Deceptive Affection Across Relational Contexts: A Group Comparison of Romantic Relationships, Cross-Sex Friendships, and Friends With Benefits Relationships

Self Cite

The current study sought to assess the dyadic effects of affection deprivation in marital relationships. We used the tenets of affection exchange theory to examine the actor and partner effects between affectionate communication, affection deprivation, and mental and relational outcomes. Moreover, we tested whether affection deprivation mediated the association between affectionate communication and outcome variables. In terms of actor effects, affectionate communication was associated with husbands’ depression, wives’ loneliness, and both husbands’ and wives’ marital quality and emotional intimacy. Affection deprivation was associated with all outcome variables for husbands and wives, except for wives’ emotional intimacy. We observed significant partner effects between affectionate communication and affection deprivation for both husbands and wives, as well as between wives’ affectionate communication and husbands’ emotional intimacy. Affection deprivation mediated some of the actor and partner effects between affectionate communication and outcome variables. Implications, connections to theory, and directions for future research are discussed.

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confidence: 95%

Affection Deprivation in Marital Relationships: An Actor-partner Interdependence Mediation Analysis

Hesse

Tian

2019

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“…Negative relationships, though, among general deception and commitment and satisfaction were revealed. Adding understanding to Gillen et al’s findings, Trask et al (2020) found differences in the communication of intensified affection based on relationship type, with higher levels of this DAM form in friends with benefits relationships compared to cross-sex friendships and romantic relationships. Trask et al further reported positive relationships among intensified affection and relational health, considered to be commitment, satisfaction, and closeness.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 48%

Deceptive Affection is Strategically Expressed Under Relational Threat—But Not Towards Partners with Low Mate Value

Caton

Horan

2023

Individuals sometimes express affection that they do not feel. This describes deceptive affectionate messages and occurs when communicators express affectionate messages that are not consistent with their internal feelings of affection in the moment. They are commonly expressed in romantic relationships (about 3 times per week) and are argued to function as relational maintenance and retention. The present work ( N = 1993) demonstrated that deceptive affectionate messages are the behavioral output of an evolved psychological system that strategically operates to maintain significant pair bonds (i.e., high mate value partners) but not non-significant pair bonds (i.e., low mate value partners). This system is uniquely and nonrandomly designed to increasingly generate deceptive affectionate messages when the individual’s highly valued partnership is perceived to be under relational threat and decreasingly deploy deceptive affectionate messages when the highly valued partnership is not under threat, but the system does not apply this relational strategy in low-valued partnerships. This supports evolutionary psychological reasoning that affectionate communication should be predicated on a cost–benefit ratio, such that deceptive affectionate messages are expressed to high value mates because the substantial costs of losing a highly valued partner outweigh the smaller risks of enacting them (e.g., discovered deception, temporary relational conflict). By establishing that deceptive affection is predicated on a cost–benefit ratio, the present work better solidifies deceptive affection, and affection exchange theory more broadly, in the human evolutionary sciences.

“…However, this seems fairly implausible because participants could decline or ignore the prompts and, indeed, did so regularly. Regardless, research indicates that deceptive affection is associated with relational health, possibly because internal feelings are modified to reflect the enacted behavior (Trask et al, 2016). This modification of feelings might require a high-quality relationship, which was the case in our sample (Online Supplement 1).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Can we use smart-phones to increase physical affection, intimacy and security in couples? Preliminary support from an attachment perspective

Durbin

Debrot

Karremans

et al. 2020

This study investigated whether physical affection is causally associated with momentary intimacy and security by manipulating physical affection. We used a GPS-based smart-phone application as ecological momentary intervention that prompted participants to show physical affection to their partner when they were in the same location. We also investigated whether attachment style and attachment functioning moderated the effects of the manipulation. Thirty-nine couples were assigned to experimental ( N = 20) and control ( N = 19) groups for 2 weeks. Multilevel dyadic data analysis revealed significantly higher momentary intimacy in the experimental group, even when spontaneous physical affection was controlled; there was no significant change for momentary security. While attachment style did not moderate the effect of manipulation for either outcome, attachment functioning significantly moderated the effect on security. This is the first study to show evidence that physical affection, when instructed by a device, is causally linked to increased momentary intimacy in daily life.