Is it really “all in their heads”? How self‐esteem predicts partner responsiveness
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Objective Having a responsive partner is important for the well‐being of relationships. Unfortunately, people with low self‐esteem (LSEs) perceive their partners to be less responsive than do people with high self‐esteem (HSEs). Although the common assumption has been that LSEs' negative partner perceptions are “all in their heads”—a reflection of their negative self‐projection—we argue that LSEs' views of lower partner responsiveness are, in fact, warranted. Method Across two studies ( N Study1 = 122 couples, M age = 22.28, 50% female; N Study2 = 73 couples, M age = 19.96, 51% female), we examined LSEs' and HSEs' perceptions of their partners' responsiveness to their negative self‐disclosures, comparing them with partners' reports (Study 1) and ratings from objective coders following a negative experience created in the lab (Study 2). Results Consistent with our hypothesis, partners of LSEs were less responsive than partners of HSEs to disclosers' negative self‐disclosures, as rated by disclosers, listeners, and objective observers. Study 3 ( N = 99, M age = 33.19, 54% female) explored possible mechanisms behind these self‐esteem differences. Conclusions The finding that partners of LSEs (vs. HSEs) are less responsive may contribute to LSEs' poorer relationships.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".