UMD Theses and Dissertations

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/3

New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a given thesis/dissertation in DRUM.

More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.

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Author: search.filters.author.Teneva, NadyaSubject: search.filters.subject.relationships

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    "I Want You to Want Me": Implications of the Desire to Be Sexually Valued for Psychological Functioning and Romantic Relationships
    (2021) Teneva, Nadya; Lemay, Edward; Psychology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    People often want to be seen as sexually appealing and desirable sexual partners. I refer to this tendency as the desire to be sexually valued, and I propose that it can differ between people and have effects on functioning within romantic relationships. I expected this desire to be psychologically important for cognition, well-being and behavior within relationships. I hypothesized that this desire would be associated with psychological well- being through biasing perceptions that one is sexually desired by their partner and exacerbating reactivity to sexual rejection. Furthermore, I proposed that this desire can refer to evaluations by others in general, or it may be targeted toward a specific person such as one’s romantic partner. I expected the desire to be sexually valued to be associated with behavioral tendencies within romantic relationships, including initiation of sexual activity and a number of other behaviors targeted at increasing sexual value. Moreover, I hypothesized that people who desire to be sexually valued might adopt a communal sexual motivation towards their partners, a motivation to meet their partner’s sexual needs, which can, in turn, be associated with their own and their partner’s higher sexual and relationship satisfaction. Three studies were utilized to test these hypotheses. Study 1 and Study 3 were dyadic studies, and Study 1 included a daily diary component. Study 2 was a self-report study including only people involved in romantic relationships. Results suggested that the desire to be sexually valued exacerbated the effects of daily, but not chronic, sexual rejection on some relationship outcomes. Further, this desire was associated with wishful thinking within romantic relationships, but the strength and nature of these effects depended on participants’ attachment anxiety in Study 1. The desire to be sexually valued by one’s partner predicted increased sexual communal strength toward that partner as well as engagement in a number of behaviors aimed at increasing one’s sexual value. Finally, this desire was indirectly associated with relationship quality through perceptions of being valued by partners, suggesting that wishful thinking may explain some of its relationship benefits. Implications are discussed.
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    The Impact of Guilt on Interpersonal Relationships
    (2019) Teneva, Nadya; Lemay, Edward; Psychology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    People feel guilt when they harm others. Research on guilt has found its mixed effects on interpersonal relationships. The current dyadic study investigates the primary hypothesis that two facets of guilt expression: sharing repair motivations and elaborating on transgression details, have offsetting effects on outcomes through their influence on victim’s perceptions. Perpetrators described an incident in which they expressed guilt to a partner (victims), and both parties completed measures regarding the incident. Results suggest that perpetrators who feel guilty expressed more repair motivations and more wrongdoing, and victims’ perceptions of the incident were connected to personal and relational outcomes. However, victims and perpetrators did not agree on perpetrators’ expressions of wrongdoing or repair motivation, suggesting that guilt may often have weak or mixed effects because it is not always accurately detected. In addition, several moderators of the links between guilt, guilt expression, and victims’ perceptions of the conflict were identified.