Intimate

Relationships

Rowland S.Miller

习读专用，不作商用，如侵联删。

C H A P T E R 1 0

Stresses and Strains（I）

Perceived Relational Value ◆ Hurt Feelings ◆ Ostracism

◆ Jealousy ◆ Deception and Lying ◆ Betrayal ◆ Forgiveness

◆ For Your Consideration ◆ Chapter Summary

Let’s take stock. In previous chapters, we have encountered adaptive and maladaptive cognition, good and bad communication, and rewarding and unrewarding social exchange. We’ve been evenhanded in considering both beneficial and disadvantageous influences on close relationships. But that won’t be true here. This chapter focuses on various pitfalls, stumbling blocks, and hazards that cause wear and tear in relationships (with just one bright spot at the end). And importantly, the stresses and strains I cover here—hurt feelings, ostracism, jealousy, lying, and betrayal—are commonplace events that occur in most relationships somewhere along the way. We’ve all had our feelings hurt (Vangelisti, 2009), and sooner or later, almost everyone lies to their intimate partners (DePaulo et al., 2009). Even outright betrayals of one sort or another are surprisingly widespread and hard to avoid (Baxter et al., 1997).

However, the fact that these incidents are commonplace doesn’t mean they are inconsequential. Negative events like these can be very influential. They help explain why most of us report having had a very troublesome relation- ship within the last 5 years (Levitt et al., 1996). And despite their idiosyncra- sies, all of these unhappy events may share a common theme (Leary & Miller, 2012): They suggest that we are not as well liked or well respected as we wish we were.

10.1 PERCEIVED RELATIONAL VALUE

Fueled by our need to belong,1 most of us care deeply about what our intimate partners think of us. We want them to want us. We want them to value our com- pany and to consider their partnerships with us to be valuable and important. We want our partners to evaluate their relationships with us positively, and sometimes, we want that relationship to be very meaningful and close. As a result, according to theorist Mark Leary (Leary & Miller, 2012), it’s painful to perceive that our relational value—that is, the degree to which others consider their relationships with us to be valuable, important, or close—is lower than we would like it to be.

1Need a reminder about the human need to belong? Look back at p. 4 in chapter 1.

Over time, we’re likely to encounter various degrees of acceptance and rejection in our dealings with others, and Leary (2001) has suggested that they can be arranged along the continuum described in Table 10.1. At the extreme of maximal inclusion, people seek our company and don’t want to have a party unless we can come. They are somewhat less accepting, but still positively inclined toward us when they offer us active inclusion: They invite us to the party and are glad we can come. However, their acceptance is more passive when they don’t invite us to the party but admit us if we show up, and they are ambivalent, neither accepting nor rejecting, when they genuinely don’t care one way or the other whether we show up or not.

If we want others to like us and value their relationships with us, noncom- mittal ambivalence from them may be bad enough, but things can get worse. We encounter passive exclusion when others ignore us and wish we were else- where, and we suffer active exclusion when others go out of their way to avoid us altogether. However, the most complete rejection occurs when, in maximal exclusion, others order us to leave their parties when they find us there. In such instances, merely avoiding us won’t do; they want us gone.

Our emotional reactions to such experiences depend on how much we want to be accepted by particular others, and just what their acceptance or rejection of us means. On occasion, people exclude us because they regard us positively, and such rejections are much less painful than are exclusions that result from our deficiencies or faults. Consider the game show Survivor: Con- testants sometimes try to vote the most skilled, most able competitors off the island to increase their personal chances of winning the game. Being excluded because you’re better than everyone else may not hurt much, but rejection that suggests that you’re inept, insufficient, or inadequate usually does (Çelik et al., 2013).

In addition, it’s not much of a blow to be excluded from a party you didn’t want to attend in the first place. Exclusion is much more painful when we want to be accepted by others than when we don’t much care what they think of us. Indeed, it’s also possible to be accepted and liked by others but be hurt because they don’t like us as much as we want them to. This is what unrequited love is often like (see p. 265). Those for whom we feel unrequited love may be fond of us in return, but if we want to be loved instead of merely liked, their mildness is painful.

All of these possibilities suggest that there is only a rough connection between the objective acceptance or rejection we receive from others and our feelings of acceptance or rejection that result, so we will focus on the percep- tion that others value their relationships with us less than we want them to as a core ingredient of the stresses and strains that we will inspect in this chapter (Leary & Miller, 2012). We feel hurt when our perceived relational value for others is lower than we want it to be.

10.2 HURT FEELINGS

In fact, the feelings of acceptance or rejection we experience in our dealings with others are related to their evaluations of us in a complex way: Maximal exclusion doesn’t feel much worse than simple ambivalence does (Buckley et al., 2004). Take a careful look at Figure 10.1. The graph depicts people’s reac- tions to evaluations from others that vary across a 10-point scale. Maximal exclusion is described by the worst possible evaluation, a 1, and maximal inclu- sion is described by the best possible evaluation, a 10; ambivalence, the point at which others don’t care about us one way or the other, is the 5 at the mid- point of the scale. The graph demonstrates that once we find that others don’t want us around, it hardly matters whether they dislike us a little or a lot: Our momentary judgments of our self-worth bottom out when people reject us to any extent (that is, when their evaluations range from 4 down to 1).

On the other hand, when it comes to acceptance, being completely adored doesn’t improve our self-esteem beyond the boost we get from being very well- liked. Instead, we appear to be very sensitive to small differences in regard from others that range from ambivalence at the low end to active inclusion at the high end. As people like us more and more, we feel better and better about ourselves until their positive regard for us is fully ensured. This all makes sense from an evolutionary perspective (Leary & Cottrell, 2013); carefully discerning degrees of acceptance that might allow access to resources and mates is more useful than monitoring the enmity of one’s enemies. (After all, when it comes to reactions from potential mates, there are usually few practical differences between mild distaste and outright disgust!)

So, mild rejection from others usually feels just as bad as more extreme rejec- tion does. But decreases in the acceptance we receive from others may have a greater impact, particularly when they occur in that range between ambivalence and active inclusion—that is, when people who liked us once appear to like us less now. Leary and his colleagues demonstrated the potent impact of decreases in acceptance when they manipulated the evaluations that research participants received from new acquaintances (Buckley et al., 2004). As young adults talked about themselves to another person over an intercom system, they received intermittent approval ratings on a computer screen (see Figure 10.2); the ratings supposedly came from their conversation partner, but they were actually controlled by the experimenters, who provided one of four patterns of feedback. Some people received consistent acceptance, receiving only 5’s and 6’s, whereas others encountered constant rejec- tion, receiving only 2’s and 3’s. It’s painful to be disliked by others, so of course, those who were accepted by the unseen acquaintance were happier and felt better about themselves than those who were rejected. But other people received evalu- ations that changed over time, starting poorly and getting better, or starting well and getting worse. In the latter case, over a span of 5 minutes, the research par- ticipants received successive ratings of 6, 5, 3, 3, and 2. Apparently, as the new acquaintance got to know them better, the less the acquaintance liked them.

The pattern of decreasing acceptance was particularly painful, causing more negative reactions than even constant rejection did (Buckley et al., 2004). Evidently, it’s especially awful to experience drops in our perceived relational value—that is, relational devaluation, or apparent decreases in others’ regard for us—and it causes a variety of unhappy emotions. When their partners turned against them, people felt sad, angry, and hurt, with the latter emotion being a particular sensation that is uniquely associated with losses of relational value (Leary & Leder, 2009). Hurt feelings have much in common with real pain; when people suffering from romantic rejection are placed in fMRI scan- ners and asked to study pictures of the ex-lovers who broke up with them, their brains respond as if they were experiencing physical pain (Eisenberger, 2013). Rejection really hurts. And remarkably, the pain reliever acetaminophen reduces the pain of social rejection just as it does a headache:2 After a week- and-a-half of daily doses of acetaminophen, college students had fewer hurt feelings at the end of the day than did other students who were taking a placebo (DeWall et al., 2010). Marijuana blunts3 social pain, too (Deckman et al., 2014). Obviously, psychological wounds can cause real distress, and the sense of injury that characterizes hurt feelings—the feeling that relationship rules have been broken and that one has been damaged, shattered, cut, or stabbed— makes hurt feelings a distinct emotional experience (Feeney, 2005).