Commitment in romantic relationships as a function of partners’ encoding of important couple-related memories

ABSTRACT

The purpose of the present study was to investigate how significant couple-related events are encoded in the episodic memory of each partner of a romantic relationship and how they relate to each of these partners’ level of commitment in an independent and additive fashion. Each partner of a couple reported a significant couple-related memory and rated their level of need satisfaction experienced during the event of the memory. In addition, each partner was shown his/her partner’s memory and also rated their own level of need satisfaction for this event. Results showed that partners need satisfaction ratings of their own memory positively predicted their own commitment to the relationship directly (for women) as well as through their need satisfaction generally experienced in the relationship (for men). In addition, men’s need satisfaction ratings of their own memory were associated with women’s commitment while controlling for women’s need satisfaction ratings of men’s memory, but no such cross-partner effects were found for women. Overall, the findings shed light on an initial understanding of how a person’s own memory of an event can impact another person’s attitudes even when taking into account this other person’s memory encoding of that same event.

KEYWORDS:

• Episodic memories
• need satisfaction
• couple relationship
• relationship commitment

Disclosure statement

The authors declare no financial interest or benefit arising from the applications of this research.

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Following Philippe et al.'s (2015) recommendations, general questionnaires were assessed before memory questionnaires to avoid priming effects from memory descriptions.

2. The path analysis was conducted again while controlling for men’s and women’s extraversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, significance of their own and their partners’ memory, remembrance of their partners’ memory, or participants’ age and valence of their memory and results remained virtually the same (significant paths remained significant at the same p value).

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by a Master’s scholarship from the Fonds de Recherche du Québec-Société et Culture (FRQSC) awarded to Valerie Guilbault and a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada awarded to Frederick L. Philippe [grant number 435-2012-1358].