Perspective Taking, Self-Anchoring, and Attention to Context in Long-Distance and Geographically Close Romantic Relationships

Abstract

We manipulated perspective taking and measured romantic intimates’ attention to their partners’ context. Participants read a letter supposedly from their romantic partner describing the partner's precarious situation (e.g., stress and financial issues) and either imagined their partner's difficult situation (n = 87) or remained objective and detached (n = 85). Afterwards, they drew a picture of their romantic partner in the situation (drawing task) and wrote about the thoughts they had while reading the letter (writing task). As predicted, when adopting their romantic partner's perspective (vs. remaining detached), geographically close intimates focused more on their partner's context, whereas long-distance intimates relied on self-anchoring processes to produce knowledge about their partner's feelings and thoughts in that specific situation. We discuss theoretical, clinical, and therapeutic implications of the findings for the study of differential perspective-taking processes and mechanisms in long-distance and geographically close relationships.