Me, myself, and us: salient self-threats and relational connections

Guided by their own amoebic self theory (C. T. Burris & J. K. Rempel, 2004), in 6 studies the authors explore the impact that involvement in an intimate relationship has on how a person appraises and responds to threat. They first show that people in relationship feel less constrained by their physical bodies compared with single people. In 3 subsequent studies involving physical size, blood/body donation, sexual activities, and responses to evil, they show that generalized sensitivity to bodily threat predicts self-protective reactions to specific physical threats among singles, but not among people in relationship, suggesting that intimate relationship involvement decreases the salience of the physical body. In the final pair of studies, they show that the salience of the physical body rebounds when people in relationship are primed, either subliminally or supraliminally, to think of themselves as distinct and separate from their partners. Thus, the present research shows how conceptualizing the self as "us" rather than "me" can transform an individual's response to the outside world, and highlights how physical cues in particular are affected by this process.