Date of Award

2007

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Psychology

Abstract

There is a substantial amount of evidence for a decline in feelings of passionate love across the course of intimate relationships (Aron, Norman, & Aron, 2001). Self-expansion theory (Aron & Aron, 1986) posits that individuals enter into relationships to expand their sense of self and suggests that declines in feelings of passionate love are due to diminished opportunities for expansion with one's partner over time. Previous researchers have been able to create increases in relationship quality by having partners engage in joint participation in novel and arousing activities, which are considered a basis for self-expansion (Aron, et al., 2000). The current study sought to increase couples' reports of passionate love through joint participation in novel and arousing activities and to illustrate that this relationship was mediated by self-expansion. Twenty three couples participated in the current study, which utilized a pre-post design in which couples completed measures of passionate love, companionate love, and global relationship satisfaction, as well as measures intended to capture the experience of self-expansion, before and after participating in an activity intended to be experienced as self-expanding (laser tag). Analyses revealed that while couples did experience a significant increase in their report of global relationship satisfaction, they did not report increases in passionate love or companionate love, nor did they show significant changes on the measures of self-expansion. These results provide further evidence that participation in novel and arousing activities is beneficial to a couple's satisfaction with their relationship, yet fails to support the notion that the benefits brought on by participating in such activities would be most evident for passionate love and would be mediated by experiences of self-expansion.

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