a mental simulation procedure in 3 studies, participants randomly assigned to focus their attention on an exemplar from their social worlds representing unit, preunit, or nonunit same-sex relationships responded to social exchange scenarios. Preunits intended to act like a friend and not an acquaintance, yet they experienced more discomfort following a communal script than those in a unit relation. Content analyses of open-ended responses revealed that preunits were more likely than units or nonunits to see a nice gesture by the other person as having some social meaning. Failure to reciprocate a favor by either party was deemed more important to preunit than unit or nonunit relations. In Study 4, in which actual interaction records were used, the quality of individual discrete interactions was more highly correlated with momentary, on-line perceptions of relationship closeness for preunit interactions than unit or nonunit interactions.

It is proposed that satisfying, stable relationships reflect intimates' ability to see imperfect relationships in somewhat idealized ways--to make a leap of faith. Both members of dating and married couples [...]

It is proposed that satisfying, stable relationships reflect intimates' ability to see imperfect partners in idealized ways. In this study of the long-term benefits (or possible costs) of positive illusions, both members of dating couples completed measures of idealization and well-being 3 times in a year. Path analyses revealed that idealization had a variety of self-fulfilling effects. Relationships were most likely to persist - even in the face of conflicts and doubts - when intimates idealized one another the most. Intimates who idealized one another more initially also reported relatively greater increases in satisfaction and decreases in conflicts and doubts over the year. Finally, individuals even came to share their partners' idealized images of them. In summary, intimates who idealized one another appeared more prescient than blind, actually creating the relationships they wished for as romances progressed.

It is proposed that satisfaction is associated with idealistic, rather than realistic, perceptions of one's partner. To provide baselines for assessing relationship illusions, both members of married and dating heterosexual couples were asked to rate themselves and their partners on a variety of interpersonal attributes. Participants also rated the typical and ideal partner on these attributes. Path analyses revealed that individuals' impressions of their partners were more a mirror of their self-images and ideals than a reflection of their partners' self-reported attributes. Overall, intimates saw their partners in a more positive light than their partners saw themselves. Furthermore, these idealized constructions predicted greater satisfaction. Individuals were happier in their relationships when they idealized their partners and their partners idealized them. Taken together, these results suggest that a certain degree of idealization or illusion may be a critical feature of satisfying dating and even marital relationships.

Because coping with uncertainty is an important aspect of close relationships and is critical to issues of trust, the authors expected individual differences in uncertainty orientation to play a central role in shaping people's representations of their relationships. For a 3-week period, 77 couples completed a series of questionnaires and kept diaries on their interactions. As expected, certainty-oriented persons' need for cognitive closure resulted in either high or low trust for their partners, whereas uncertainty-oriented persons typically attained only a moderate level of trust. Several other measures indicated that certainty-oriented partners found their relationships most aversive under moderate trust. Memory data indicated that certainty-oriented individuals, but not uncertainty-oriented individuals, used conclusions about trust as a heuristic for reconstructing the past in ways that maintained cognitive clarity. Uncertainty orientation also combined with gender in many interesting ways.

This article explores the narratives that individuals construct about their romantic partners. The authors believe that individuals weave stories that encapsulate or defuse negativity, such as evidence of an intimate's faults. Such storytelling essentially masks feelings of uncertainty engendered by the specter of negativity and thus bolsters felt confidence. The paradigm used for examining narrative construction is described and the postulates or principles guiding the storytelling process are outlined. A discussion follows of how individuals integrate and defuse negativity within positive stories about their partners. The article concludes by exploring the content and structure of confidence-instilling narratives.

It is proposed that individuals develop story-like representations of their romantic partners that quell feelings of doubt engendered by their partners' faults. In Study 1, dating individuals were induced to depict their partners as rarely initiating disagreements over joint interests. Such conflict avoidance was then turned into a fault. In scaled questionnaires and open-ended narratives, low-conflict individuals then constructed images of conflict-engaging partners. These results suggest that storytelling depends on considerable flexibility in construal as low-conflict Ss possessed little evidence of conflict in their relationships. Study 2 further examined the construal processes underlying people's ability to transform the meaning of negativity in their stories (e.g., seeing virtues in faults). Paradoxically, positive representations of a partner may exist - not in spite of a partner's faults - but because of these imperfections.

Using a computerized mixed-motive negotiation task, the present study examined the differential effects of behavioral prediction versus impression formation goals on the integration of social information in an ongoing interactive context. In these negotiations, subjects were instructed either to predict the other's negotiating behavior or to form an impression of the other negotiator. In a control group, no observational instructions were given. Subjects' cognitive integration of their expectations, perceptions, and negotiation behaviors were examined using path analytic procedures. The path analyses indicated that the behavioral prediction goal resulted in the behavioral interaction forming the basis of subjects' concurrent perceptions of the other negotiator, which did not subsequently affect subjects' own behavior. As expected, there was also greater variability in subjects' perceptions over time relative to impression formation subjects. The impression formation goal resulted in a high degree of integration between negotiation behaviors and perceptions. This observational goal appeared to promote an early consolidation of perceptions and a continuing, cyclical influence between perceptions and behavior. Finally, the perceptions of subjects in the control group were primarily based on expectations and prior perceptions; their behavior was highly ritualistic, and their perceptions were equally as variable as those of the behavioral prediction group. The contribution of these results to the literature on observational goals is discussed, and the need to examine the effects of observational goals on the pattern of responses in ongoing social interactions is emphasized.

The sociometer's role in guiding the social behavior of people and the dependence on acceptance for decision-making are studied by inviting undergraduate students to join a social group. It is found that people with high self-esteem are almost always eager to join a group whereas low self-esteem people are keen to join only when acceptance is guaranteed and the same is true about decision-making.

The authors argue that individuals with more negative models of self are involved in less satisfying relationships because they have difficulty believing that they are loved by good partners. Dating and married couples completed measures of self-models, perceptions of the partner's love, perceptions of the partner, and relationship well-being. The results revealed that individuals troubled by self-doubt underestimated the strength of their partners' love. Such unwarranted insecurities predicted less positive perceptions of their partners. In conjunction, feeling less loved by a less-valuable partner predicted less satisfaction and less optimism for the future than the partner's feelings of love and commitment warranted. A dependency regulation model is described, where feeling loved by a good, responsive partner is thought to represent a sense of felt security that diminishes the risks of interdependence and promotes closeness.