Leveraging impression management motives to increase the use of face masks.

Three pilot studies ( = 832) revealed that people held more positive attitudes toward targets wearing protective face masks. Therefore, we examined whether knowledge of this self-presentational benefit would increase people's intentions to wear face masks. Participants ( = 997) were randomly assigned to read a passage about the COVID-19 pandemic, the safety benefit of mask-wearing, the self-presentational benefit of mask-wearing, or a combination of the latter two.

Pursuing safety in social connection regulates the risk-regulation, social-safety, and behavioral-immune systems.

A new goal-systems model is proposed to help explain when individuals will protect themselves against the risks inherent to social connection. This model assumes that people satisfy the goal to feel included in social connections-connections where they are valued and protected rather than at risk of being harmed-by devaluing rejecting friends, trusting in expectancy-consistent relationships, and avoiding infectious strangers. In the hypothesized goal system, the fundamental goal to feel safe in social connection regulatory systems that afford safety from the risk of being interpersonally rejected (i.

Leveraging smartphones to observe couples remotely and illuminate how COVID-19 stress shaped marital communication.

The height of the COVID-19 pandemic was an exceptionally stressful time for families that offered a unique opportunity to understand how stressful experiences occurring outside the relationship shape behavior occurring inside the relationship. Given the social distancing requirements of the pandemic, however, most research addressing this issue has relied on self-reports of behavior, which are susceptible to bias. In the summer of 2020, we asked a sample of married individuals living in the United States, Canada, Ireland, and the United Kingdom to complete online questionnaires assessing neuroticism and attachment insecurity, their levels of chronic stress, and their levels of acute stress due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Evidence of a Bidirectional Association Between Daily Sexual and Relationship Satisfaction That Is Moderated by Daily Stress.

Prior research provides mixed evidence regarding the direction of the association between sexual and marital satisfaction. Whereas some studies suggest a bidirectional association, other studies fail to document one direction or the other. The current investigation used a 12-day diary study of 287 married individuals to clarify the nature of this association.

Perceptions of Infectability to Disease Moderate the Association between Daily Concerns about Contracting COVID-19 and Satisfaction with Sex.

The behavioral immune system is an evolved adaptation comprised of automatic behavioral, cognitive, and affective reactions that has allowed humans throughout evolutionary history to avoid situations that risk infection by pathogens (e.g., physical proximity to sick people).

Do people realize how their partners make them feel? Relationship enhancement motives and stress determine the link between implicitly assessed partner attitudes and relationship satisfaction.

Do people realize the evaluative feelings that are spontaneously activated by their partner? If so, do they use those evaluations when judging their romantic relationships? To answer these questions, we investigated the association between automatic partner attitudes and judgments of relationship satisfaction in 7 studies. Study 1 was a meta-analysis of 86 correlations that revealed a very weak association between implicitly and explicitly assessed relationship evaluations, and Studies 2a-2c revealed that people failed to accurately report their automatic partner attitudes even when specifically asked to do so. Consistent with the idea that such inaccuracy emerged in part because motivational factors led people to override their automatic attitudes, Studies 3 and 4 demonstrated that automatic partner attitudes better aligned with relationship judgments when people were incentivized with money (Study 3) and had dissolved their relationship (Study 4).

Quantifying the Sexual Afterglow: The Lingering Benefits of Sex and Their Implications for Pair-Bonded Relationships.

Sex presumably facilitates pair bonding, but how do partners remain pair-bonded between sexual acts? Evolutionary perspectives suggest that sexual afterglow serves this purpose. We explored how long sexual satisfaction would remain elevated following sex and predicted that stronger sexual afterglow would characterize more satisfying partnerships. We pooled the data from two independent, longitudinal studies of newlywed couples to examine these issues.

Capturing the Interpersonal Implications of Evolved Preferences? Frequency of Sex Shapes Automatic, but Not Explicit, Partner Evaluations.

A strong predisposition to engage in sexual intercourse likely evolved in humans because sex is crucial to reproduction. Given that meeting interpersonal preferences tends to promote positive relationship evaluations, sex within a relationship should be positively associated with relationship satisfaction. Nevertheless, prior research has been inconclusive in demonstrating such a link, with longitudinal and experimental studies showing no association between sexual frequency and relationship satisfaction.