Talk Table Technique in Couple Interaction

Relationship Maintenance

• Relationship maintenance refers to the behaviors and strategies partners use to ensure a valued relationship continues.
• Three types of behaviors: strengthening a good relationship, averting declines, and repairing problems.

Intimacy Process Model

• The intimacy process model shows how communication between partners can strengthen or weaken feelings of understanding, validation, and caring in a committed relationship.
• Process: A makes a disclosure, goes through B's interpretive filter, B responds, and A has a reaction to B's response.
• Factors influencing the process: A and B's motives, needs, goals, and fears.

Self-Expansion Model

• The self-expansion model suggests that people seek to grow and improve themselves by acquiring resources, enriching their identity, and strengthening skills, often through intimate relationships.

Overcoming Stress and Adversity

• Social integration: involvement and interconnections with other people.
• Social support: resources and assistance provided by relationship partners.
• Benefits of social support: maintaining strong partnerships, increased satisfaction, improved mood and self-esteem, better problem-solving, and coping with external stress.
• Cons of social support: implied obligation, diminished self-esteem, and emotional costs.
• Invisible support: avoiding drawbacks, more effective before or just after stress.

Capitalization

• Capitalization: sharing positive events in one's life, building personal and interpersonal resources.
• Broaden-and-build theory: expressing positive emotions enhances daily experiences and builds resources for well-being.
• Active vs passive responses: enthusiastic vs mild, and constructive vs destructive responses: acknowledging and supporting vs undermining positive events.

Forgiveness

• Forgiveness: transforming anger or hurt into a desire to be generous and unselfish toward the offending partner.
• Factors influencing forgiveness: seriousness of the offense, personality, quality of the apology, and relationship quality.
• Three stages of forgiveness: impact, meaning, and moving-on.

Sexual Intimacy

• Sexual satisfaction: a partner's evaluation of the quality of the sexual aspect of an intimate relationship.
• Importance of sexual satisfaction: closely linked to overall relationship satisfaction, especially for those who value sex and anxiously attached individuals.
• Relationship satisfaction without sex: rarely satisfied, associated with distress.

Conflict

• Conflict: inevitable in intimate relationships, arising from pursuing goals that interfere with the other partner's goals.
• Importance of communication: active listening, seeking compromise, and avoiding stubborn positions.
• How scientists study conflict: coding system, conditional and unconditional probabilities.
• Characteristics of unhappy couples: less positivity, predictability, and reciprocity.

Infidelity and Aggression

• Infidelity: breaking a promise to keep emotional and sexual lives exclusively with each other.
• Prevalence: 23% of men and 12% of women have engaged in extramarital sex, with genetic factors contributing to half the variation.
• Risk factors: individuals high in sociosexuality, risky relationships, and contexts.
• Consequences: individual struggle, relationship dissolution, and severe aggression.
• Intimate partner violence: situational couple violence (SCV) and coercive controlling violence (CCV).
• SCV: escalating verbal exchanges, pushing, and grabbing, often bilateral.
• CCV: one partner uses aggression to dominate the other, often referred to as battering.

Interpreting Experience

• Information processing: organizing what we learn about the world.
• Belief vs value: idea about what the world is like vs opinion about what's important.
• Intimacy process model: linking specific observations to general meanings.
• Ideal standards model: relationship satisfaction depends on how closely the current relationship matches what we value.
• Perceptual confirmation: our expectations affect our perceptions.
• Effects of rejection sensitivity and low self-esteem: expecting rejection, misinterpreting others' behaviors, and impacting interactions.### Behavioral Confirmation
• Behavioral confirmation: our expectations cause us to behave in ways that make others respond in ways that confirm those beliefs
• Self-fulfilling prophecy: behavior that leads to an expected experience or result; a prediction that causes itself to become true

Culture

• Culture: shared beliefs, norms, and values of people who speak the same language and share a geographic area, during a period of time
• Arranged marriage: union where parents introduce the partners, approve the marriage, and organize the wedding
• Media: how relationships are portrayed in media affect what people believe about relationships, how people evaluate their own relationships, and how they behave

Motivated Reasoning

• Motivated reasoning: our desires and preferences shape the way information is interpreted
• Explains why outsiders often see a relationship differently than the people in it
• Motive: drive to reach a specific goal
• Bias: tendency to process information to protect a particular point of view

Different Motives

• Enhancement motive: describes how people want to believe their intimate relationships are successful
  • Leads to an enhancement bias, the tendency to prefer information that supports/strengthens positive beliefs about the relationships
• Accuracy motive: desire to understand a partner and be understood in return
  • Judge whether a relationship is worth pursuing
• Justification motive: preference for information that makes a person feel moral and reasonable, supporting a positive view of oneself
  • Contributes to self-serving bias, the tendency to take credit for our successes and blame others for our failures

Accommodation vs Assimilation

• Accommodation: changing existing beliefs in order to accept new information
• Assimilation: integrating new information with existing knowledge without changing the original beliefs

Mechanisms of Motivated Reasoning

• Plan A: Keep negative information out of awareness
  • Selective attention: noticing and focusing on some aspect of the environment and not others
  • Memory bias: tendency to recall past information in a way that justifies one's current feelings about a partner or a relationship
• Plan B: Minimize negative information
  • Attribution: assigning a specific behavior to a more general cause
  • Locus dimension: whether the cause of a behavior is internal or external to the person
  • Stability dimension: whether the cause of a behavior is temporary or stable
  • Flexible standards: adjusting expectations and standards to be more achievable, making it easier to maintain satisfaction
  • Social comparison: the use of information about others to evaluate one's own attitudes and abilities

The Role of Motivation and Ability in Motivated Reasoning

• Commitment calibration hypothesis: threats to a relationship trigger defense actions only if the threat matches the couple's commitment level
  • Low threat: different commitment levels rated photos of attractive alternatives
  • High threat: when the alternative was interested in the rater, only happily married people criticized the alternative, while everyone else rated them as highly attractive

Stress and Context

• Proximal context: close and direct elements of the environment
• Distal context: removed and indirect elements of the environment
• Stressor: any aspect of the environment that makes demands on people, leaving a couple with reduced capacity to maintain a relationship
• Resource: a source of support outside the couple, something that contributes to their ability to interact effectively

Chronic vs Acute Conditions

• Chronic conditions: aspects of the context that are relatively stable and enduring
• Acute events: sudden changes with a clear start and end
• Interaction: impact of acute events depends on chronic conditions like resources and stress levels

The Two Routes through which Stress Affects Relationships

• Route 1: the content of the relationship
  • Stress affects what we talk about, when we interact, where we interact, and how much we interact with our partner
• Route 2: processing of relationship problems
  • Stress affects how we process and respond to relationship problems

Stress Pile-Up

• Stress pile-up: accumulating consequences of stressful events that can be as stressful as or more stressful than the original event

Fight or Flight Response

• Fight or flight response: a physiological response to stress or threat that prepares the body to take action, by either confronting the threat (fight) or escaping it (flight)

Stress Spillover vs Stress Crossover

• Stress spillover: stressful events from one domain transferring over to another domain
• Stress crossover: stressful events affecting multiple people in a relationship

Long Distance Relationships

• Pros: idealizing each other, those who choose to stay committed while separated want their relationship to work out, and those who make the greatest use of responsive texting are the most satisfied
• Cons: restricting face-to-face interaction, increasing the cost of maintaining relationships, and the potential for jealousy and infidelity

Benefits of Stress

• Noticing stress: recognizing how external stressors influence relationships is crucial for minimizing spillover and crossover effects
• Building resilience: couples must learn to handle stress effectively

Social Networks

• Psychological network: people who play important roles in a person's life

• Interactive network: people who we interact with regularly

• Network composition: types of relationships and connections in a person's social network

• Network overlap: how much partners in a relationship share the same social network

• Social capital: the tangible and intangible benefits people derive from their relationships with others

• Substitutability: the degree to which different members of a social network may fulfill the same needs for an individual### Adaptive Processes in Relationships

• Adaptive processes directly impact the quality and satisfaction of a romantic relationship

Factors Influencing Adaptive Processes

• Characteristics of individual partners
• Characteristics of their environment

Vulnerability-Stress-Adaptation Model

• Enduring characteristics of partners influence initial satisfaction in the relationship
• External stressors also impact initial satisfaction
• Adaptive processes help couples manage stress and solve problems together
• Navigating challenges is crucial for maintaining satisfaction in the relationship

Barriers and Alternatives

• Shared responsibilities can be a barrier to relationship satisfaction
• Other potential partners can be an alternative to the current relationship
• These factors determine changes in satisfaction and ultimately influence the decision to stay together or break up