Relationship Beliefs and Communication Skills in Turkish Married Individuals: Examining the Mediating Role of Partner Accommodation Behavior and Emotional Dependency

In this study, the mediating role of partner accommodation behavior and emotional dependency in the relationship between relationship beliefs and communication skills was investigated. The study was carried out with 400 married participants. The results of the multiple analysis revealed that relationship belief, emotional dependency, and partner accommodation behavior had an 11.20% variance in communication skills. Relationship belief was associated with lower partner accommodation behavior and greater emotional dependency. Further analysis revealed that communication skills were significantly predicted by partner accommodation behavior but not predicted by emotional dependency. Additionally, the indirect effect of relationship belief on communication skills through partner accommodation behavior was significant. As a result, it has been achieved that partner accommodation behavior has a partial mediating role between the relationship beliefs and communication skills of married individuals. Possible explanations and the implications and limitations of the study were discussed.

EmoChannel-SA: exploring emotional dependency towards classification task with self-attention mechanism

Exploiting hand-crafted lexicon knowledge to enhance emotional or sentimental features at word-level has become a widely adopted method in emotion-relevant classification studies. However, few attempts have been made to explore the emotion construction in the classification task, which provides insights to how a sentence’s emotion is constructed. The major challenge of exploring emotion construction is that the current studies assume the dataset labels as relatively independent emotions, which overlooks the connections among different emotions. This work aims to understand the coarse-grained emotion construction and their dependency by incorporating fine-grained emotions from domain knowledge. Incorporating domain knowledge and dimensional sentiment lexicons, our previous work proposes a novel method named EmoChannel to capture the intensity variation of a particular emotion in time series. We utilize the resultant knowledge of 151 available fine-grained emotions to comprise the representation of sentence-level emotion construction. Furthermore, this work explicitly employs a self-attention module to extract the dependency relationship within all emotions and propose EmoChannel-SA Network to enhance emotion classification performance. We conducted experiments to demonstrate that the proposed method produces competitive performances against the state-of-the-art baselines on both multi-class datasets and sentiment analysis datasets.

EMOTIONAL DEPENDENCE IN ROMANTIC RELATIONSHIPS: THE ROLE OF ADVERSE CHILDREN’S EXPERIENCE AND EARLY DYSFUNCTION SCHEMES

Emotional dependency is a persistent pattern of unsatisfied emotional needs, that the individual tries to fulfill in close intimate relationship in particular romantic relationship. Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) are often identified as a cause of emotional dependency. However, there is plenty of evidence that many psychosocial problems are more strongly associated with early maladaptive schemas (EMS), than directly with ACEs. ACEs and EMS both can have effect on emotional dependency. Such assumption has strong theoretical reasoning, but there is still lack of empirical evidence about the exact role ACEs and EMS can play in emotional dependency. The present study examined early maladaptive schemas as mediators of the adverse childhood experiences – emotional dependency in romantic relationship. The study has cross-sectional design. Questionnaires completed by 128 individuals (78% females) (Mage=26; SD=9), who currently or in the past were involved in romantic relationship. There were assessed 10 types of childhood trauma (The Adverse Childhood Experiences Questionnaire), early maladaptive schemas (Young Schema Questionnaire-Short Form) and emotional dependency (Emotional Dependency Questionnaire). The mediation role of EMS was tested by Baron and Kenny (1986) analysis strategy using hierarchical multiple regression procedures. The findings showed that ACEs didn’t predict, but such EMS as abandonment / instability, mistrust / abuse and failure to achieve did predict emotional dependency in romantic relations (R2=0,44). The experience of emotional neglect mildly predicted schema of mistrust / abuse (R2=0,16). Such results discussed in the context of previous research, limitations that restricted the study’s conclusions and future research recommendation.

Emotion Dysregulation as a Moderator of the Association Between Relationship Dependency and Female-Perpetrated Dating Aggression

The dependency-possessiveness model proposes that individuals who are highly dependent on their intimate partner and fear partner abandonment, particularly among those with emotion dysregulation problems, may be at heightened risk for intimate partner aggression (IPA) perpetration. Despite prior research establishing a link between relationship dependency and male IPA perpetration, it is unknown whether this association extends to female-perpetrated aggression, occurs in dating relationships, and is moderated by emotion dysregulation. Thus, the purpose of the current study was to investigate the association between relationship dependency and female-perpetrated dating aggression and determine if emotion dysregulation moderated this hypothesized relationship. Female undergraduate students ( N = 119) completed measures assessing relationship dependency, emotion dysregulation, and female-perpetrated physical and psychological dating aggression as part of a larger study investigating the context of dating aggression episodes. Anxious attachment was significantly correlated with female-perpetrated psychological and physical dating aggression. Regression analyses indicated a significant interaction between the Spouse-Specific Dependency Scale [SSDS] Anxious Attachment subscale and emotion dysregulation predicting female-perpetrated physical dating aggression, suggesting moderation. There was a positive association between anxious attachment relationship dependency and female-perpetrated physical dating aggression at high levels of emotion dysregulation. A significant interaction was also found between the SSDS Emotional Dependency subscale and emotion dysregulation predicting female-perpetrated physical dating aggression, such that among those with low scores in emotion dysregulation, there was a positive relationship between emotional dependency and female-perpetrated physical dating aggression. Findings suggest that the ability to regulate emotions may play an important role in the association between relationship dependency and female-perpetrated dating aggression.

Hand-reared wolves show similar, or stronger, attachment toward human caregivers compared to hand-reared dogs

Domesticated animals are generally assumed to display increased sociability towards humans compared to their wild ancestors. Dogs (Canis familiaris) have the ability to form lasting attachment, a social bond based on emotional dependency, with humans and it has specifically been suggested that this ability evolved post-domestication in dogs. Subsequently, it is expected that dogs but not wolves (Canis lupus), can develop attachment bonds to humans. However, while it has been shown that 16-weeks-old wolves do not discriminate in their expression of attachment behaviour toward a human caregiver and a stranger when compared to similar aged dogs, wolves at the age of eight weeks do. This highlights the potential for wolves to form attachment to humans, but simultaneously raises the question if this attachment weakens over time in wolves compared to dogs. Here we used the Strange Situation Test (SST) to investigate attachment behaviour expressed in hand-reared wolves and dogs toward a human caregiver at the age of 23 weeks. Both wolves and dogs expressed attachment toward a human caregiver. Surprisingly, wolves, but not dogs, discriminated between the caregiver and a stranger by exploring the room more in the presence of the caregiver compared to the stranger and greeting the caregiver more than the stranger. Our results thereby suggest that wolves can show attachment toward humans comparable to that of dogs at later developmental stages. Importantly, our results indicate that the ability to form attachment with humans did not occur post-domestication of dogs.

Potential Therapeutic Targets in People with Emotional Dependency

Objective: To examine the relationship between the components of emotional dependency (ED) with anxious, depressive, and impulsive symptomatology. Method: 98 university students (68% women, age M = 20.2 years, ED = 2.19) responded to the ED Questionnaire (EDQ) (Lemos & Londoño, 2006), the Beck Depression Inventory II (Beck, Steer, & Brown, 2011), the Beck Anxiety Inventory (Beck & Steer, 2011), and the short version of the Barratt Impulsiveness Scale BIS-15S (Spinella, 2007). Results: The structural model indicated that a fear of being alone is associated with separation anxiety, which in turn gives rise to plan modification (PM), search for emotional expression (SEE) and attention-seeking (AS). We found that PM was associated with depression, SEE with anxiety, and that impulsivity could lead to AS. Conclusion: These results identify potential therapeutic targets in people with ED.