Relationships that do not start off well will probably fail
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Growth
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Ideal relationships develop over time
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Obstacles can make love even stronger
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A relationship succeeds through hard work and resolution of
incompatibilities
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Mindsets are orthogonal, so it is possible to hold both mindsets
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“Fate brings people together, but then it’s up to them”
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Mindsets are flexible and can change over time
○
Empathetic Accuracy
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Understanding the thoughts and feelings of one’s partner
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Why is this important for a relationship?
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Facilitates communication, support, resolving conflict
■
How would we measure this?
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Mood
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Perception of partner’s mood
■
Study: Transition into Parenthood
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78 couples having their first baby
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Daily diary design during pregnancy, infancy, and toddlerhood
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You are less empathetically accurate when a baby is born b you have to
re-learn your partner as a new person especially bc they’re changing as
a parent also

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Why to study this
○
Having your first child is a major life transition (global and daily
stressors)
○
Dyadic stress: Both partners face it together
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Findings: Empathetic accuracy goes down during infancy
○
Interdependence Theory
■
The extent to which the actions of each partner influences the outcomes of the
other
■
Greater interdependence = greater opportunity for conflict
●
“My interest conflict with your interest”
○
Relationships and Goal Pursuits
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Goal: Something you are trying to achieve
■
Why might goal pursuit be important in relationships?
■
SHAAH 2003 experiment
●
Asked participant for name of mom, name of friend, goal mom has for
you, and goal friend has for you
●
Asked to rate the closeness with mom and with friend
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Given filler task
●
Asked how committed, how many times will you pursue throughout the
week
○
Primed with mom’s name, primed with friend’s name, or primed
with control world
■
If close and primed, more likely to pursue goals
■
Regulation
●
Self-Regulation: The study of psychological and behavioral processes
that move people toward desired end states and away from undesired
end states
○
Transactive Goal Dynamics
■
Relationships are a regulating unit, with the partners as
subunits in a single system of goal dynamics, a system in
which resources are pooled
■
3 scenarios:
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One partner’s goal
●
Parallel goals
○
Can be pursued by one or both partners
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Shared goals
○
Same outcome held by both partners
■
What kind of goal is trickiest for relationships?
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Health/fitness
■
Is goal support always helpful?
●
No
○
Weight loss study
■
Wives are more likely to be
successful when their
husbands are told to be
uninvolved

●
Being Single
○
Why?
■
Demographics
●
97 men total for every 100 women
○
Automatically decreases marriage rate (only 97% women can
get married at all)
○
Not as a large as a gender difference as we would see in China
(more boys than girls) or in a post war period (loss of many
men)
■
Think about how marriage rates must look in these
instances
■
Economics
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