Romantic Context Research Articles

“Nwuna׳s body is so sexy”: Pop culture and the chronotopic formulations of kinship terms in Korean

This paper examines the indexical and chronotopic meanings of two Korean kinship terms, oppa ‘older brother of woman’ and nwuna ‘older sister of a man’, as they emerge in South Korean popular culture. These kinship terms are commonly used in South Korean society not just to address siblings, but in a tropical sense to address intimates of superior age to the speaker, extending to romantic contexts. The paper demonstrates that oppa and nwuna become chronotopic spaces for negotiation between traditional Korean morals and gender roles tied up in the status and intimacy indexed by these forms, and new competing discourses of gender equality, free love, consumerism and enlightenment. Crucially, the analysis shows that the underlying kinship metaphors contained in oppa and nwuna play a crucial role in negotiating the balance between modernity and tradition, particularly in the depiction of sex and romance in Korean popular culture. By packaging romance and sex within the idiom of kinship, sexual desires and fantasies are rendered innocent and pure, or obscured altogether, thus allowing Korean popular culture to escape censure for being overtly sexually provocative.

Bad Romance: Exploring the Factors That Influence Revenge Porn Sharing Amongst Romantic Partners

The study of revenge in a romantic context has steadily gained traction in the social sciences. Researchers have been interested in exploring what influences romantic revenge, but most studies have failed to specify the type of romantic revenge individuals carry out and also ignored the impact of technology on the enactment of revenge. The current study addressed these issues using social cognitive theory by examining a specific type of romantic revenge enabled by technology– revenge porn. Revenge porn is the nonconsensual sharing of a romantic partner’s sexual images through the Internet or mobile phones. Although this behavior has been widely covered by the mainstream media, it has been largely ignored by the scientific community. Two provocation conditions (high severity and low severity) were designed to act as a stimulus to elicit responses from participants. Following exposure to one of the provocation stimuli, participants (N = 200) answered questions designed to examine the motivations that were most likely to lead them to participate in disseminating revenge porn. Results reveal that dispositional vengefulness, vicarious experience, and expected outcomes played a role in predicting the likelihood for sharing revenge porn. Implications for future research on revenge porn are discussed.

Empatía en el Contexto Romántico: Diseño y Validación de una Medida

La empatía en su naturaleza involucra una serie de nociones (Batson, 2009) cuyos énfasis van de menos a más en cuanto a dos elementos psicológicos fundamentales: la cognición y la emoción que se vinculan en uno u otro sentido, es decir, por un lado puede ser un carácter de comprensión intelectual o imaginativa de la condición del otro sin experimentar realmente los sentimientos de esa persona (p. ej., Hogan, 1969) o por otro lado, como una reacción emocional o simpatía, en respuesta a los sentimientos o experiencias de otros (p. ej., Mehrabian & Epstein, 1972). Dado el carácter inherentemente interaccional de la empatía, el contexto de la relación de pareja se vuelve sumamente interesante de explorar en virtud de ella, ya que precisamente éste vínculo, incluye matices de emocionalidad y cognición muy particulares que favorecen el despliegue de dicha variable que implicará la integración de sus miembros en una lectura cognitivo-emocional característica y por tanto, determinará el grado de intimidad e inmediatez alcanzado por ellos. Ante esto, el propósito de este estudio fue diseñar y validar una medida de empatía hacia la pareja en una muestra no probabilística propositiva de 467 adultos de la Ciudad de México que contaban con una relación romántica. Los resultados muestran la obtención de cuatro factores clave en el entendimiento de la variable como lo son: toma de perspectiva, empatía cognoscitiva de las emociones, perturbación propia y compasión empática. Dichos factores mostraron validez de constructo y coeficientes alpha de Cronbach moderados y en su conjunto representa una contribución conceptual, metodológica y cultural al estudio de la variable en el contexto romántico.

Couple-Level Economic and Career Concerns and Intimate Partner Violence in Young Adulthood.

Family scholars have demonstrated that economic conditions influence marital quality and relationship instability. Similarly, researchers have identified low income and poverty as important risk factors for intimate partner violence (IPV). Yet limited work has examined how economic factors influence the use of violence in the romantic context, particularly during young adulthood. Using the Toledo Adolescent Relationships Study (n = 928), we examine the influence of economic and career concerns as specific sources of conflict on IPV among a sample of young adults. Findings suggest that these areas of disagreement within romantic relationships are associated with IPV risk, net of traditional predictors. We discuss the implications of our findings for intervention and prevention efforts.

Relationship dealbreakers: traits people avoid in potential mates.

Mate preference research has focused on traits people desire in partners (i.e., dealmakers) rather than what traits they avoid (i.e., dealbreakers), but mate preferences calibrate to both maximize benefits and minimize costs. Across six studies (N > 6,500), we identified and examined relationship dealbreakers, and how they function across relationship contexts. Dealbreakers were associated with undesirable personality traits; unhealthy lifestyles in sexual, romantic, and friendship contexts; and divergent mating strategies in sexual and romantic contexts. Dealbreakers were stronger in long-term (vs. short-term) relationship contexts, and stronger in women (vs. men) in short-term contexts. People with higher mate value reported more dealbreakers; people with less-restricted mating strategies reported fewer dealbreakers. Consistent with prospect and error management theories, people weighed dealbreakers more negatively than they weighed dealmakers positively; this effect was stronger for women (vs. men) and people in committed relationships. These findings support adaptive attentional biases in human social cognition.

The Legacy of Romanticism: the Pear Tree and Janie Crawford in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God

Hurston’s masterpiece, Their Eyes Were Watching God, and its protagonist, Janie Crawford, have mostly been studied under the rubrics of African American culture. That is why the readings are typically concerned with the analysis of the protagonist’s personality in her African American society, e.g., the study of such issues as language, racial discrimination, and male authority, to name but few. Emphasizing the protagonist’s connection with the pear tree as a synecdoche for nature, the authors endeavor to examine the novel and its heroine in a romantic context. It will be argued that Janie’s personality is subject to a tri-partite development. A connection will be drawn between her infatuation with the pear tree as her source of inspiration and the three stages of her life to demonstrate her growth from innocence to experience to organized innocence. Analyzing Hurston’s masterpiece from this perspective provides a better understanding of the mechanism that leads to the protagonist’s development.

Objectification in Virtual Romantic Contexts: Perceived Discrepancies between Self and Partner Ideals Differentially affect Body Consciousness in Women and Men.

The current study examined whether exposure to sexually objectifying images in a potential romantic partner's virtual apartment affects discrepancies between people's perception of their own appearance (i.e., self-perceptions) and their perception of the body ideal that is considered desirable to a romantic partner (i.e., partner-ideals). Participants were 114 heterosexual undergraduate students (57 women and 57 men) from a northeastern U.S. university. The study used a 2 (Participant Gender) x 2 (Virtual Environment: Sexualized vs. Non-Sexualized) between-subjects design. We predicted that women exposed to sexually objectifying images in a virtual environment would report greater discrepancies between their self-perceptions and partner-ideals than men, which in turn would contribute to women's body consciousness. Findings support this hypothesis and show that perceived discrepancies account for the relationship between exposure to sexually objectifying images and body consciousness for women but not men. We also found gender asymmetries in objectification responses when each component of perceived discrepancies, i.e., self-perceptions versus perceptions of a romantic partner's body ideal, were examined separately. For men, exposure to muscular sexualized images was significantly associated with their self-perceptions but not their perceptions of the body size that is considered desirable to a romantic partner. For women, exposure to thin sexualized images was significantly associated with their perceptions that a romantic partner preferred a woman with a smaller body size. However, exposure to these images did not affect women's self-perceptions. Implications for gender asymmetries in objectification responses and perceived discrepancies that include a romantic partner's perceptions are discussed.

“I Did Not Do It My Way”

The links between culture, social networks, and adolescent romantic relationships are not well understood. This article integrates cultural sociology and network perspectives to explain how cultural features of adolescent peer groups influence adolescent romantic relationship inauthenticity—the extent of incongruence between one’s thoughts/feelings and actions within romantic contexts. Using National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health) data, I apply sequence analysis and linear regression models to test whether adolescents experience greater romantic relationship inauthenticity when the ordering of events within ideal romantic relationship scripts (e.g., holding hands, saying “I love you,” having sexual intercourse) diverges from ideal romantic relationship scripts of fellow peer-group members. Results indicate romantic relationship inauthenticity increases as one’s ideal script diverges from fellow peer-group members’ scripts. Importantly, heterogeneity in relationship scripts at the peer-group level was not associated with relationship inauthenticity. This study highlights the roles cultural reinforcement and social network processes play in the link between culture and action.

Positive Body Image and Sexual Functioning in Dutch Female University Students: The Role of Adult Romantic Attachment.

This study focused on links between romantic attachment, positive body image, and sexual functioning. Dutch female university students (N = 399) completed an online survey that included self-report items about body appreciation, sexual functioning, and romantic attachment. A proposed conceptual model was tested using structural equation modeling and a good fit to the data was found. Results revealed that attachment avoidance in a romantic context was negatively related to sexual arousal, vaginal lubrication, the ability to reach orgasm, and sexual satisfaction. Attachment anxiety was negatively related to body appreciation which, in turn, was positively related to sexual desire and arousal. Findings indicated that romantic attachment is meaningfully linked to body appreciation and sexual functioning. Therefore, the concept of adult attachment may be a useful tool for the treatment of sexual problems of young women.

Establishing Cross-Cultural Measurement Equivalence of Scales Associated with Face-Negotiation Theory: A Critical Issue in Cross-Cultural Comparisons

To extend face-negotiation theory (FNT) to romantic relationship contexts, we examined the patterns of responses to six survey instruments among five countries. We intend this initial paper to serve as a tutorial of testing measurement invariance—specifically by elaborating on: (a) how to establish measurement equivalence and (b) how to test measurement invariance using multigroup Confirmatory Factor Analysis. The results highlight the importance of establishing equivalency and routinely testing invariance in cross- and intercultural research. This is especially important given the often-extreme equivalency challenges faced when collecting data in non-Western cultures using scales developed in Western countries.

Caught in a Bad Romance

Integrating insights from cultural sociology and identity theory, I explore the mental health consequences of adolescent romantic relationship inauthenticity--incongruence between thoughts/feelings and actions within romantic contexts. Applying sequence analysis to National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health data, I measure relationship inauthenticity by quantifying the extent to which the ordering of events of actual romantic relationships (e.g., holding hands, saying "I love you") diverges from the sequence of events within idealized relationship scripts among 5,316 adolescents. I then test its association with severe depression, suicide ideation, and suicide attempt. I find that romantic relationship inauthenticity is positively associated with the risk of all three markers of poor mental health, but only for girls. This study highlights the importance of gender and culture in determining how early romantic involvement influences psychological well-being.

Nussbaum on Sexual Instrumentalization

In “The Wrongness of Rape,” Gardner and Shute argued that the English offence of rape primarily targets the wrong of objectification. As they put it: “That a rapist objectifies his victim by treating her as a mere repository of use-value is, in our view, what is basically wrong with rape.” Gardner and Shute tie objectification closely to instrumentalization – to the “conversion of subjects into instruments or tools.” In doing so, they explicitly purport to follow Martha Nussbaum’s understanding of what is morally problematic about objectification. Nussbaum observes that one may objectify another in one of several ways. But it is instrumentalization – understood narrowly as the mere use of another person – that she regards as the most inherently troubling. Gardner and Shute’s claim that the offence of rape primarily addresses the wrong of objectification risks proving too much. Objectification is rife in our culture. Why focus on rape, rather than objectification in its many other forms? Gardner and Shute recognized this problem, and purported to explain how penetration sets rape apart as an especially brutal, humiliating form of objectification. But what leaps out from Gardner and Shute’s analysis is not the idea that rape is an especially problematic form of objectification. What is striking is that Gardner and Shute engage in little explicit discussion of what does not count as instrumentalizing sexual touching. For our purposes, it is significant that Nussbaum herself does not regard the kinds of objectification that occur in the sexual context as necessarily instrumentalizing and, therefore, as morally problematic. Indeed, she is prepared to conclude that objectification “might be a wonderful part of sexual life.” In this paper, I want to explore more closely just what Nussbaum understands by instrumentalization, focusing in particular upon the meaning and role of mutuality in her analysis. Doing so, I argue, gives us insight into why sexual touching in three broad contexts may not be considered instances of instrumentalization: spontaneous sexual touching in a romantic context; non-spontaneous sexual touching in the context of intimate relationships; and prostitution. The last point may be most controversial given Gardner and Shute’s own stated view that prostitution involves instrumentalization. Even when we look to sexual touching in intimate relationships, however, Nussbaum seems to introduce ideas of implied consent that appear nowhere in Gardner and Shute’s paper.

“This Is 1975, Not 1875”: Despair and Longings in Women's Letters to Cambridge Lesbian Liberation and Daughters of Bilitis Counselor Julie Lee in the 1970s

I n T h e o d o r e r o e T h k e ’ s 1954 p o e m , “elegy for Jane: My Student, Thrown by a Horse,” a teacher whose beloved student has died ponders how it was possible that he could have had such a depth of feeling for her: “I, with no rights in this matter, neither father nor lover.” His poem offers an arresting commentary on the inaccessibility of the love object, outside of familial or romantic contexts, and who has the “rights,” from an emotional standpoint, to love whom. The emotional confusion evoked here could be applied to anyone who felt disconcerted, distressed, and intrigued by the boundary between emotional closeness and sexuality. Though historians of emotions and sexuality have primarily written about this sort of sensibility during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, especially in the form of romantic friendship, it was also a prominent, though more disparaged and less easily understood, sentiment in the midand late twentieth century.

Slash Manips: Remixing Popular Media with Gay Pornography

Slash Manips: Remixing Popular Media with Gay Pornography

Love, Despair, and Resiliency: Ovid’s Contributions to an Interactionist Analysis of Intimate Relations

Ovid (Ovidius – Publius Ovidius Naso; 43 BCE-18 CE) is well known in classical studies and poetic circles for his insightful portrayals of heterosexual relations. However, his The Art of Love and related texts have received scant attention from those in the social sciences. Ovid’s writings on love may be best known for their advisory and entertainment motifs, but this same set of texts also provides an extended and comparatively detailed set of observations on heterosexual interchanges, as well as some remarkably astute analysis of interpersonal relations more generally. Developed within a symbolic interactionist frame (Mead 1934; Blumer 1969; Strauss 1993; Prus 1996; 1997; 1999), this paper gives particular attention to the processes by which people engage others in romantic contexts, make sense of their experiences with one another, deal with an assortment of third-parties, and manage wide ranges of related emotional sensations as they work their ways through aspects of the broader relationship process (from preliminary anticipations and initial encounters to terminations and re-involvements of relationships). It is in these respects that this paper considers the more distinctive ethnographic potential of Ovid’s depictions of love in the Roman classical era. As an instance of ethno-history, Ovid’s considerations of people’s involvements with love, sex, and romance, as well as the varying emotional states that people experience along the way, add some highly instructive cross-cultural and trans-historical dimensions to more contemporary, generic examinations of affective relationships. Using Ovid’s materials as an ethno-historical database with which to assess contemporary interactionist notions of “developing relationships,” this paper concludes with a consideration of the implications of Ovid’s works and contemporary interactionist studies for research on intimate relationships, emotionality, and influence work.

Strategic Reactions to Infants: Female Self-Presentation in a Romantic Context

Research has demonstrated that humans engage in various self-presentational behaviours in the context of mate attraction. We build and expand on these efforts by showing that female facial behaviour also responds to the manipulation of romantic motivation in ways congruent with the logic of evolutionary theory. Given that childbearing is an important goal of human courtship, we hypothesized that during the initial stages of romantic encounters one way that women can advertize their quality is through their emotional reactions to children. Two studies were conducted to determine whether women would self-present in the context of romance by augmenting positive reactions (e.g., smiling more) or by attenuating negative reactions (e.g., frowning less). In both studies participants were undergraduate psychology students. Study 1 was an online study; it examined reported facial expressions towards and cognitive evaluations of infants. Study 2 was a laboratory study in which participants' spontaneous facial behavior was videotaped while they watched a video of infants (vs. a neutral film). In both studies we found support only for the hypothesis that, when in a romantic context, women attenuate negative reactions. Such attenuation was found for facial expressions, but not for cognitive or affective evaluations of infants.

Validating a Measure of Self and Partner Change in Romantic Relationships: The Perceived Change in Relationships Scale

In romantic relationships, individuals take attributes of their romantic partner into their own self-concept, thus becoming increasingly similar to their partner. The current research tested the possibility that some individuals may take on the characteristics of their romantic partner to a greater extent. The Perceived Change in Relationships Scale was designed to measure the extent to which individuals report changing to be like their romantic partners and report that their romantic partners change to be more like them. We investigated the properties of this scale across two studies. The first study explored the factor structure of the scale. The second study demonstrated that generally perceiving greater self-change in relationships predicted individuals actually altering their self-concepts in romantic contexts.

Development of an attachment-informed measure of sexual behavior in late adolescence

There is considerable interest in relations between sexual behavior and romantic attachment styles in adolescence as attachment needs are increasingly met through intimate partners rather than parents. The objectives of this research were to organize a measure of sexual behavior within an attachment theory framework, and then show that this new measure uniquely predicted sexual approach styles and invasive sexual experiences. 190 18- and 19-year-old university students in late adolescence completed sexual behavior items that were provided ambivalent (anxious) and avoidant dimensions. These were systematically related to the romantic attachment dimensions of the Experiences in Close Relationships – Revised. However, even after romantic relationship style, gender, and social desirability were controlled, avoidance in sexual relationships predicted lifetime sexual partner number and negatively predicted positive sexual strategies, and ambivalence in sexual relationships predicted invasive and coercive sexual behaviors. A measure specific to sexual relationships informs the attachment and romantic context of sex in late adolescence.

Romantic relationships and adjustment problems in China: The moderating effect of classroom romantic context

Theoretical and empirical research has shown that adolescent romantic relationships are associated with a wide range of developmental outcomes, including adverse consequences. The present study used a hierarchical linear model to examine the moderating effect of classroom romantic context on the association between adolescent romantic relationships and adjustment problems. Data were collected from 4776 Chinese adolescents across 106 classes and from 47 schools. The participants' ages ranged from 12 to 18 years. The results indicated that romantic involvement and breakups were associated with adolescents' depressive symptoms and delinquent behaviors. Moreover, the association between breakups and depressive symptoms depended on the classroom romantic context. Specifically, we found that adolescents who experienced breakups showed fewer depressive symptoms in classrooms where romantic relationships were common among classmates than in those classrooms where romantic relationships were rare among classmates. The theoretical implications of these findings are discussed.

Prescription of Protective Paternalism for Men in Romantic and Work Contexts

Behavioral prescription specifies how people ought to act. Five studies investigated prescription for men of protective paternalism, a particular form of benevolent sexism, depending on contextual and individual factors. In Studies 1 and 2, female participants prescribed for men more protective paternalistic behavior toward women in a romantic than in a work context. In Study 3, male participants prescribed the same level of protective paternalistic behavior as female participants did. Conversely, more gender egalitarianism was prescribed for men in a work than in a romantic context (Studies 1–3). In Study 4, the same protective paternalistic behavior was labeled as intimacy in a romantic context but was identified to the same extent as intimacy and as sexism in a work context. In Study 5, female participants’ benevolent sexist beliefs predicted their prescription of protective paternalistic behavior for men in both contexts. These studies demonstrated that prescription of protective paternalism for men is a complex phenomenon because it depends on contextual as well as individual variables. These findings need to be added to the list of factors explaining how this particular form of sexism is maintained within gender relationships and how it contributes to women’s subordination.