Heterosexual individuals may possess evolved psychological mechanisms that help protect their ongoing romantic relationships against external threats from other attractive individuals. The current study used love priming and a dot-probe task to examine the attentional bias associated with long-term relationship maintenance by comparing between 52 single heterosexual men and 57 heterosexual men in exclusive romantic relationships, in the Chinese context. The results showed that single men responded to love priming with greatly increased attention to and difficulty disengaging from attractive women, whereas committed men were largely inattentive to attractive alternatives irrespective of the situation. The present findings provide evidence on the domain of relationship maintenance from a Chinese cultural context, and suggest that Chinese men protect an ongoing relationship by being automatically inattentive in early-stage attentional processing to attractive women who could serve as attractive alternatives.

This study tested the influence of Deaf identity (cognitive identification and affective identification) on the association between perceived deaf discrimination and subjective well-being among Chinese adolescents who are deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH), based on the rejection-identification model. Questionnaires on perceived deaf discrimination, subjective well-being, Deaf identity, and demographic information were completed by 246 DHH students (15–23 years old) from special residential schools in China. The results indicated that: (1) higher level of perceived deaf discrimination was significantly associated with lower level of subjective well-being (direct effect = −0.24, 95% confidence interval [CI] = [−0.37, −0.12], p < .001); (2) there was a significant indirect effect of perceived deaf discrimination on subjective well-being via cognitive identification (indirect effect = −0.07, 95% CI = [−0.12, −0.01], p < .05); and (3) positive affective identification due to increased cognitive identification with Deaf community may help counteract the negative impact of perceived deaf discrimination on subjective well-being (indirect effect = 0.06, 95% CI = [0.03, 0.10], p < .001). These findings further support the notion that the different components of group identification should be examined separately.

Studies about heterosexual individuals’ long-term relationship maintenance have indicated that committed individuals possess evolved psychological mechanisms that help protect their ongoing romantic relationships against threats from attractive others during early stage attentional processing when mating-related motivation is activated. In this study, two experiments tested the relationship maintenance mechanism among committed female college students in the Chinese cultural context under different love priming conditions. Committed Chinese women displayed inattention to attractive alternatives in positive love-scenario priming (Study 1: 114 female undergraduates, age range = 18–26 years), subliminal semantic love priming (Study 2: 110 female undergraduates, age range = 18–25 years), and baseline conditions (Studies 1 and 2). Those with high levels of chronic jealousy showed significantly increased attention to and difficulty disengaging attention from attractive rivals when subliminally primed with love. This provides further evidence, from an Eastern cultural context, for the existence of attentional biases toward attractive alternatives and rivals in early stage attentional processes for relationship maintenance. This research also illustrates the important role of romantic love in maintaining long-term romantic relationships.