The delusion of the disappearing self? Attachment avoidance and the experience of externally invisible self-loss in romantic relationships.

All of us experience self-change in relationships, but our subjective experiences of change may not always align with external metrics of such change. We hypothesized that people with higher attachment avoidance are more likely to experience self-change as a loss, which in turn predicts lower relationship commitment. We further hypothesized, however, that there would be a disparity in perceptions, such that avoidant people will experience self-loss that external metrics-including their own behaviors and ratings from third-party coders-do not detect. Results from four studies, which employed a variety of cross-sectional (Studies 1 and 4) and longitudinal (Studies 2 and 3) methods, demonstrated that higher attachment avoidance predicted greater experienced loss of self, which in turn predicted lower commitment. Studies 2-4 also revealed evidence for the hypothesized disparity in perceptions: Avoidantly attached individuals' experience of greater self-loss failed to emerge when using a variety of external metrics of self-loss, producing Avoidance × Loss Type (experienced vs. external metric) interaction effects. These studies suggest that avoidantly attached people, who tend to be vigilant to autonomy threats in relationships, experience relationship-linked changes as losses, even though external metrics fail to detect such loss. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

"Mostly White, heterosexual couples": Examining demographic diversity and reporting practices in relationship science research samples.

Social and personality psychologists aim to "understand individuals in their social contexts for the benefit of all people" (Society for Personality and Social Psychology, n.d.). Though this mission is admirable, value statements do little, on their own, to create an inclusive, high-quality science that benefits humanity broadly. In this research, we evaluate relationship science, a major subfield of social-personality psychology, illustrating both the unique diversity-relevant challenges faced by particular subfields and the barriers to inclusive and diverse research that are shared across research areas. Specifically, we examine the sample diversity and reporting practices of 1,762 studies published in eight mainstream psychology and relationships journals at two time points-(a) 1996-2000 and (b) 2016-2020-and center our analysis around five focal sample characteristics: gender, sexual orientation, regional context, socioeconomic status (SES), and race. We find that reporting practices and representation have not improved for some core demographic characteristics (e.g., socioeconomic status) and that even in domains for which reporting practices have improved (e.g., sexual orientation), reporting remains limited. Further, we find that reporting practices in relationship science frequently center Whiteness (e.g., "participants were mostly White"), obscure or overlook potential sexual orientation diversity (e.g., implying that individuals in man-woman dyads are "heterosexual"), and treat the United States as the contextual default (e.g., participants came from a "large Southeastern university"). In light of these findings, we offer recommendations that we hope will cultivate a more representative and inclusive discipline. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Some researchers wear yellow pants, but even fewer participants read consent forms: Exploring and improving consent form reading in human subjects research.

Though consent forms include important information, those experienced with behavioral research often observe that participants do not carefully read consent forms. Three studies examined participants' reading of consent forms for in-person experiments. In each study, we inserted the phrase "some researchers wear yellow pants" into sections of the consent form and measured participants' reading of the form by testing their recall of the color yellow. In Study 1, we found that the majority of participants did not read consent forms thoroughly. This suggests that overall, participants sign consent forms that they have not read, confirming what has been observed anecdotally and documented in other research domains. Study 2 examined which sections of consent forms participants read and found that participants were more likely to read the first 2 sections of a consent form (procedure and risks) than later sections (benefits and anonymity and confidentiality). Given that rates of recall of the target phrase were under 70% even when the sentence was inserted into earlier sections of the form, we explored ways to improve participant reading in Study 3. Theorizing that the presence of a researcher may influence participants' retention of the form, we assigned participants to read the form with or without a researcher present. Results indicated that removing the researcher from the room while participants read the consent form decreased recall of the target phrase. Implications of these results and suggestions for future researchers are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).