Theories of Romantic Relationships

SEt s

Real life applications. in Integrative behavioural couples therapy Partners are trained to increase the proportion of positive exchanges in their everyday interactions and decrease negative ones Christensen at our found that 2/3 of those treated using this reported that their relationship had significantly improved and we’re feeling happier as a result. Strength as it can help distressed couples in real life.

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less applicable to romantic relationships. SET assumes that couples keep a tally of loss and profit within a relationship however Clock and Mills argue that well this may be true of exchange couples work colleagues it is really the case for communal couples where rewards are distributed freely without keeping school. This has been expanded on by other fairies to argue furnace is key relationships. This is a limitation as a limits the validity of SET as it can only apply to a limited range of social relationships.

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Deterministic. According to SET if the cost outweigh the rewards are personal wants to opt out of relationship. However, there are many cases where people stay in a high cost relationship for example when One partner is chronically ill without feeling the satisfied. As a result the predictive validity of SET is very limited. It cannot establish with significant certainty whether a person will happy or unhappy in a relationship Based on the cost and rewards they are getting from it. This is a limitation because it cannot be used to predict human behaviour with a degree of certainty which is one of the main objectives for psychology to be as accepted as a science.

et S

one strength of equity theory is that it is less deterministic

other theories such as SET argue that if a partner has low profit and a high CL with alternatives then they are likely to leave that relationship.

However ET argues that people have more choice and may decide to stay in their current relationship and respond to the inequity through behaviour or cognitive responses.

Strength as it considers the element of free will People have been deciding to stay and work at their current relationship. Furthermore equity theory considers broader range of factors making it more holistic

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cultural differences.

Aumer-ryan found that the concept of equity is more important in western cultures than non western cultures.

Both men and women from non-western collectivist cultures claim to be most satisfied with their relationships when they will over benefiting from it not when the relationship was fair.

Therefore this is a limitation as these results highlight a culture bias in this area of research and suggest that the equity theory doesn't explain the development of romantic relationships in all cultures.

Furthermore the equity theorem also ignores gender differences, lacking generalizability

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can't explain a wider range of relationships. ET argues that the person will leave due to the unfairness in the relationship. Other theories such as Rustbolt Investment Model explained that some people may decide to stay in abusive relationship due to having so much invested which they could lose by leaving. Despite high Cl alt and low satisfaction. Limitation as can't explain why some people stay in a high cost relationship

rusbults investment model

can you explain why people stay in abusive relationships. According to the theory people may remain committed to their partner despite low satisfaction because they have a large amount invested. An example of this could be time or children. Other theories such as SET would argue that because satisfaction is low they would leave that relationship. Rosbult and maltz studied abused woman and found they were most likely to stay when investment was highest. Strength as can explain a wide range of relationships than previous theories.

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holistic.

Rosbult argues that relationships have many factors that affect commitment, such as satisfaction level investment and comparison level.

Other theories such as ET only considered fairness to be a factor of that affect the commitment in a relationship.

Strength as it takes into count of range of factors that affect commitment levels in relationships.

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supporting research is correlational.

Much of the research into whether investment affects commitment uses correlation studies. These studies can only look at the relationship between these two variables and cannot prove that investment needs to commitment. This is a limitation as that they relax predictive validity as we cannot predict how much investment may be needed for a long-term commitment to happen, which is a main feature of a science.s