Love and Infidelity: How we protect Relationships (Interesting Science study)

LOVE AND INFIDELITY: HOW OUR BRAINS KEEP US FROM STRAYING
By Regina Nuzzo
Los Angeles Times
September 15, 2008

http://www.latimes.com/features/health/la-he-mating15-2008sep15,0,5766094.st
ory

In the pursuit of happily-ever-after, the odds seem to be stacked against
us.

Men and women reap huge benefits when they stick around with a good partner
— staying happier and healthier, living longer and passing along more
genes. But the sticking-around part is a challenge. We don’t get long-term
relationship payoffs right away. And until then — between the
once-upon-a-time and the happily-ever-after — plenty of temptations can
beckon.

Not that it’s wrong to shop around before settling down. But there always
will be enticing alternative mates — whether heart-grabbing or merely
eye-catching. So researchers wonder: With so many attractive alternatives,
how do humans manage to maintain relationships at all?

The brain appears to have some tricks up its neural sleeve. A new line of
research is exploring how automatic psychological mechanisms kick into
action when the eye starts to wander, helping resist temptation and
strengthening the relationship — even without us being aware of it.

Here’s a sample from some recently published experiments (all on
heterosexual men and women in committed monogamous relationships) that show
how our brain keeps us connected to — and, yes, even happy with — the old
ball and chain.

(Spoiler: When it comes to relationships, men and women are a bit
different.)

Subconscious alarm bells

An early-warning alert system signals threat.

In an experiment published in the Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology in July, researchers at McGill University in Montreal asked 150
men and women to imagine chatting with an attractive member of the opposite
sex. For comparison, another 150 imagined boring encounters with people of
the same sex. After the visualizations, all participants played
fill-in-the-blank word games designed to reveal subconscious thoughts.

When presented with “THR_AT,” for instance, women who’d thought about hunky
men tended to write “threat.” But men more often wrote “throat.” Likewise,
given “LO_AL” after the hunk visualization, women saw “loyal,” but men
tended to see “local.” (Men and women who imagined ho-hum encounters
answered similarly, so researchers decided the differences were because of
imagined flirtation.)

The conclusion? The mere thought of an outside flirtation is enough to
trigger alarm bells in women’s brains — but not so much in men’s. “It’s an
amazing outcome,” says John Lydon, professor of psychology at McGill
University and leader of the study. “The same things weren’t coming to mind
for the men.”

Extra tolerance

A flirtation can trigger increased niceness toward a partner — or not.

In this experiment, the McGill researchers upped the ante. Each participant
encountered a live temptation: a good-looking actor of the opposite sex,
trained in the art of subtle flirtation (and pretending to be another
participant signed up for the same study). A comparison group included aloof
fake subjects who made no conversation.

After interacting with the beautiful actor, participants were then asked to
imagine how they would react if their own partner were to act
not-so-beautifully — being late for a date, for instance, or lying about
going out with friends.

Men who were paired with the chatty attractive woman were less likely to
forgive their girlfriends’ hypothetical bad behavior (compared with men
paired with the taciturn fake participant). Women, on the other hand, did
the opposite: Those who had interacted with the good-looking man were more
likely to be extra forgiving and make excuses for their boyfriends’
slip-ups.

The conclusion? Subconsciously, men saw the flirtatious woman as a good
alternative mate and so felt a bit less committed to their girlfriends.
Women, too, saw the friendly guy as an attractive alternative — but they
also saw the threat he posed. So women tried to strengthen their
relationships — essentially pitching in to do more of the “heavy lifting”
of relationship upkeep, Lydon says.

Avoidance

Sometimes we mentally push away temptation.

Here the McGill researchers turned to computer games. They asked 115 men and
women to explore an immersive virtual reality and play with the position of
images dangling in space: photographs of animals, fruit and attractive
people.

Women who had been first primed to think subconsciously about their
relationships tended to shove away the images of the handsome men. The male
participants, on the other hand, didn’t push away the good-looking women —
if anything, they pulled them closer.

Women may automatically know how to protect a relationship better than men
do, Lydon says. So the researchers tried to teach men’s subconsciousness a
new trick: planning ahead for temptation.

Studies have shown, for example, that New Year’s resolutions succeed more
often when people first form a plan of behavior for specific situations. So
the researchers had another group of men visualize a scenario involving a
cute woman at the bar and a girlfriend gone for the weekend. Then they had
the men complete the following sentence in detail: “When the girl
approaches, I will [blank] to protect my relationship.”

When let loose in a virtual reality building, these trained men tended to
avoid certain areas: the rooms with pictures on the wall of pretty women
flickering imperceptibly, flashing for only a few thousands of a second —
so fast that only their subconscious would notice. Untrained men, however,
virtually flocked to the flashing-women rooms.

The conclusion? Women already know how to distance threats and protect
relationships, perhaps because they’ve been taught to do so by society. “Men
don’t have those strategies built in,” Lydon says, “but they can be
trained.”

What’s more, the methods can be automatic. “These strategies don’t require
conscious control,” he says, “so they can work if you’re tired or
distracted, or even if you’ve had a drink.”

Suppression

We can also push down illicit thoughts.

In a set of experiments on 120 men and women, published in Evolution and
Human Behavior in March, researchers at UCLA explored how love gives the
brain a boost.

Normally, suppressing unwanted thoughts will backfire. You can force
yourself not to think about chocolate cake for a while, but soon your
thoughts will be filled with rich delicious desserts even more than usual.
It’s called the ironic rebound effect, says Gian Gonzaga, first author of
the paper and now a senior research scientist at EHarmony, a match-making
website. And psychological theories say suppression shouldn’t succeed with
thoughts of deliciously tempting men and women either.

Yet it does work. When men and women were induced to experience feelings of
love for their partners, they were able to suppress thoughts about
attractive members of the opposite sex. Feeling lust for their partners, on
the other hand, didn’t help with the suppression.

What’s more, love induced a selective memory block. When shown pictures of
attractive members of the opposite sex, the in-love participants later
couldn’t remember important details — such as whether the person in the
picture had a good body or dreamy eyes. They could remember irrelevant
details, however, such as whether the person was wearing a purple sweater or
holding a hot dog, Gonzaga says.

The conclusion? The warm-and-fuzzy glow of love makes the unwanted thoughts
go away — either by providing a distraction or by interfering with the
coding of the memory. “Love seems to cut off being able to remember anything
that might threaten the relationship,” Gonzaga says. Desire doesn’t do this,
though. “Love helps a person commit,” he says, “but desire fuels sexuality,
and sexual desire is not about commitment.”

Inattention

Best of all, we can just not notice temptation.

In another set of experiments of 124 men and women, published in Evolution
and Human Behavior in September, Gonzaga and colleagues at Florida State
University found that love can induce a sort of “hottie blindness” in
people.

A computer game measured how quickly participants could tear their eyes away
from an image of a good-looking member of the opposite sex. The quicker the
eye dart, the less captivating the image.

Participants who were feeling generally happy tended to linger somewhat on
the tantalizing pictures. But folks feeling strong love for their partners
seemed to be repelled by the tempting sight, and their attention skipped
away relatively quickly. And a final vindication for the males: Love seems
to be an especially potent charm for men, since it drove away their
attention from the tempting pictures even faster than it did for women.

The conclusion? Love shapes our attention to members of the opposite sex at
a very primitive level. “This must be very deeply ingrained in us,” Gonzaga
says, “because it happens so quickly, and we can’t consciously control it.”

As for the gender difference in all the experiments: It may come out in the
wash. “Men and women have different challenges in a relationship, but the
long-term gains are powerful for both,” Gonzaga says. And both — whether
through innate ability, training or love — are able to respond to little
threats lurking in flirty smiles. “The basic idea is that if people
understand that their relationship is being threatened, they are going to
defend it.”