![]() ![]() These were disliked people who played an important role in their life, such as exes or estranged parents. ![]() They also looked at people’s implicit feelings toward significant others that they reported disliking a lot. There’s another finding worth highlighting from the Zayas and Shoda study. So, despite the overwhelmingly positive pictures posted on social media of all your friends’ happy relationships, know that you’re only seeing, at best, half the story. While that may be true in one particular moment, it isn’t representative of the complex nature of your relationship overall-or even in one day! Our feelings toward our partners can range wildly from moment to moment-and it seems that may just be part of the wild ride of sharing your life with another complex human being. Why does this study matter? Much of our relationship rhetoric focuses on positive and negative as two ends of a spectrum-feeling more positively toward your partner means you feel less negatively toward them, and vice versa. It seems hating your partner in the moment does not mean that you don’t also love them a lot-which is actually a bit of a revelation (and a relief). Feeling negatively towards your partner does not mean that you are doing something wrong or that you are in the wrong relationship. What these findings suggest to me is that this love/hate dynamic is a normal part of close relationships. ![]() Those closest to us, such as our romantic partners, invoke strong feelings on both ends of the spectrum-some days, thoughts of our romantic partners may leave us awash with love and admiration other days, we may feel dislike or even repulsion. Thus, people feel both positively and negatively toward those they love. (Note: The bars on the left side of the graph show the typical response using positive and negative objects, such as sunsets and spiders, where positive objects only affect positive target words and negative objects only affect negative target words.) These were significant others toward whom participants reported feeling very positively and not very negatively, yet these findings show that at an implicit level, people hold both positive and negative feelings toward the ones they love. The effect for positive words was larger, but there was a small effect showing that thinking about their significant others actually boosted people’s responses when categorizing negative words like garbage and cancer. But they were also quicker to categorize negative words. The bars on the right show that, as expected, participants were quicker to categorize positive words after seeing their significant other’s name. Still with me? Great, because here is where it gets interesting. This task allows researchers to actually quantify people’s feelings towards their significant others, by calculating how quickly they respond to positive words and negative words after seeing their significant other’s name. Likewise, if we are thinking about something unpleasant, we will be slower to categorize positive words and quicker for negative ones. Here’s how our brains work, as revealed by decades of psychological research: If we are thinking about something pleasant when a positive word pops up, we are quicker to categorize it as positive but when a negative word pops up, we are slower to put it in the negative category. Their job was to categorize the target words as positive or negative as quickly as possible by pushing the correct button. They’d see the name of their significant other pop up on the computer screen, which was then was quickly followed by a target word that was either positive (e.g., lucky, kitten) or negative (e.g., garbage, cancer). ![]() How? Participants did a standard computer task that measures how quickly they respond to certain directions. Unsurprisingly, people reported highly positive feelings and very low negative feelings toward the person they had chosen.īut then the researchers assessed implicit feelings-the emotions they might not be consciously aware of-about the significant other. Then, the participants reported on their positive and negative feelings toward that person. How did Zayas and Shoda find the hate in the midst of love? They asked study participants to think of a significant other they like very much. ![]()
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