When Giving Feels Good

Emotion (Washington, D.C.), 2017

Gratitude is robustly linked to many positive outcomes for individuals and relationships (e.g., greater life and relationship satisfaction). However, little is known about how romantic partners come to feel grateful for each other's pro-relational acts, such as when a partner makes a sacrifice. The present research examines how perceptions of partner sacrifice motives evoke gratitude. We distinguish between partner, relationship, and self-focused motives, and how they are guided by approach or avoidance orientations. We expected that perceiving a partner to sacrifice for partner-focused approach motives (i.e., to promote the partner's well-being) should evoke gratitude, as this type of motive may signal a genuine departure from self-interest. Moreover, we expected these motives to provoke greater perceptions of partner responsiveness, which should partially explain why they elicit gratitude. In contrast, perceiving a partner to sacrifice for relationship-focused motives (e.g...

Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 2013

Journal of Personality, 2013

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1997

Journal of Social and Personal Relationships

Romantic partners regularly encounter conflicts of interests and sacrifice their self-interest for their partner or the relationship. But is this relationship maintenance behavior always appreciated by the partner receiving the sacrifice? We examined whether expectations of sacrifices (i.e., beliefs that sacrifices are necessary, normal, and expected in relationships) predict people’s appreciation for their partner and, ultimately, their relationship satisfaction. Utilizing a daily experience procedure among romantic couples in the Netherlands ( N = 253 individuals), we found that when participants perceived a partner’s sacrifice, they experienced greater partner appreciation (i.e., gratitude and respect) and, in turn, felt more satisfied with their relationship when their sacrifice expectations were low, rather than high. In contrast, perceiving a partner’s sacrifice had no effect on appreciation and relationship satisfaction when the sacrifice recipient held strong sacrifice expec...

Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 2012

Family Process, 2006

Meltem İzmir akdeniz akademisi dergisi, 2022

The Calendar of the Celts also offers a contextual series of myths that follow the patterns of the months and seasons as they are charted in the night sky. This basis for the spiritual and religious beliefs of the Celtic peoples is easily traced through each month of the year by charting the moon, the stars, and particularly the constellations on the Coligny Calendar. Since the bronze tablet of the Calendar of the Celts discovered in ancient Gaul has some lacuna and is written in a notation of astronomy, the translation of the artifact involves using some of the names of the constellations on the Greek calendar of Attica which traces the same cycles of the celestial bodies. Given the names of the constellations and the deities they represent throughout the year in the Greek Iron Age, the Celtic deities are thus easily identifiable through comparative mythology. Amazing as is sounds, the Neolithic peoples of the British Isles, Europe and the Mediterranean were thus able to give us a mythology that spanned cultures and was preserved well into the Iron Age and now is available to us in the present age. Archetypes, cross-cultural myths, and deities in the night sky have come down through the ages to enlighten us as to the patterns of the mind of our ancestors of thousands of years ago.