The Case for Studying Implicit Social Cognition in Close Relationships

Abstract

This review offers close relationships as a fruitful avenue to address long-lasting questions and current controversies in implicit social cognition research. Close relationships provide a unique opportunity to study strong attitudes that are formed and updated through ongoing contact with significant others and appear to have important downstream consequences. Therefore, close relationship contexts enable researchers to apply fine-grained, dyadic, longitudinal methodologies to provide unique insights regarding whether and how automatic attitudes relate to personal experience, change meaningfully and reliably over time, and predict consequential judgments and behaviors. Further, given that close relationships are critical to people's well-being and health, applying implicit social cognition theories to close relationships may also offer practical benefits regarding real-world issues related to relationship decay. In this regard, we provide guidance for future research by highlighting how continuing to refine our understanding of implicit social cognition in close relationships can inform interventions and reliably benefit society

How do implicit and explicit partner evaluations update in daily life? Evidence from the lab and the field.

“…We believe that close relationships may offer the sort of richly meaningful real-life context that has up to this point often been overlooked in implicit social cognition research (see Faure et al, 2020). By exploring how implicit evaluations update in this context on a fine-grained timescale, we garner several novel insights.…”

Implicit Ambivalence: A Driving Force to Improve Relationship Problems

“…We believe close relationships offer an ideal domain in which to address these questions. Unlike the abstract constructs, imaginary targets, and out-groups that attitude researchers typically study, romantic relationships offer unique contexts to examine how attitudinal processes that stem from real-life emotional experiences with a significant other may form, change, and affect well-being (see Faure et al, 2020). With respect to implicit ambivalence in particular, close romantic relationships can be a source of both intense pleasure and intense pain.…”

Adopting Evaluative Conditioning to Improve Coach–Athlete Relationships

“…In the present study, multiple measures were adopted not to test the dual-process and single-process theories, but to extensively explore the potential effects of EC on coach–athlete relationships from different aspects. The consistent changes in the measures shed light on the growing body of research on developing novel interventions in close relationship ( McNulty et al, 2017 ; Faure et al, 2020 ).…”

“…In the present study, multiple measures were adopted not to test the dual-process and single-process theories, but to extensively explore the potential effects of EC on coachathlete relationships from different aspects. The consistent changes in the measures shed light on the growing body of research on developing novel interventions in close relationship (McNulty et al, 2017;Faure et al, 2020). An interesting finding in the present study is that the anger and disgust associations increased over time for the coaches without EC intervention while remained unchanged for the EC-intervened coaches.…”

“…Rather than changing coaches’ behaviors, this approach is about changing athletes’ perceptions of their coaches based on automatic processes. In current research on interpersonal relationships, there is still a lack of interventions on the automatic processes ( Faure et al, 2020 ; Van Dessel et al, 2020 ). Whereas EC interventions have been shown to be effective in marital relationships, its effectiveness in other areas of interpersonal relationships has not been examined.…”