This proposal investigates Intimate partner violence (IPV) which refers to any behavior carried out with the primary intent to cause physical harm to a romantic partner who is motivated to avoid being harmed. This type of violence sometimes occurs when conflict situations get out of hand, and most who study this social problem agree that even ?normal? individuals (i.e., those who are neither dominance-oriented nor pathological) sometimes experience violent impulses during relationship conflict. How they refrain from acting upon such impulses is an important question that has not been widely studied. The research proposed here employs a multimethod approach, including self-report measures of actual IPV that has taken place in one's current romantic relationship and laboratory analog measures of IPV. To investigate the psychological mechanisms underlying IPV, the PI will employ experimental methods manipulating both self-control and level of provocation, couple interaction methods in which romantic partners engage in a videotaped conflict discussion together, reaction time methods to explore the implicit (automatic) cognitive processes individuals experience in the wake of provocation, and multiyear longitudinal methods to provide information about IPV trajectories over time. In an effort to capitalize upon insights from social psychological aggression research and to integrate them with the burgeoning IPV literature, the PI proposes a model identifying some of the central variables that could be used to predict when IPV is likely to transpire. Collectively, the proposed studies promise to provide a rich, textured understanding of the mechanisms underlying IPV, and findings from the proposed research could help to promote restraint-oriented interventions to decrease the prevalence and severity of IPV.
Intimate partner violence seems puzzling, even shocking. Why would individuals deliberately inflict physical pain on a partner with whom they have chosen to merge their lives? Scholars have tackled this question since research on intimate partner violence (IPV) emerged and then quickly exploded in the 1970s and 1980s. A range of influential theories suggest that individuals perpetrate IPV because society socializes them to do so. Proponents of one perspective argue that men and women perpetrate violence against intimate partners (particularly spouses) because society tells them that such perpetration is "perfectly appropriate" (Gelles & Straus, 1988, p. 26; also see Straus, Gelles, & Steinmetz, 1980). Proponents of another perspective argue that men are socialized to perpetrate IPV while women are not, suggesting that "men who assault their wives are actually living up to cultural prescriptions that are cherished in Western society" (R. E. Dobash & R. P. Dobash, 1979, p. 24). Various other perspectives, including social learning theory (Kwong, Bartholomew, Henderson & Trinke, 2003; cf. Bandura, 1973), are broadly consistent with the idea society trains individuals to enact IPV. The grant-funded research has approached IPV from a fundamentally different perspective, though it does not take issue with the view that individuals who are socialized to believe IPV is acceptable are especially likely to engage in such violent behavior. Our work suggests that many acts of IPV are immediately precipitated by the perpetrator acting upon gut-level violent impulses that conflict with their more deliberative and self-controlled preferences for nonviolent conflict resolution. From this perspective, many acts of IPV are caused in large part by momentary failures in self-regulation. These lapses are self-control failures, which refer to situation in which individuals’ tendencies to act upon their gut-level impulses rather than upon well-considered preferences that are better-aligned with their long-term preferences (see Baumeister, Heatherton, & Tice, 1994). We suggest that most individuals who experience violent impulses during conflictual interaction with their romantic partner typically are able to override these impulses, but they may succumb to them when their self-regulation fails. This grant-funded research has already yielded 19 published papers and the 13 additional papers that are under review or in preparation (not to mention many ongoing data-analytic projects that aren’t yet part of a manuscript). This work, which has appeared in the highest-impact scholarly journals in our field, has also been prominently featured in the major textbooks in our field and in best-selling nonfiction books targeted toward the general public. In addition, this NSF funding helped my hone his graduate-level courses on Close Relationships and Self-Regulation and my undergraduate course on Close Relationships. Plus, a number of additional scholars who worked on the project have honed their scientific skills. The primary graduate students involved in this work have landed superb tenure-track faculty positions, and many of the undergraduate students involves in this work are currently enrolled in PhD programs in various disciplines.
