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Commitment and Forgiveness in Relationships Focus of APS Registered Replication Report Project
APS is pleased to announce the launch of a new Registered Replication Report (RRR) aimed at replicating a 2002 experiment investigating commitment and forgiveness in close relationships. Drawing on the framework of interdependence theory, psychological scientists Eli Finkel, Caryl E. Rusbult, Madoka Kumashiro, and Peggy A. Hannon hypothesized that commitment, as a fundamental property of relationships, would promote “positive mental events, pro-relationship motives, and forgiveness.” The researchers designed an experiment to test this hypothesis, recruiting 89 undergraduate student participants who were in dating relationships at the time of the study.
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APS Registered Replication Report Project to Explore the “Facial Feedback Hypothesis”
Editors of Perspectives on Psychological Science are now accepting proposals from researchers who would like to participate in a new Registered Replication Report (RRR) designed to replicate a 1988 experiment testing the “facial feedback hypothesis.” The experiment, originally conducted by Fritz Strack, Leonard Martin, and Sabine Stepper, investigated the hypothesis that a person’s facial expressions can influence their affective responses, an idea that dates back to Darwin. In their study, Strack and colleagues surreptitiously induced participants to smile by holding a pen in their teeth or to pout by holding it between their lips.
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Health and Marriage: The Cortisol Connection
The Huffington Post: Bad marriages can be sickening. Most people don't have to be convinced of this, but for those who do, several decades of studies offer plenty of proof. Even so, very little is known about exactly how marriage quality affects health. Do strife and rudeness and neglect--and all the other signs of marital unhappiness--somehow get under the skin and trigger physical ailments? Or do warmth and trust and understanding and appreciation follow some biological pathway to wellness? Or both? Relationship experts have been focusing recently on marital partners' beliefs about their marriage--specifically a partner's belief that the other partner understands and cares for him or her.
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Aggressive Boys Tend to Develop Into Physically Stronger Teens
Boys who show aggressive tendencies develop greater physical strength as teenagers than boys who are not aggressive, according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. “This work was motivated by a long-standing controversy over the relationship between physical development and personality,” says psychological scientist Joshua Isen of the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: Greater Maternal Insensitivity in Childhood Predicts Greater Electrodermal Reactivity During Conflict Discussions With Romantic Partners in Adulthood Lee Raby, Glenn I. Roisman, Jeffry A. Simpson, W. A. Collins, and Ryan D. Steele How do our early interpersonal experiences shape the way we react to relationships in adulthood? Participants' childhood interactions with their mothers were assessed for maternal sensitivity.
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How Children Learn To Read
The New Yorker: Why is it easy for some people to learn to read, and difficult for others? It’s a tough question with a long history. We know that it’s not just about raw intelligence, nor is it wholly about repetition and dogged persistence. We also know that there are some conditions that, effort aside, can hold a child back. Socioeconomic status, for instance, has been reliably linked to reading achievement. And, regardless of background, children with lower general verbal ability and those who have difficulty with phonetic processing seem to struggle. But what underlies those differences?
