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Automatic Inattention to Attractive Alternative Partners Helps Male Heterosexual Chinese College Students Maintain Romantic Relationships.

ABSTRACT: Heterosexual individuals may possess evolved psychological mechanisms that help protect their ongoing romantic relationships against external threats from other attractive individuals. The current study used love priming and a dot-probe task to examine the attentional bias associated with long-term relationship maintenance by comparing between 52 single heterosexual men and 57 heterosexual men in exclusive romantic relationships, in the Chinese context. The results showed that single men responded to love priming with greatly increased attention to and difficulty disengaging from attractive women, whereas committed men were largely inattentive to attractive alternatives irrespective of the situation. The present findings provide evidence on the domain of relationship maintenance from a Chinese cultural context, and suggest that Chinese men protect an ongoing relationship by being automatically inattentive in early-stage attentional processing to attractive women who could serve as attractive alternatives.

SUBMITTER: Ma Y

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6657529 | biostudies-literature | 2019

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Automatic Inattention to Attractive Alternative Partners Helps Male Heterosexual Chinese College Students Maintain Romantic Relationships.

Ma Yidan Y Xue Weifeng W Tu Shen S

Frontiers in psychology 20190718

Heterosexual individuals may possess evolved psychological mechanisms that help protect their ongoing romantic relationships against external threats from other attractive individuals. The current study used love priming and a dot-probe task to examine the attentional bias associated with long-term relationship maintenance by comparing between 52 single heterosexual men and 57 heterosexual men in exclusive romantic relationships, in the Chinese context. The results showed that single men respond ...[more]

PMID: 31379694

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Project description:BackgroundIt has been suggested that an increasing proportion of young adults in Japan have lost interest in romantic relationships, a phenomenon termed "herbivorization". We assessed trends in heterosexual relationship status and self-reported interest in heterosexual romantic relationships in nationally representative data.MethodsWe used data from seven rounds of the National Fertility Survey (1987-2015) and included adults aged 18-39 years (18-34 years in the 1987 survey; sample size 11,683-17,675). Current heterosexual relationship status (married; unmarried but in a relationship; single) was estimated by sex, age group and survey year, with singles further categorized into those reporting interest vs. no interest in heterosexual romantic relationships. Information about same-sex relationships were not available.ResultsBetween 1992 and 2015, the age-standardized proportion of 18-39-year-old Japanese adults who were single had increased steadily, from 27.4 to 40.7% among women and from 40.3 to 50.8% among men. This increase was largely driven by decreases in the proportion of married women aged 25-39 years and men aged 30-39 years, while those in a relationship had increased only slightly for women and remained stable for men. By 2015, the proportion of single women was 30.2% in those aged 30-34 years and 24.4% in those aged 35-39 years. The corresponding numbers for men were 39.3% and 32.4%. Around half of the singles (21.4% of all women and 25.1% of all men aged 18-39 years) reported that they had no interest in heterosexual romantic relationships. Single women and men who reported no interest in romantic relationships had lower income and educational levels and were less likely to have regular employment compared to those who reported such an interest.ConclusionsIn this analysis of heterosexual relationships in nationally representative data from Japan, singlehood among young adults had steadily increased over the last three decades. In 2015 around one in four women and one in three men in their thirties were unmarried and not in a heterosexual relationship. Half of the singles reported no interest in romantic relationships and these women and men had lower income and educational levels and were less likely to have regular employment.

Dataset Information

Automatic Inattention to Attractive Alternative Partners Helps Male Heterosexual Chinese College Students Maintain Romantic Relationships.

Publications

Automatic Inattention to Attractive Alternative Partners Helps Male Heterosexual Chinese College Students Maintain Romantic Relationships.

Similar Datasets

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