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Approach and avoidance goals and perceptions of romantic partners’ traits

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Abstract

We hypothesized that people’s relationship motives would be associated with how they think about their romantic partners’ personal qualities. Specifically, across two studies using a community and student sample, we examined how individual differences in social approach and social avoidance goal strength shaped perceptions of traits in romantic partners. We utilized two different reaction-time-based methods that had participants quickly describe or categorize their partner. Through a series of partial correlation analyses, we found that approach goals were associated with more easily perceiving and evaluating partners in terms of positive traits that partners possess. In contrast, avoidance goals were associated with greater ease in perceiving partners in terms of the negative traits they lack. Results are discussed in terms of the ways in which these different patterns of framing a partner’s traits may have implications for relationship satisfaction and partner evaluation.

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Notes

  1. Data were collected prior to current power analysis practices; however, a post-hoc power analysis using GPower (Faul et al., 2007) suggests that our sample size offered a power of .76 to detect a medium effect size.

  2. Additional individual difference measures were also administered to participants for exploratory purposes and to conceal the nature of the study. A list of these measures is available upon request. None of these additional measures were the focus of the present work and are therefore not discussed further.

  3. Participants arrived at the study with their partners. They were told that they would be participating in separate tasks and only one participant completed the current study.

  4. Data were collected prior to current power analysis practices; however, a post-hoc power analysis using GPower (Faul et al., 2007) suggests that our sample size offered a power of .86 to detect a medium effect size

  5. Additional individual difference measures were also administered to participants for exploratory purposes and to conceal the nature of the study .A list of these measures is available upon request. None of these additional measures were the focus of the present work and are therefore not discussed further.

  6. These additional items included: family-oriented, good with kids, driven, lazy, mean, inconsiderate, understanding, respectful, confident, social, independent, faithful, loyal, good communicator, and honest.

  7. We also ran these analyses focused in on the top ten most relationship-relevant trait reaction times. In those analyses, we find an even stronger association between positive trait reaction times and relationship satisfaction (r = −.320, p = .002, 95% CI [−.522, −.037]).). However, there was no significant relationship between the top ten relationship-relevant negative trait reaction time and relationship satisfaction.

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This work was supported by the National Science Foundation, BCS 0444129.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Pace University, 861 Bedford Road, Pleasantville, NY, 10570, USA

    Courtney L. Gosnell

  2. Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA

    Shelly L. Gable

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  1. Courtney L. Gosnell
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  2. Shelly L. Gable
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Correspondence to Courtney L. Gosnell.

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All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

These studies were approved by the Institutional Review Board of the University of California, Santa Barbara (Protocol # 13-09-254).

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Gosnell, C.L., Gable, S.L. Approach and avoidance goals and perceptions of romantic partners’ traits. Curr Psychol 42, 12594–12603 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-021-02477-x

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