The impact of non-shared experiences in close relationships
Supervisor: Dr. John Lydon
Hi! Hope everyone is doing well. I’m Yongyao Li, and this year I worked with Dr. Lydon on a project that looked at non-shared experiences in close relationships. We specifically explored how couples high in shared reality react to non-shared experiences which might be potential threat to the relationship. We found that when asked to recall a non-shared experience, couples higher in shared reality tended to recall an experience that was further back in time. However, the experience didn’t necessarily feel more distant to couples higher in shared reality compared to couples lower in shared reality. Our finding suggests that relationship partners take a motivated cognition approach instead of a motivated perception approach when faced with the threats from non-shared experiences.
As social distancing and quarantine due to covid-19 is, and will be, changing how we experience our social lives, I personally believe that research in non-shared experiences will gain growing attention. I hope that my work could inspire more future work that aims to investigate what we could do to adapt to situations like this. Thanks!