Does imagining you never met a romantic partner boost relationship satisfaction and gratitude? A conceptual replication and extension of the effect of mentally subtracting a partner
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Previous research has found that thinking about the presence of a partner in one’s life can, at least temporarily, increase relationship satisfaction. However, other studies have found that doing the opposite—thinking about the absence of a partner from one’s life (i.e., mentally subtracting a partner)—can boost relationship satisfaction. The current study is a conceptual replication and extension of a previous study demonstrating that people who imagined never meeting their current partner reported greater satisfaction than people who thought about the presence of a partner in their life or a neutral control. We expected that thinking about the absence of a partner could boost gratitude and, in turn, promote greater relationship satisfaction. However, we did not find support for the mental subtraction effect on relationship satisfaction or gratitude. That is, participants who mentally subtracted their romantic partners from their lives did not report greater relationship satisfaction or gratitude compared to participants who thought about the presence of their partner in their lives (or those in a control condition). Our study suggests that mentally subtracting positive life events may not always boost feelings of satisfaction.
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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 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".