Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-x4r87 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-29T11:15:01.256Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

2 - Self-Evaluation Motives in Close Relationships: A Model of Global Enhancement and Specific Verification

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 July 2009

By
Lisa A. Neff  and
Benjamin R. Karney
Edited by
Patricia Noller  and
Judith A. Feeney
Lisa A. Neff
Affiliation:
University of Florida
Benjamin R. Karney
Affiliation:
University of Florida
Patricia Noller
Affiliation:
University of Queensland
Judith A. Feeney
Affiliation:
University of Queensland
Get access

Summary

In their classic work on marriage, Berger and Kellner wrote: “The reality of the world is sustained through conversation with significant others” (1964, p. 53). Spouses, in particular, are said to provide each other with the most important source of feedback about the nature of the social world. More notably, spouses provide each other with the most important source of feedback about themselves (Berger & Kellner, 1964). Marriage involves an identity negotiation process in which spouses must determine the roles and characteristics each will assume within the relationship (for example, Schlenker, 1984). Marital satisfaction, then, may rest on whether spouses accept the identities each will hold in the marriage, and thus view and treat the other in the desired manner (Schlenker, 1984; Swann, 1984).

In fact, abundant evidence suggests that the feedback spouses provide one another concerning their identity within the relationship is associated with marital well-being. How intimates view one another has been linked to both the satisfaction and the stability of a relationship (for example, Murray, Holmes, & Griffin, 1996a; 1996b; Swann, De La Ronde, & Hixon, 1994). Nevertheless, researchers disagree on the type of feedback that is associated with positive relationship outcomes. Do spouses in satisfying relationships provide each other with favorable feedback, casting even negative qualities in a more positive light? Or do these spouses convey an accurate understanding of each other's qualities, acknowledging both strengths and weaknesses?

Type
Chapter
Information
Understanding Marriage
Developments in the Study of Couple Interaction
 , pp. 32 - 58
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2002

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Baldwin, M. W. (1992). Relational schemas and the processing of social information. Psychological Bulletin, 112, 461–484CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Berger, P. L., & Kellner, H. (1964). Marriage and the construction of reality: An exercise in the microsociology of knowledge. Diogenes, 46, 1–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brown, J. D., (1986). Evaluations of self and others: Self-enhancement biases in social judgments. Social Cognition, 4, 353–376CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ronde, C., & Swann, W. B. Jr. (1998). Partner verification: Restoring images of our intimates. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75, 374–382CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dunning, D., Meyerowitz, J. A., & Holzberg, A. D. (1989). Ambiguity and self-evaluation: The role of idiosyncratic trait definitions in self-serving assessments of ability. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 57, 1082–1090CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gottman, J. M., & Krokoff, L. J. (1989). Marital interaction and satisfaction: A longitudinal view. Journal of Counseling and Clinical Psychology, 57, 47–52CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Greenwald, A. G., (1980). The totalitarian ego: Fabrication and revision of personal history. American Psychologist, 35, 603–618CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hampson, S. E., Goldberg, L. R., & John, O. P. (1987). Category-breadth and social-desirability values for 573 personality terms. European Journal of Personality, 1, 241–258CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hampson, S. E., John, O. P., & Goldberg, L. R. (1986). Category breadth and hierarchical structure in personality: Studies of asymmetries in judgments of trait implications. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 51, 37–54CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Holmes. J. G., & Murray, S. L. (1995). Memory for events in close relationships: Applying Schank and Abelson's story skeleton model. In R. S. Wyer, Jr. (Ed.), Knowledge and memory: The real story: Vol. 8. Advances in social cognition (pp. 193–210). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc
John, O. P., Hampson, S. E., & Goldberg, L. R. (1991). The basic level in personality-trait hierarchies: Studies of trait use and accessibility in different contexts. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 60, 348–361CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Joiner, T. E. Jr., (1995). The price of soliciting and receiving negative feedback: Self-verification theory as a vulnerability to depression theory. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 104, 364–372CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Joiner, T. E. Jr., Alfano, M. S., & Metalsky, G. I. (1993). Caught in the crossfire: Depression, self-consistency, self-enhancement, and the response of others. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 12, 113–134CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Karney, B. R., McNulty, J. K., & Frye, N. E. (2001). A social-cognitive model of relationship maintenance. In J. H. Harvey & A. E. Wenzel (Eds.), Close romantic relationships: Maintenance and enhancement (pp. 195–214). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc
Katz, J., Anderson, P., & Beach, S. R. H. (1997). Dating relationship quality: Effects of global self-verification and self-enhancement. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 14, 829–842CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kunda, M. (1990). The case for motivated reasoning. Psychological Bulletin, 108, 480–498CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Linville, P. W. (1985). Self-complexity and affective extremity: Don't put all of your eggs in one cognitive basket. Social Cognition, 3, 94–120CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Maass, A., Salvi, D., Arcuri, L., & Semin, G. (1989). Language use in intergroup contexts: The linguistic intergroup bias. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 57, 981–993CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Marsh, H. W. (1986). Global self-esteem: Its relation to specific facets of self-concept and their importance. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 51, 1224–1236CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Morling, B. & Epstein, S. (1997). Compromises produced by the dialectic between self-verification and self-enhancement. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 73, 1268–1283CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Murray, S. L. & Holmes, J. G. (1993). Seeing virtues in faults: Negativity and the transformation of interpersonal narratives in close relationships. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 65, 707–722CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Murray, S. L., & Holmes, J. G. (1994). Storytelling in close relationships: The construction of confidence. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 20, 650–663CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Murray, S. L., & Holmes, J. G. (1999). The (mental) ties that bind: Cognitive structures that predict relationship resilience. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77, 1228–1244CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Murray, S. L., Holmes, J. G., & Griffin, D. W. (1996a). The benefits of positive illusions: Idealization and the construction of satisfaction in close relationships. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 70, 79–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Murray, S. L., Holmes, J. G., & Griffin, D. W. (1996b). The self-fulfilling nature of positive illusions in romantic relationships: Love is not blind but prescient. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 71, 1155–1180CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Neff, L. A., & Karney, B. R. (1999a). To be adored and to be known: Global enhancement and specific verification in relationships. Paper presented at the meeting of the International Network of Personal Relationships, Louisville, KY
Neff, L. A., & Karney, B. R. (1999b). Global enhancement and specific verification in newlywed marriage. Unpublished manuscript, University of Florida at Gainesville
Norton, R. (1983). Measuring marital quality: A critical look at the dependent variable. Journal of Marriage and the Family, 45, 141–151CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pasch, L. A., Bradbury, T. N., & Sullivan, K. T. (1997). Social support in marriage: An analysis of intraindividual and interpersonal consequences. In G. R. Pierce, B. Lakey, I. G. Sarason, B. R. Sarason (Eds.), Sourcebook of social support and personality. New York: PlenumCrossRef
Pelham, B. W. (1991). On confidence and consequence: The certainty and importance of self-knowledge. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 60, 518–530CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Pelham, B. W., & Swann, W. B. (1989). From self-conceptions to self-worth: On the sources and structure of global self-esteem. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 57, 672–680CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rosenberg, S. (1965). Society and the adolescent self-image. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press
Rosenberg, M. (1979). Conceiving the self. New York: Basic Books
Schlenker, B. R., (1984). Identities, identifications, and relationships. In V. Derlega (Ed.), Communication, intimacy, and close relationships (pp. 71–104). New York: Academic PressCrossRef
Sedikides, C. (1993). Assessment, enhancement, and verification determinants of the self-evaluation process. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 65, 317–338CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Showers, C. (1992). Compartmentalization of positive and negative self-knowledge: Keeping bad apples out of the bunch. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 62, 1036–1049CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Simpson, J. A., Ickes, W., & Blackstone, T. (1995). When the head protects the heart: Empathic accuracy in dating relationships. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 69, 629–641CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Swann, W. B. Jr., (1984). Quest for accuracy in person perception: A matter of pragmatics. Psychological Review, 91, 457–477CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Swann, W. B., Jr. (1990). To be adored or to be known? The interplay of self-enhancement and self-verification. In E. T. Higgins & R. M. Sorrentino (Eds.), Handbook of motivation and cognition: Foundations of social behavior (vol. 2, pp. 408–448). New York: Guilford
Swann, W. B., Jr., (1998). The self and interpersonal relationships. Paper presented at the meeting of the Society of Experimental Social Psychologists, Lexington, KY
Swann, W. B. Jr., Ronde, C., & Hixon, J. G. (1994). Authenticity and positivity strivings in marriage and courtship. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 66, 857–869CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Swann, W. B. Jr., & Hill, C. A. (1982). When our identities are mistaken: Reaffirming self-conceptions through social interaction. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 43, 59–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Swann, W. B. Jr., Pelham, B. W., & Krull, D. S. (1989). Agreeable fancy or disagreeable truth? Reconciling self-enhancement and self-verification. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 57, 782–791CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Swann, W. B. Jr., & Schroeder, D. G. (1995). The search for beauty and truth: A framework for understanding reactions to evaluations. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 21, 1307–1318CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Swann, W. B. Jr., Stein-Seroussi, A., & Giesler, R. B. (1992). Why people self-verify. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 62, 392–401CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Taylor, S. E., & Brown, J. D. (1988). Illusion and well-being: A social psychological perspective on mental health. Psychological Bulletin, 103, 193–210CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Taylor, S. E., Collins, R. L., Skokan, L. A., & Aspinwall, L. G. (1989). Maintaining positive illusions in the face of negative information: Getting the facts without letting them get to you. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 8, 114–129CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lange, P. A. M., & Rusbult, C. E. (1995). My relationship is better than –and not as bad as –yours is: The perception of superiority in close relationships. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 21, 32–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×