(provided by candidate): Close interpersonal relationships have substantial implications for individual physical and mental well-being. Understanding the ways in which individuals think about their relationships and relationship partners is an important task facing relationship researchers. The proposed work examines the organization of thoughts about relationship partners (i.e., how thoughts about the partner are related to one another in memory) whereas most previous work has focused on the content of thoughts about relationship partners. Earlier work has shown that individuals with low self-esteem tend to segregate positive and negative partner information in memory where individuals with high self-esteem tend to integrate such information. The proposed research is a series of five studies that will replicate and extend these findings in important ways. The first study will attempt to conceptually replicate these findings. The second and third studies will investigate - via a reaction time study and a longitudinal self-report study, respectively - the same conceptual issue but with a sample of married participants. Two final studies will investigate biases in recall of information about potential relationship partners as a function of self-esteem.
| Sharpee, Tatyana O (2007) Comparison of information and variance maximization strategies for characterizing neural feature selectivity. Stat Med 26:4009-31 |
