James K Mcnulty

Florida State University | FSU

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 fro...

Conventional wisdom suggests that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Echoing this sentiment, theoretical perspectives on close relationships suggest that the synergistic combination of both partners’ personal qualities can influence relationship outcomes above and beyond the simple additive influence of each partner’s qualities. Yet, e...

Satisfying romantic relationships offer numerous social and health benefits, making it critical to understand the trajectory of relationship satisfaction. In recent years, research has begun to examine the role of automatic processes in relationship contexts. In particular, a growing number of studies have incorporated indirect (implicit) measures...

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...

Three pilot studies (Ntotal = 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 pand...

A new goal-systems model is proposed to help explain when individuals will protect themselves against the risks inherent to social connection. This model assumes that people satisfy the goal to feel included in safe social connections—connections where they are valued and protected rather than at risk of being harmed—by devaluing rejecting friends,...

Although the isolated threat of disease often motivates people to avoid others, people need the help and cooperation of others to protect themselves against pandemic disease threats. Therefore, the fear of contracting a highly contagious virus like COVID-19 should motivate people to believe that they can in fact count on the help and cooperation of...

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...

Prior research provides mixed evidence regarding the direction of the association between sexual and marital satisfaction. Whereas some studies suggest a bidirectional association, other studies fail to document one direction or the other. The current investigation used a 12-day diary study of 287 married individuals to clarify the nature of this a...

One challenge many marital couples face is that they experience discrepant levels of sexual desire for one another. Such discrepancies are particularly likely to arise in mixed-sex relationships because, at least in long-term relationships, men tend to have higher levels of sexual desire for their partner than do women. But what underlies this sex...

Individual differences in personality and other traits may be associated with the likelihood that people or their partners will engage in infidelity. This chapter reviews research examining these possibilities. It begins by reviewing research examining associations between infidelity and (a) the Big Five, (b) Dark Triad, (c) attachment insecurity (...

Anecdotal and theoretical work suggests blink rate as an indicator of imminent suicide risk. We sought to empirically examine whether suicide decedents displayed a reduced blink rate in goodbye videos filmed before death, compared to several control groups. Independent raters coded blink rates from videos of 34 suicide decedents and four comparison...

The quality of romantic relationships influences physical and mental health. However, maintaining happy and healthy relationships is challenging; relationship satisfaction declines over time, and relationship dissolution is frequent. This raises the question of which factors contribute to the maintenance versus decline of relationship satisfaction....

Throughout human evolutionary history, women have faced significant adaptive challenges during pregnancy. Natural selection may therefore have favored psychological mechanisms to help women prepare for birth and motherhood. Previous researchers have conceptualized such mechanisms as comprising a form of “nesting,” consisting of selectivity in one's...

The behavioral immune system is an evolved adaptation comprised of automatic behavioral, cognitive, and affective reactions that has allowed humans throughout evolutionary history to avoid situations that risk infection by pathogens (e.g., physical proximity to sick people). Although behavioral immune system activation may be functional by helping...

People sometimes hurt those they profess to love; yet our understanding of intimate partner aggression (IPA) and its causes remains incomplete. We examined brain activity using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in an ethnically and racially diverse sample of 50 female-male, monogamous romantic couples as they completed an aggression task...

People sometimes hurt those they profess to love; yet our understanding of intimate partner aggression (IPA) and its causes remains incomplete. We examined brain activity using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in an ethnically and racially diverse sample of 50 female-male, monogamous romantic couples as they completed an aggression task...

Implicit ambivalence involves holding strong positive and negative implicit evaluations toward the same object. This state is common in close relationships because even the most satisfying partnerships involve in conflicts and other frustrating experiences that can be explained away through effortful motivated reasoning yet remain in memory as ment...

Significance Understanding the factors that explain declines in marital satisfaction is one of the most pressing challenges for relationship science. Yet, several lines of recent research relying on singular theoretical models have questioned our ability to do so. The current research pooled data from 10 independent longitudinal studies of married...

Dual-process models of cognition distinguish relatively automatic from relatively controlled processes in terms of their interactive impact on perception, judgment, and behavior. Such models have advanced explanation and prediction in a variety of domains across psychology but have yet to be comprehensively applied to the pressing societal and publ...

This review offers close relationships as a fruitful avenue to address long-lasting questions and current controversies in implicit social cognition research. Close relationships provide a unique opportunity to study strong attitudes that are formed and updated through ongoing contact with significant others and appear to have important downstream...

Do people realize the evaluative feelings that are spontaneously activated by their partner? If so, do they use those evaluations when judging their romantic relationships? To answer these questions, we investigated the association between automatic partner attitudes and judgments of relationship satisfaction in 7 studies. Study 1 was a meta analys...

Sex is critical to marriage. Yet, there are several reasons to expect spouses to experience declines in the desire for sex over time, and the rates of any declines in sexual desire may differ for men and women. We used two multi-wave, longitudinal studies to test whether male and female members of newlywed couples experienced different rates of cha...

A recent surge in research on automatic processes in close relationships has revealed new insights into how people form and update relationship evaluations as well as the implications of these evaluations for their relationship outcomes. We begin by summarizing this research within the framework of interdependence theory—the predominant theory of h...

Sex is a defining feature of romantic relationships; yet, only recently has research into the implications of sexual processes for such relationships proliferated. We review this work to illustrate how considering the way in which sexual processes influence relationships can help bridge theoretical and empirical work outside and within relationship...