Julie Longua Peterson chairs symposium and presents talk at annual conference of International Association for Relationships Research (IARR)

Julie Longua Peterson, Ph.D., assistant professor in the Department of Psychology, recently attended the International Association for Relationships Research conference in Chicago.

At the conference, she chaired a symposium titled “The Heart’s Hidden Agenda:  Unlocking the Contextual and Chronic Factors that Influence Unconscious Relationship Processes.”  The symposium brought together relationships researchers who study implicit (automatic, relatively unconscious) processes.

Although researchers have been examining people’s beliefs about the self and their relationships for decades, very little is known about the factors that influence people’s implicit (i.e., automatic, relatively unconscious) beliefs about the self and their close relationships, or the outcomes associated with these beliefs.  The goal of the symposium was to examine some of the ways in which unconscious relationship processes are influenced by both current perceptions of the relationship and chronic perceptions of the self.  The symposium featured talks by several researchers whose work illuminates the heart’s hidden agenda, revealing a pattern of relationship processes that appears particularly attuned to both contextual and chronic factors.

Peterson also served as a speaker at the IARR conference.  Her research presentation focused on how people who are high (vs. low) in attachment related anxiety respond to support from close relationship partners.  Across two experiments, Dr. Peterson showed that people high in attachment anxiety activate a more negative implicit evaluation of the self after recalling a time they were loved and supported by someone close to them.

The results also suggest that reflecting on a time of love and support results in more negative implicit self-evaluations only when anxious participants are the recipients of that care, rather than the providers of it.  Because implicit evaluations predict motivations for connection, nonverbal behavior, and relationship stability, identifying how positive events influence these types of self-evaluations may prove particularly important for understanding disparities in well-being across attachment styles.

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