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.
Highlights
We explored automatic attentional biases associated with long-term romantic relationship maintenance among heterosexual male college students in the Chinese cultural context
The results showed that when mental representations associated with love were activated, single men increased their attention toward and had difficulty in disengaging from attractive women who could be potential mates, whereas committed men were inattentive to attractive opposite-sex persons who could serve as attractive alternatives and threaten their ongoing relationship under both the baseline and love priming conditions
Feelings of romantic love may have activated single men’s motivation to seek an attractive partner and increased attention only toward and resulted in difficulty disengaging from attractive women
Summary
From the social psychology perspective, long-term pair-bonding can help satisfy individuals’ fundamental needs for positive social bonds (Baumeister and Leary, 1995), and social evolutionary studies have found that long-term romantic relationship can provide strong family ties with both male and female sides of the family and bind different groups together (Chapais, 2013); a stable and satisfying long-term romantic relationship can facilitate positive emotional experience and better personal well-being and physical health (Baumeister and Leary, 1995; Proulx et al, 2007; Robles et al, 2014). For attractive samesex persons who could serve as intrasexual rivals, committed women tend to show attentional adhesion to them in early-stage attentional processes, which could facilitate the identification of potential intrasexual threats to help guard their partners from infidelity (Maner et al, 2007a). The aim of this study was to explore whether mated male college students in the Chinese cultural context possess relationship maintenance mechanisms (e.g., inattention to attractive alternatives, attentional adhesion to intrasexual rivals) in early-stage attentional processing compared with single men, using a modified dot-probe paradigm, which can provide the baseline to identify attentional biases
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