Perspective Taking, Self-Anchoring, and Attention to Context in Long-Distance and Geographically Close Romantic Relationships

Abstract

We manipulated perspective taking and measured romantic intimates’ attention to their partners’ context. Participants read a letter supposedly from their romantic partner describing the partner's precarious situation (e.g., stress and financial issues) and either imagined their partner's difficult situation (n = 87) or remained objective and detached (n = 85). Afterwards, they drew a picture of their romantic partner in the situation (drawing task) and wrote about the thoughts they had while reading the letter (writing task). As predicted, when adopting their romantic partner's perspective (vs. remaining detached), geographically close intimates focused more on their partner's context, whereas long-distance intimates relied on self-anchoring processes to produce knowledge about their partner's feelings and thoughts in that specific situation. We discuss theoretical, clinical, and therapeutic implications of the findings for the study of differential perspective-taking processes and mechanisms in long-distance and geographically close relationships.

Perspective Taking and Empathic Emotions in Letters Written by Grandchildren to Their Grandparent With Dementia Versus Grandparent Without Dementia

“…Perspective taking was operationally defined as the number of self-reported shared experiences in the letter written to the grandparent (Bertacco & Deponte, 2005; Clark & Schaffer, 1989). We also operationalized perspective taking as a higher number of second-person singular pronouns, as these pronouns reflect a focus on the recipient of the letter (Miron, Kulibert, Saltigerald, & Petrouske, 2017). Indeed, prior work underscores the powerful role of pronouns in facilitating a particular cognitive perspective (Hartung, Burke, Hagoort, & Willems, 2016).…”

“…Pronouns. This measure of perspective taking (Miron, Kulibert, et al, 2017) consisted of the number of times the grandchildren used "you," "your," or "yours" in their letter to their grandparent. After independently counting the number of second-person pronouns used in each letter, the first, third, and fifth authors met and compared numbers.…”