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1. What is self-expansion, how can being in a relationship lead to it, and what rewards would a relationship provide according to self-expansion theorists? 2. Does personality have any effect on desire for self-expansion? What about “homebodies” or people who don’t like trying new things? 3. What about “like attracts like”? Is it really all because people feel insecure that others will not like them, or is there something else to it? Although it might be more self-expanding, would an extremely socially liberal person really be happier with a conservative? 4. Could there be another explanation for the link between engaging in novel and exciting activities and relationship satisfaction other than self-expansion (e.g. the "exciting" manipulation in the 3rd study of the Aron et al. (2000) paper)? For example, is it possible that sharing experiences might bring the couple closer and make them more satisfied with one another? Or can that also fall under the umbrella of self-expansion? 5. How does the self-expansion model relate to the other three models we have discussed? Does it contradict any elements of the other three models? Cognition in Relationships 1. Can the idea of sexual scripts be applied to other relationship theories, like attachment styles? Can sexual scripts be a result of attachment style (or visa versa)? Does it disagree with self-expansion theory in that people would desire and seek novel and exiting sexual encounters and not have internal scripts of how these encounters are “supposed” to go? 2. The Lenton and Bryan paper claims that the CS (casual) sexual script is more common than the CR (committed) sexual script. Is this just because they used college students? If these studies were done on a more varied population (married couples, etc), would we see different results? If these sexual scripts are based even partly on experience, would these sexual scripts be better predictors for future sexual encounters? 3. In what ways could attributing sexual intent to non-sexual scripts be a factor in unwanted sexual advances (i.e. sexual harassment, sexual assault, rape), and how could this knowledge contribute to the prevention of these actions? 4. Etcheverry & Le (2005) use interdependence model concepts in their study on accessibility and commitment, but how can their methods and findings be applied to (or use concepts from) attachment theory? 5. If commitment accessibility can moderate the relationship between commitment and stay/leave behavior, what other forms of accessibility could also contribute to that relationship?
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