What You Read and What You Believe: Genre Exposure and Beliefs about Relationships

Capps, Stephanie

What You Read and What You Believe: Genre Exposure and Beliefs about Relationships

dc.contributor.advisor	Barnes, Jennifer
dc.contributor.author	Capps, Stephanie
dc.contributor.committeeMember	Carvallo, Mauricio
dc.contributor.committeeMember	Mayeux, Lara
dc.date.accessioned	2017-05-09T19:26:15Z
dc.date.available	2017-05-09T19:26:15Z
dc.date.issued	2017-05
dc.date.manuscript	2017-05-04
dc.description.abstract	Research has shown that exposure to specific fiction genres is associated with theory of mind and attitudes toward gender roles and sexual behavior (e.g. Fong, Mullin, & Mar, 2013, 2015); however, relatively little research has investigated the relationship between exposure to written fiction and beliefs about real-world relationships. Here, participants were asked to complete both the Genre Familiarity Test (Black, Capps, & Barnes, 2017), an author recognition test that assesses prior exposure to seven different written fiction genres, and the Relationship Belief Inventory (Epstein & Eidelson, 1982), a measure that assesses the degree to which participants hold five unrealistic and destructive beliefs about the way that romantic relationships should work. After controlling for personality, gender, and exposure to other genres, three genres were found to be significantly correlated with different relationship beliefs. Exposure to Classics and Fantasy predicted less support for unrealistic relationship beliefs, while exposure to Romance predicted more support for the belief that the sexes are inherently different. A second study was conducted to examine whether exposure to different subgenres of romantic media exerted a causal effect on relationship beliefs. Participants viewed movie trailers from romantic comedies, romantic tragedies, or nature documentaries. After controlling for gender and lifetime exposure to written romance fiction, participants in the nature documentary control condition were more likely to support the belief that sexual perfectionism is necessary for a satisfying relationship.	en_US
dc.identifier.uri	http://hdl.handle.net/11244/50728
dc.language	en	en_US
dc.subject	Relationships	en_US
dc.subject	Fiction	en_US
dc.subject	Genre	en_US
dc.subject	Psychology	en_US
dc.thesis.degree	Master of Science	en_US
dc.title	What You Read and What You Believe: Genre Exposure and Beliefs about Relationships	en_US
ou.group	College of Arts and Sciences::Department of Psychology	en_US