SELFESTEEM CONTINGENCIES AND PASSIONATE LOVE PRELIMINARY FINDINGS GENEVIÈVE A

COPING SKILLS POST TEST 1 WHAT IS GOOD SELFESTEEM?
ROSENBERG SELFESTEEM SCALE (ROSENBERG 1965) THE SCALE IS A
RUNNING HEAD INCREASING IMPLICIT SELFESTEEM INCREASING IMPLICIT SELFESTEEM THROUGH

SELFESTEEM CONTINGENCIES AND PASSIONATE LOVE PRELIMINARY FINDINGS GENEVIÈVE A
SELFESTEEM SELFEFFICACY LOCUS OF CONTROL READING ATTITUDE AND READING

LES CONTINGENCES DE L'ESTIME DE SOI COMME PROCESSUS PSYCHOLOGIQUES SOU-JACENTS LES IMPACTS NÉGATIFS DE LA PASSION OBSESSIVE

Self-esteem contingencies and passionate love: Preliminary findings


Geneviève A. Mageau, Catherine F. Ratelle, & Robert J. Vallerand

Laboratoire de recherche sur le comportement social

Département de psychologie

Université du Québec à Montréal


The motivational perspective of passion (Vallerand, Blanchard, Koestner, & Gagné, 2001) proposes that there are two distinct types of passion for engaging in an activity. A first type of passion, obsessive passion, refers to "an internal pressure that forces the individual to engage in a passionate activity". The individual thus feels controlled by the activity. Past research revealed that obsessive passion is associated with negative consequences (e.g., stress, depression, and physical symptoms). The second type of passion, harmonious passion, is described as "a motivational tendency that leads the individual to freely choose to engage in the activity". Hence, individuals engage in their passionate activity out of pleasure and choice. In past research, harmonious passion was associated with positive outcomes (e.g., flow, life satisfaction, and vitality). A recent study (Ratelle & Vallerand, 2001) suggested that the motivational perspective on passion also applies to romantic relationships. Furthermore, they showed that their conceptualization of passion is different from previous perspectives like the passionate-companionate love distinction. Ratelle and Vallerand (2001) also related passion and relationship quality, operationalized as dyadic adjustment, satisfaction with love life, optimism toward the future of the relationship, and commitment. Results suggested that harmonious passion is positively associated with relationship quality, whereas obsessive passion is either not correlated or negatively associated with relationship quality. There was one exception where individuals scoring high on obsessive passion also reported being highly committed to their relationship. This finding is quite paradoxical, given that their experience within the relationship is not positive (and can even be negative). A possible explanation of such findings is that people with an obsessive passionate love have their self-esteem contingent on their lover. While it is widely recognized that different levels of self-esteem have important differential impact on people, Crocker and Wolfe (2000) proposed a different perspective to study self-esteem. They showed that people base their self-esteem on very different contingencies (i.e., competency, physical appearance, approval of others, etc…) and that these self-esteem contingencies moderate people's reactions to actual outcome. In line with this new conceptualization of self-esteem, the first goal of the present study was to determine if having one's self-esteem contingent on one's lover fosters the development of an obsessive passionate love but not a harmonious passionate love. Moreover, we examined the influence of the two types of passion on relationship quality. From the larger sample of 300 students who completed our questionnaire, 176 participants reported having a romantic relationship. Using the Romantic Passion Scale (Ratelle & Vallerand, 2001) and the self-contingencies scale (Crocker, Luhtanen, Wolfe, & Bouvrette, 1999), we first tested the relations between self-esteem contingencies and obsessive and harmonious passion. Regression analyses suggested that a self-esteem contingency on one's lover enables us to differentially predict obsessive and harmonious passionate love. Second, the present study replicated previous results with harmonious passion being positively associated with relationship quality while the opposite pattern was found for obsessive passion. The obtained findings are discussed in terms of their implications for the self-esteem and passion literatures.





Tags: contingencies and, self-esteem contingencies, selfesteem, passionate, contingencies, geneviève, findings, preliminary