James K. McNulty

A model of the generation of collective safety in social connection is proposed. This model posits that not being able to make sense of the behavior of others functions as an alert that motivates people who feel more vulnerable to the actions of societal collectives to find compensatory reason to trust in others. In two separate studies, participants in the United Kingdom and participants in the United States completed surveys the day before, and after, the 2024 general/federal elections. Preregistered moderated mediation analyses revealed that when family/friends behaved more (vs. less) inexplicably, participants who felt more (vs. less) vulnerable to the political party in power trusted sociopolitical relationships more rather than less. Such compensatory affirmations predicted renewed trust in personal relationships and strengthened feelings of connection post-election, suggesting that inexplicable behavior can motivate vulnerable people to generate the safety they need to see during societal transitions.

Advances in generative artificial intelligence (AI) have given rise to relational AI-AI agents that mimic human relational capabilities while possessing unique nonhuman features, including constant availability, extensive malleability, and a lack of intrinsic psychological needs. This article uses self-determination theory to examine how relational AI may support or undermine the three basic psychological needs self-determination theory posits as essential for well-being: relatedness, competence, and autonomy. Across roles including that of tutor, copilot, social mediator, companion, and therapist, relational AI may address critical challenges to these needs, facilitating goal attainment, alleviating loneliness, and promoting mental health. However, relational AI also carries potential risks for well-being, including reduced self-direction, diminished efficacy, and altered expectations within human relationships. We propose that relational AI's ultimate impact on users' well-being will depend on moderating factors that may shape both the strength and direction of its effects on well-being, including users' motivational orientation toward the goal for which they use relational AI, their motivational orientation for using relational AI, their baseline psychological need satisfaction, dynamics particular to each relational AI role, and various situational factors. Crucially, it is likely impossible to fully understand relational AI's impacts on well-being without examining all three psychological needs, as focusing on only a single need risks overlooking dynamics in which impacts on multiple needs interact to amplify or neutralize well-being. Future research on these processes can deepen our understanding of human relationship dynamics, inform responsible AI development, and reveal novel theoretical mechanisms underlying relational AI's impacts on well-being. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Lack of belonging can negatively affect mental and physical health, but experiences with social rejection are routine. Two studies examined whether being unable to mitigate the risk of rejection in real-world relationships motivates people to defensively immerse themselves in symbolic social bonds with celebrities and fictional characters. Study 1 (four daily diary samples) and Study 2 (cross-sectional sample) operationalized the ability to mitigate risk (i.e., the ability to self-protect) through the amount of time spent in the physical company of potentially hurtful/rejecting close others. In both studies, unmitigated risk (i.e., spending more time with potentially hurtful/rejecting close others) predicted increased/greater engagement with symbolic social bonds. These studies are the first to reveal specific characteristics of social rejection experiences that motivate escape into symbolic social bonds.

Introduction: Maintaining relationship quality during the first few years can be difficult for many couples. We examined whether variability in the repeat-length polymorphism RS3 on the vasopressin receptor gene AVPR1A is associated with relationship maintenance processes and trajectories of marital satisfaction over the first three years of marriage.Methods: Newlywed couples (N=70; 128 individuals) reported on various aspects of their marriage within three months of their wedding and on their marital satisfaction every four months for three years, and provided saliva samples that we genotyped for RS3 alleles. Based on the literature, we predicted that people with at least one copy of target allele 334 (vs. none) would report more problems in pair bonding. We also used another genotype analysis approach from the extant literature, by testing whether people with a greater (vs. fewer) number of short alleles would report more problems in pair bonding.Results: Across both approaches, results failed to support our predictions. In fact, the significant effects that did emerge were in the opposite direction from our predictions: people with at least one copy of allele 334 reported fewer marital problems and less interest in romantic alternatives; the number of short alleles was similarly positively associated with more dedication to the relationship and greater relationship satisfaction at the beginning of marriage.Discussion: Discrepancies between these findings and prior research illustrate the challenges of candidate gene studies with small sample sizes. Nevertheless, in offering a potential reconciliation between the discrepancies, we suggest that attending to relational phase may be critical to understanding the role of RS3 in couple functioning; AVPR1A RS3 variability may be differentially associated with pair bonding in the newlywed stage compared to established marriages.

Pioneering research suggested that sexual afterglow (lingering sexual satisfaction following an act of sex) lasts 2 but not 3 days and predicts subsequent relationship satisfaction. Nevertheless, recent research highlights the importance of considering the differential impacts of sexual acceptance and rejection. We used 2-week, daily-diary data from 576 participants to demonstrate that sexual afterglow lasted at least 1 day on average, particularly following partner-initiated and mutually initiated sex, and did not depend on individual differences in the importance of sex or sexual rejection, though negative aftereffects of sexual rejection lasted 3 days. Furthermore, lingering sexual (dis)satisfaction often predicted subsequent relationship satisfaction. Mini-meta-analyses of the current data with all published data suggest sexual afterglow lasts at least 1 day and predicts relationship quality whereas sexual rejection did not reliably produce aftereffects. Conclusions focus future research on other factors that may contribute to differences in sexual afterglow and reactions to other discrete events.

This chapter describes key advances in understanding the effects of conflict behavior in couple relationships. We illustrate that (1) most types of couple conflict behavior are not routinely harmful or beneficial, (2) understanding what constitutes harmful or beneficial conflict behavior requires identifying the reasons conflict behavior affects actors and their partner, and (3) these differing functions mean that the effects of conflict behavior vary according to contextual factors-qualities of the situation, actor, partner, and external environment-which all interact to predict communication effectiveness. We conclude that managing conflict effectively requires enacting a range of different behaviors depending on the needs and demands of the situation. We then present a new model of calibrated dyadic communication that considers how these varying factors infuse the communication process to affect communication effectiveness and conclude by highlighting the implications the model has for future research.

Although prominent theories of intimate relationships, and couples themselves, often conceive of relationships as fluctuating widely in their degree of closeness, longitudinal studies generally describe partners' satisfaction as stable and continuous or as steadily declining over time. The increasing use of group-based trajectory models (GBTMs) to identify distinct classes of change has reinforced this characterization, but these models fail to account for individual differences within classes and within-person variability across classes and may thus misrepresent how couples' satisfaction changes. The goal of the current analyses was to determine whether accounting for these additional sources of variance through growth mixture models (GMMs) alters characterizations of satisfaction changes over time. Applied to longitudinal data from 12 independent studies of first-married couples (combined N = 1,249 couples), GMMs that allowed for class-specific individual differences and within-person variability fit the data better than the GBTMs that constrained these to be equal across classes. Most notably, considerable within-person variability was evident within each class, consistent with the idea that spouses do indeed fluctuate in their satisfaction. Spouses who dissolved their marriages were 3.8-5.7 times more likely to be in classes characterized by greater volatility in satisfaction. Because the early years of marriage appear to be characterized by within-person fluctuations in satisfaction, time-varying correlates of these fluctuations are likely to be at least as important as time-invariant correlates in explaining why some marriages thrive where others falter. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Three pilot studies (N_total = 832) revealed that people held more positive attitudes toward targets wearing protective face masks. Therefore, we examined whether knowledge of this self-presentational benefit would increase people's intentions to wear face masks. Participants (N = 997) were randomly assigned to read a passage about the COVID-19 pandemic, the safety benefit of mask-wearing, the self-presentational benefit of mask-wearing, or a combination of the latter two. Although this manipulation failed, findings revealed that preexisting beliefs about masked targets being more likable were positively associated with mask-wearing intentions, particularly among participants less concerned with disease or more politically conservative.

The height of the COVID-19 pandemic was an exceptionally stressful time for families that offered a unique opportunity to understand how stressful experiences occurring outside the relationship shape behavior occurring inside the relationship. Given the social distancing requirements of the pandemic, however, most research addressing this issue has relied on self-reports of behavior, which are susceptible to bias. In the summer of 2020, we asked a sample of married individuals living in the United States, Canada, Ireland, and the United Kingdom to complete online questionnaires assessing neuroticism and attachment insecurity, their levels of chronic stress, and their levels of acute stress due to the COVID-19 pandemic. We then asked participants to submit a 10-min video of themselves and their spouse attempting to solve an important marital problem that they recorded on their smartphone or other device and uploaded to a secure server. Coders were able to reliably code the behavior of both partners using an established coding system, and the distribution of codes was similar to prior research. Consistent with predictions, participants' COVID-19 stress interacted with their neuroticism and attachment avoidance to predict their levels of oppositional behavior, controlling for their levels of chronic stress and their partner's behavior; neuroticism and attachment avoidance were associated with behaving in a more oppositional manner among participants who reported high but not low COVID-19 stress. Attachment anxiety trended toward predicting more oppositional behavior regardless of stress. These results shed light on how stress affects behavior and introduce a novel way to observe family behavior remotely. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).