Reading Relationships, But Seeing Betrayal: Impact of Relational Health Schemas on Processing of Interpersonal Conflict

Close relationships are of vital importance to psychological well-being and adjustment. However, all relationships experience periods of conflict. This investigation examines relational health schemas as an individual difference variable that determines cognitive appraisal of conflict and betrayal in close female relationships. Undergraduate female participants were classified into higher or lower relational health schema groups and randomly assigned to read a fictional experimental vignette describing a close friendship between two women. The vignette provided an account of the development of a friendship and concluded in a description of an interpersonal conflict between the two characters. Severity of betrayal (actual/perceived) and friendship resolution (positive, negative, ambiguous) were varied across the experimental conditions. Free recall of vignette content and reading time were the dependent measures. It was expected that vignettes with severity of betrayal and resolutions congruent with relational health schemas would be processed more quickly and remembered more accurately than those that were incongruent. The results provide support for individual differences in relational health as a determinant of processing biases. The findings also suggest that severity of betrayal and outcome mediate the processing of content and amount of recall for interpersonal conflict vignettes.