Ma Yidan, Xue Weifeng, Tu Shen
Department of Psychology, Institute of Education Science, Leshan Normal University, Leshan, China.
Applied Psychology, School of Public Administration, Guizhou University of Finance and Economics, Guiyang, China.
Front Psychol. 2019 Jul 18;10:1687. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01687. eCollection 2019.
Heterosexual individuals may possess evolved psychological mechanisms that help protect their ongoing romantic relationships against external threats from other attractive individuals. The current study used love priming and a dot-probe task to examine the attentional bias associated with long-term relationship maintenance by comparing between 52 single heterosexual men and 57 heterosexual men in exclusive romantic relationships, in the Chinese context. The results showed that single men responded to love priming with greatly increased attention to and difficulty disengaging from attractive women, whereas committed men were largely inattentive to attractive alternatives irrespective of the situation. The present findings provide evidence on the domain of relationship maintenance from a Chinese cultural context, and suggest that Chinese men protect an ongoing relationship by being automatically inattentive in early-stage attentional processing to attractive women who could serve as attractive alternatives.
异性恋个体可能拥有进化而来的心理机制，这些机制有助于保护他们正在进行的浪漫关系免受来自其他有吸引力个体的外部威胁。本研究采用爱情启动和点探测任务，在中国背景下，通过比较52名单身异性恋男性和57名处于排他性浪漫关系中的异性恋男性，来检验与长期关系维持相关的注意偏向。结果表明，单身男性对爱情启动的反应是，对有吸引力的女性关注度大幅增加且难以转移注意力，而有伴侣的男性无论在何种情况下，对有吸引力的替代对象大多都不关注。本研究结果从中国文化背景的角度为关系维持领域提供了证据，并表明中国男性通过在早期注意加工过程中自动对可能成为有吸引力替代对象的有吸引力女性不关注，来保护正在进行的关系。
