Personality cognitions under romantic love

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationships within reciprocal cognitions of two people of the opposite sex who are romantically involved. The subjects were 61 undergraduates and the partnersof those. They rated the Self-Differential Scale to evaluate 1) self image, 2) image of the other person, 3) inference about other person's self image, 4) inference about the other person's image of me, 5) ideal self image, and 6) ideal image of the opposite sex. The final cognitive process was originally adopted in this study. Using the responses of both partners' ratings, we examined the degree of similarity between reciprocal cognitive processes. The results revealed that the similarity between 5) ideal self image and 6) ideal image of the opposite sex, and 1) self image and 4) inference about the other person's image of me, and 2) image of the other person and 3) inference about other person's self image, played a basic and important role in their cognitions. Furthermore, partial correlation analysis clarified that the 5) ideal self image has an influence on the cognitions concerning image of self and the 6) ideal image of the opposite sex affects the cognitions concerning image of other person. We discussed these results as compared to those from two persons of the same sex.