“For decades psychologists have assumed that the first impulse is selfish and that it takes self-control to behave in a pro-social manner<\/strong>,” says lead researcher Francesca Righetti of VU University Amsterdam in the Netherlands. “We did not believe that this was true in every context, and especially not in close relationships.”<\/p>\n Righetti and colleagues sought to examine whether impulsivity, in close relationships, might actually benefit others.<\/p>\n They found that participants whose self-control was taxed (and were thus more impulsive) were more willing to sacrifice time and energy for their romantic partner or best friend than participants whose self-control wasn’t taxed<\/strong>.<\/p>\n In one study, to find out whether they would sacrifice in actual practice, the researchers told couples they would have to talk to 12 strangers and ask them embarrassing questions<\/strong>. The participants didn’t know that they wouldn’t actually have to follow through with the task.<\/p>\n Participants with high self-control opted to split the burden right down the middle — assigning six strangers to themselves and six strangers to their partner. But participants with low self-control opted to take on more of the burden, sacrificing their own comfort to spare their partners<\/strong>.<\/p>\n A final experiment revealed that married individuals low in trait self-control sacrificed more for their partners, yet were also less forgiving of their transgressions — presumably because self-control is required to override the focus on the wrongdoing and think instead about the relationship as a whole.<\/p>\n While sacrificing for a partner may help to build the relationship on a day-to-day basis, Righetti and colleagues note that it could backfire over the long-term, compromising individuals’ ability to maintain a balance between personal and relationship-related concerns<\/strong>.<\/p>\n This balance is a perennial issue for anyone in a close relationship:<\/p>\n “Whether it’s about which activities to engage in during free time, whose friends to go out with, or which city to live in, relationship partners often face a divergence of interests — what is most preferred by one partner is not preferred by the other,” notes Righetti.<\/p>\n The field of research is relatively new, so the jury is still out on what effects sacrifice has on relationship well-being<\/strong>, but Righetti is hopeful that research over the next few years will shed more light on the link.<\/p>\n Co-authors on this research include Catrin Finkenauer, also of VU University Amsterdam in the Netherlands, and Eli Finkel of Northwestern University.<\/p>\n This research was supported by grants from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" From the Association for Psychological Science press release via ScienceDaily: When faced with the choice of sacrificing time and energy for a loved one or taking the self-centered route, people’s… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5,7],"tags":[322,12,276,98],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14533"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14533"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14533\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14837,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14533\/revisions\/14837"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14533"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14533"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14533"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"support_friends_resiliency\"](\"http:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/06\/support_friends_resiliency.jpg\")
<\/a>When faced with the choice of sacrificing time and energy for a loved one or taking the self-centered route, people’s first impulse is to think of others<\/strong>, according to new research published in Psychological Science<\/em>, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.<\/p>\n