Margaret S Clark

Margaret S Clark
Yale University | YU · Department of Psychology

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162
Publications
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Introduction
Skills and Expertise

Publications

Publications (162)
Preprint
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The principle of impartial beneficence (IB) holds we should strive to maximize others’ well-being regardless of their relationship to us. But does endorsement of IB in principle translate to more uniform concern for others irrespective of relationship type? Three pre-registered studies (total N=1,716) found IB endorsement predicts greater and more...
Article
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Existing emotion regulation research focuses on how individuals use different strategies to manage their own emotions—also called intra-personal emotion regulation. However, people often leverage connections with others to regulate their own emotions—interpersonal emotion regulation. The goal of the present studies was to develop a comprehensive an...
Article
We agree with Grossmann that fear often builds cooperative relationships. Yet he neglects much extant literature. Prior researchers have discussed how fear (and other emotions) build cooperative relationships, have questioned whether fear per se evolved to serve this purpose, and have emphasized that human cooperation takes many forms. Grossmann's...
Article
Selfishness is central to many theories of human morality, yet its psychological nature remains largely overlooked. Psychologists often draw on classical conceptions of selfishness from evolutionary biology (i.e., selfish gene theory), economics (i.e., rational self-interest), and philosophy (i.e., psychological egoism), but such characterizations...
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Objective: Theories suggest that laughter decreases negative affect and enhances social bonds; however, no studies have examined the benefits of laughter on stress biomarkers in dyads. This study examined the hypotheses that individual and shared laughter would be associated with lower blood pressure reactivity and decreased self-reported and perc...
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Judgments of whether an action is morally wrong depend on who is involved and the nature of their relationship. But how, when, and why social relationships shape moral judgments is not well understood. We provide evidence to address these questions, measuring cooperative expectations and moral wrongness judgments in the context of common social rel...
Preprint
Full-text available
Selfishness is central to many theories of human morality, yet its psychological nature remains largely overlooked. Psychologists often rely on classical conceptions of selfishness from economics (i.e., rational self-interest) and philosophy (i.e. psychological egoism), but such characterizations offer limited insight into the richer, motivated nat...
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Objective We examined the feasibility and explored the physical, psychological, relational, and biological effects of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), an 8-week standardized mindfulness program, involving older married couples (60 years or older) with metabolic syndrome (one or both partners had metabolic syndrome). We also explored gende...
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When do people express their emotions to other people and when do they choose not to do so? Emotional experience-positive or negative-often leads people to reveal their feelings to others, especially to close relationship partners. Although emotional expression has been incorporated into recent dyadic models of emotion regulation, little research h...
Article
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Objective: Little is known about the cardiovascular effects of mutual emotional spousal support given for health concerns. We examined the hypotheses that: (a) mutual support (both spouses giving and receiving support) compared to one-sided or no support, would decrease blood pressure and heart rate in both spouses during a recovery period; and (b...
Article
We propose a broadened conceptualization of what it means to belong by reviewing evidence that there is more than one way to achieve a sense of belonging. We suggest four paths—a communal-relationship path, a general-approbation path, a group-membership path, and a minor-sociability path—and review some evidence for the existence of each. We call f...
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Cambridge Core - Social Psychology - The New Psychology of Love - edited by Robert J. Sternberg
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The relatively novel construct of intellectual humility describes people's tendency to be open-minded and non-defensive when appraising oneself and one's beliefs. Although intellectual humility describes an intrapersonal style of processing information, we theorize that it also has interpersonal roots. This article describes four experiments and on...
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Having conversations with new people is an important and rewarding part of social life. Yet conversations can also be intimidating and anxiety provoking, and this makes people wonder and worry about what their conversation partners really think of them. Are people accurate in their estimates? We found that following interactions, people systematica...
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Close relationship partners often respond to happiness expressed through smiles with capitalization, i.e. they join in attempting to up-regulate and prolong the individual’s positive emotion, and they often respond to crying with interpersonal down-regulation of negative emotions, attempting to dampen the negative emotions. We investigated how peop...
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Beck and Clark (2009) found self-report evidence that adults are more likely to offer support to a potential friend than to seek identical support from that potential friend, but that this asymmetry between offering and seeking support weakens among close friends. The present study sought to behaviorally replicate these findings in adults as well a...
Article
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People derive a number of benefits from sharing experiences with close others. However, most research on this topic has been restricted to forms of sharing involving explicit socializing, including verbal communication, emotion expression, and behavioral interaction. In two studies, these complexities were eliminated to find out whether merely expe...
Article
A case is made that a communal relationship context (or lack thereof) shapes people's emotional lives for three reasons. First, a person's communal partners assume some degree of non-contingent responsibility for the person's welfare. This allows the person, when with or, at times, when thinking about such partners, to drop some self-protective vig...
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Two studies document that people are more willing to express emotions that reveal vulnerabilities to partners when they perceive those partners to be more communally responsive to them. In Study 1, participants rated the communal strength they thought various partners felt toward them and their own willingness to express happiness, sadness and anxi...
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Whether at a coffee shop, in a waiting room, or riding the bus, people frequently observe the other people around them. Yet they often fail to realize how much other people engage in the same behavior, and that they, therefore, also are being observed. Because it is logically impossible that people, on average, are the subjects of observation more...
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In 2 studies involving 96 married couples (Study 1) and 118 romantic couples (Study 2), we investigated partners’ perceptions of each others’ recently experienced emotions. In both studies, both individuals within each couple independently provided reports of (a) their own recently experienced emotions, (b) their perceptions of their partners’ rece...
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Sharing an experience with another person can amplify that experience. Here, we propose for the first time that amplification is moderated by the psychological distance between co-experiencers. We predicted that experiences would be amplified for co- experiencers who are psychologically proximate but not for co-experiencers who are psychologically...
Article
Beliefs that individuals hold about whether emotions are malleable or fixed, also referred to as emotion malleability beliefs, may play a crucial role in individuals' emotional experiences and their engagement in changing their emotions. The current review integrates affective science and clinical science perspectives to provide a comprehensive rev...
Chapter
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The nature of adult close, communal, relationships is outlined. We define high quality, close, adult relationships in terms of the interpersonal processes that, ideally, characterize them rather than in terms of stability, satisfaction, or lack of conflict. We explain why it is desirable to define them in the former rather than the latter manner. T...
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Perceived partner responsiveness refers to the belief that partners care for one's needs and have positive regard for the self. The authors present a model of motivated distortion of partner responsiveness and review research relevant to this model. The model proposes that perceivers who are strongly motivated to bond with particular partners tend...
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Extremely positive experiences, and positive appraisals thereof, produce intense positive emotions that often generate both positive expressions (e.g., smiles) and expressions normatively reserved for negative emotions (e.g., tears). We developed a definition of these dimorphous expressions and tested the proposal that their function is to regulate...
Article
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In two studies, we found that sharing an experience with another person, without communicating, amplifies one's experience. Both pleasant and unpleasant experiences were more intense when shared. In Study 1, participants tasted pleasant chocolate. They judged the chocolate to be more likeable and flavorful when they tasted it at the same time that...
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Scientists have increasingly turned to the brain and to neuroscience more generally to further an understanding of social and emotional judgments and behavior. Yet, many neuroscientists (certainly not all) do not consider the role of relational context. Moreover, most have not examined the impact of relational context in a manner that takes advanta...
Conference Paper
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We investigated if undergraduate summer research programs increase confidence in mastery of research skills, confidence as researchers and intentions to pursue graduate school, and if that differed by gender. Overall participants in the program had significant improvements in confidence in mastery of research skills, and confidence as researchers....
Article
In the past 25 years, relationship science has grown from a nascent research area to a thriving subdiscipline of psychological science. In no small measure, this development reflects the pioneering contributions of Ellen Berscheid and Elaine Hatfield. Beginning at a time when relationships did not appear on the map of psychological science, these t...
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Two studies investigated norms related to communal strength in the United States and Egypt. Communal strength reflects the extent to which individuals feel responsible for meeting the needs of relationship partners, varies between relationships, and predicts caregiving. Participants indicated the communal strength marital partners should feel towar...
Article
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A tape of 13 relatively labelable and 13 nonlabelable sounds was presented to 13 Ss. Later a second tape containing these same 26 sounds plus 17 new labelable sounds and 17 new nonlabelable sounds was presented to the same Ss. They were asked to indicate when they recognized a sound from the first tape. Ss were able to recognize a significantly gre...
Article
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Baumard et al.'s definition of morality is narrow and their review of empirical work on human cooperation is limited, focusing only on economic games, almost always involving strangers. We suggest that theorizing about mutualisms will benefit from considering extant empirical behavioral research far more broadly and especially from taking relationa...
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Reviews the book, Social Perception and Social Reality: Why Accuracy Dominates Bias and Self-Fulfilling Prophecy by Lee Jussim (see record 2012-08852-000 ). Reports of stereotypes biasing interpersonal perception and of these biased perceptions leading, in turn, to self-fulfilling prophecies are staples in psychology courses. Yet, have we exaggerat...
Article
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This research compared the experiences and consequences of hurt feelings and anger in 3 retrospective studies (Studies 1a, 1b, and 2), a dyadic daily diary study (Study 3), and a dyadic behavioral observation study (Study 4). Although victims felt both hurt and angry in response to perpetrators' behaviors that signaled relational devaluation (Studi...
Article
Gonadal hormones may influence cognitive function. Postmenopausal midlife women in the population-based Melbourne Women's Midlife Health Project cohort were administered a comprehensive battery of neuropsychological tests on two occasions 2 years apart. Participants (n = 148, mean age 60 years) had undergone natural menopause and were not using hor...
Article
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In this commentary we return to the original question of Wanic and Kulik’s paper, “Why do men benefit more from marriage than do women?” We suggest that trying to understand why women suffer more than men in marriage (from conflict or for any other reason) will not, by itself, answer the question. The answers are certainly multifaceted and complex,...
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Trust lies at the heart of person perception and interpersonal decision making. In two studies, we investigated physical temperature as one factor that can influence human trust behavior, and the insula as a possible neural substrate. Participants briefly touched either a cold or warm pack, and then played an economic trust game. Those primed with...
Article
This study examined the impact of subjects' moods on their compliance with simple messages. It was predicted and found that recipients of messages: (1) complied more when in a happy mood than when in a neutral state, and (2) complied less when in an angry mood than when in a neutral state. These effects were observed both when high and low pressure...
Article
People may value their possessions, in part, because ownership of goods promotes feelings of security. If so, increasing their sense of security should reduce the value they place on possessions. In two studies we tested this prediction. In Study 1, participants who were assigned randomly to write about an instance of receiving social support place...
Article
The effects of communal motivation on reactions to relationship partners' expressed anger were examined. In Study 1, married couples reported on the communal strength of their marriage, their expressions of anger to their spouse, and relationship satisfaction. In Study 2, college students reported on the communal strength of their best friendships,...
Article
The authors take a position that high-quality marriages are best defined in terms of theoretically grounded sets of intra- and interpersonal processes that promote both individuals' mental and physical health and the health of their relationship. On the basis of a long-standing research program on communal and exchange relationships, they set forth...
Article
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It is controversial to what extent endogenous gonadal hormone exposures influence executive functions in midlife women. Participants in the population-based Melbourne Women's Midlife Health Project were administered a battery of neuropsychological tests on two occasions 2 years apart. Tests of executive functions were the Trail Making Test (Part B)...
Chapter
Emerging adulthood (EA) has been defined as a time between the ages of 18 and 25, during which individuals are neither adolescents who have never left home, live with their parents (or parent), and are highly dependent on their parents (or parent) nor adults who have assumed full responsibility for themselves and for others, such as a romantic part...
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Caryl E. Rusbult, a pioneer in the scientific study of close relationships and a much esteemed and beloved colleague and mentor, passed away on January 27, 2010, of cancer, at the age of 57. Rusbult made many important, highly cited contributions. Her work played a major role in shaping an emerging specialization-the operation of social-psychologic...
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Couples reported on bases for giving support and on relationship satisfaction just prior to and approximately 2 years into marriage. Overall, a need-based, noncontingent (communal) norm was seen as ideal and was followed, and greater use of this norm was linked to higher relationship satisfaction. An exchange norm was seen as not ideal and was foll...
Article
This research was conducted to examine the hypothesis that expressing gratitude to a relationship partner enhances one's perception of the relationship's communal strength. In Study 1 (N = 137), a cross-sectional survey, expressing gratitude to a relationship partner was positively associated with the expresser's perception of the communal strength...
Article
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The authors posit that the attribution of desirable interpersonal qualities to physically attractive targets is a projection of interpersonal goals; people desire to form and maintain close social bonds with attractive targets and then project these motivations onto those targets. Three studies support this model. Tendencies to see attractive novel...
Article
The authors hypothesize that people who fear dependence evidence a particular defensive bias by perceiving benefits received to have been less voluntarily given, which justifies not depending upon their partner. In Study 1, both members of married couples completed daily diaries regarding benefits they gave and received and the extent to which each...
Article
Three studies suggest that people control the nature of their relationships, in part, by choosing to enter (or avoid) situations providing feedback about other people's social interest. In Study 1, chronically avoidant individuals (but not others) preferred social options that would provide no information about other people's evaluations of them ov...
Article
Three studies provide evidence that people with low self-esteem, but not those with high self-esteem, distance themselves from a flawed partner in situations in which the flaws seem likely to reflect negatively on them. Participants with low (but not high) self-esteem reduced their motivation to care for the partner's needs when they felt they migh...
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This study examined the association between care-recipients' willingness to express emotions to spousal caregivers and caregiver's well-being and support behaviors. Using self-report measures in the context of a larger study, 262 care-recipients with osteoarthritis reported on their willingness to express emotions to caregivers, and caregivers repo...
Article
Two studies provide evidence that, in friendships, people offer support to partners more often than they request identical support for themselves. In one study, people reported being more likely to offer different types of support (e.g., a ride to a train station) than to request identical support. This effect was more pronounced for casual than es...
Article
This article reports results from a three-country study of patient perceptions of physician responsiveness. Based on existing research in the medical and social-psychological literatures, we theorized that patients' perceptions of physician responsiveness to their needs would be an important component of the patient–physician relationship and that...
Article
A model of the role and costs of contingent self-worth in the partner-affirmation process was tested. Actors whose self-worth was contingent on appearance or intelligence claimed to have expressed their particular heightened sensitivity to their romantic partners. Suggesting a cost to these reactions, actors' beliefs about having expressed heighten...
Article
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Two studies of college students in the US utilized a new methodological approach in which participants arranged their multiple family members (i.e. parents, siblings, aunts, and uncles) within a series of relationship network grids. These grids measured participants’ own feelings of communal responsiveness toward and perceived feelings of communal...
Article
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The authors present a model positing that when people are insecure about a relationship partner's acceptance, they often express emotional vulnerabilities to the partner, which causes them to believe the partner views them as highly vulnerable and insecure. In turn, this belief causes them to doubt the authenticity of the partner's expressions of p...
Article
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In 5 studies, the authors tested predictions that (a) people project their own felt communal responsiveness onto partners, perceiving partners to be just as caring and supportive as they are, and (b) projected perceptions guide perceivers' orientation toward further promotion of communal relationships. In Study 1, a manipulation of felt communal re...
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Four studies support the hypothesis that expressing negative emotion is associated with positive relationship outcomes, including elicitation of support, building of new close relationships, and heightening of intimacy in the closest of those relationships. In Study 1, participants read vignettes in which another person was experiencing a negative...
Chapter
Types of Relationships and EmotionTypes of People and EmotionPossible Interactions between Types of People and Types of RelationshipsResponsiveness to Needs and Expression of Emotion: Reciprocal EffectsConcluding Comments
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This research tested a social projection model of perceived partner responsiveness to needs. According to this model, people project their own care and supportiveness for a partner onto their perceptions of their partner's caring and supportiveness. In 2 dyadic marriage studies, participants' self-reported responsiveness to the needs of a spouse pr...
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Earlier research has demonstrated that individuals high in self-esteem tend to integrate positive and negative information about close others whereas those low in self-esteem tend to segregate such information. The present study of roommates replicates this link and extends it by providing evidence that: (a) high self-esteem and integration of room...
Article
College students were given the task of making an object from balloons while being observed by someone who they were told had highly similar values (similar conditions) or highly dissimilar values (dissimilar conditions). Later they were to observe while the other made an object from wire coat hangers that were already unwound (no opportunity to re...
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The authors theorize that individuals with high self-esteem functionally integrate positive and negative partner information in memory, whereas those low in self-esteem segregate such information. The authors obtained support for this view in 7 studies. In a first set, participants judged whether positive and negative traits presented in an alterna...
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This paper presents normative data for visual – spatial ability in midlife Australian women. Understanding normative performance on visuospatial tasks has gained increasing importance recently with the emergence of the association between Alzheimer's disease and impairments in visuo-constructional skills and judgments of spatial relations. Thus, th...
Article
Increased levels of total homocysteine (tHcy) have been associated with lower performance on tests of cognitive function, and may be a potential preclinical marker for Alzheimer's disease. Most reports have focused on older cohorts, but raised tHcy levels, in association with cognitive changes may be occurring in earlier years. Scores for verbal an...
Article
This research examines the effects of relationship type (close vs. business), a personality variable (dispositional communal orientation), and the interaction of these two variables on individuals’ willingness to express emotions to relationship partners. Results supported our predictions that (a) people are willing to express more emotion in relat...
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Normative data for tests of working memory and executive function (a term adopted to cover a range of cognitive skills) are primarily based on the U.S. population and are not always specific for gender or education levels. The diagnosis of, and research into, cognitive diseases rely on the use of relevant normative data. This study presents normati...
Chapter
This 2004 book showcases research and theory about the way in which the social environment shapes, and is shaped by, emotion. The book has three sections, each of which addresses a different level of sociality: interpersonal, intragroup, and intergroup. The first section refers to the links between specific individuals, the second to categories tha...
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During the transition to parenthood, perceived imbalances in family work typically increase. Little is known, however, about which individuals are especially prone to perceive unfairness in the division of family work during this time. Using data from a longitudinal study of married couples expecting their first child and controlling for marital di...
Article
To establish normative data for tests of verbal and non-verbal memory for midlife Australian-born women, and in so doing investigate factors which contribute to variation in test performance. Two hundred and fifty-seven healthy women aged 56-67 years (mean age 60), who are participating in the Melbourne Women's Midlife Longitudinal Health Project,...
Article
Two studies addressed the meaning of expressed happiness in social relationships. In the first study, men expected to interact with a socially desirable or a socially undesirable woman. It was predicted that (a) when about to meet a socially undesirable woman, men would display more happiness publicly than is felt privately and (b) when about to me...
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