Tapping into the mysteries of love and hate

Now psychologists have started to unravel the mystery of love-hate relationships.

Researchers in the US discovered that people who see their relationships as either all good or all bad tend to suffer from low self-esteem.

They find it difficult to see partners as having a mix of positive and negative traits, and either idolise or despise them at any given point in time, said the experts.

“We do not think these results are limited to any one type of relationship,” said Professor Margaret Clark, who led the study at Yale University in Connecticut.

“We think they apply to any close relationship.”

In the study, volunteer students were given a list of 10 adjectives and asked to indicate quickly if they applied to their relationship “partners”, who included room-mates and mothers as well as girl and boyfriends.

Some of the adjectives were positive, such as “caring” and “warm”, and some negative, such as “greedy” and “dishonest”.

Individuals low in self-esteem were much slower to respond when negative and positive adjectives were alternated than when similar adjectives appeared one after the other.

Those who had high self-esteem responded at the same speed whichever way the adjectives were presented.

Before the tests took place, participants had their self-esteem measured using a recognised psychological questionnaire.

The reaction time study was conducted a week later by a researcher who did not know the self-esteem results.

Prof Clark has a theory to explain the findings, published in the latest issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

“Those low in self-esteem are chronically concerned about whether or not their close relationship partners will or will not accept them.

“In good times, those low in self-esteem tend to idealise partners, rendering those partners safe for approach and likely to reflect positively upon them. At the first sign of a partner not being perfect, however, they switch to focusing on all possible negatives about the partner so as to justify withdrawing from that partner and not risking vulnerability.”

Based on the results, Prof Clark and co-researcher Dr Steven Graham have developed a way to measure the degree to which people place thoughts about partners into “all good” and “all bad” boxes. Their new scale is called the I-Taps (Integration of Thoughts About Partners Scale).