Attachment Insecurity and Daily Relationship Threats as Obstacles to Relational Self-Expansion
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Incorporating growth (i.e., broadening one's perspective of the self, partner, and world) is an important feature for the maintenance of satisfying and long-lasting intimate relationships. However, as relationships progress and people increasingly gain familiarity with their intimate partner, the opportunities for growth decline. According to the self-expansion model, one way that people can add growth to their relationship is by engaging in exciting (i.e., novel and arousing) couple activities. Although exciting couple activities have been associated with many relational benefits, it is unclear whether certain threat-related conditions might be related to poorer relational self-expansion and relational self-expansion outcomes, such as engagement in exciting couple activities. Through a 21-day daily diary study of community couples (N = 122), the present study investigated the effects of relationship threats on the occurrence of exciting couple activities and ratings of relational self-expansion. It was hypothesized that insecure attachment styles (i.e., trait-based) and daily relationship threats (i.e., state-based) would negatively predict people's overall exciting activity experiences and ratings of relational self-expansion. Data analyses were guided by the Actor-Partner Independence Model (APIM). Contrary to my hypotheses, there was inconsistent support for the association between attachment avoidance and attachment anxiety and relational self-expansion. Consistent with my hypotheses, people (and their partners) reported lower relational self-expansion, and also were significantly less likely to engage in exciting couple activities on days when relationship threats (e.g., rejection, disappointment, feeling misunderstood) were greater than usual. Furthermore, on days when people engaged in exciting couple activities and felt greater relationship threats, they reported a less successful exciting couple activity experience. Although there was evidence that relationship threats negatively predicted people's daily activity experiences on the same day, relationship threats were not related to the occurrence of exciting couple activities on the following day. In conclusion, this study offers evidence suggesting that state-based threat concerns might be one obstacle that couples face in promoting growth within intimate relationships.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".