Socially Situated Cognition and the Couple as a Dynamic System: A Commentary

Fincham, Stanley, and Beach (2007) join a growing movement advocating a greater research focus on the positive aspects of development and functioning (Seligman, Parks, & Steen, 2005). They suggest that research on marital processes has emphasized the study of conflict and has not attended sufficiently to other processes contributing to healthy marriages. They advance four candidates (forgiveness, commitment, sacrifice, and sanctification) as potential areas of study for understanding how satisfying and fulfilling marriages are maintained, as well as how unhappy marital situations may transform into more positive relationships without outside influence. Fincham et al. (2007) present not just a set of new concepts but also the outlines of a broader theoretical framework that advocates a fundamental shift in how to think about and study stability and change in marital relationships. In this comment, I take up three core themes central to the framework they present, discuss how they might be more fully specified, and speculate on promising avenues of research on marital process that would test the validity and utility of this framework. These themes include the movement toward socially situated cognition, the integration of social cognition and action within a dynamic systems framework, and the place of communal goals in an individualist society. FROM SOCIAL COGNTHON TO SOCIALLY SITUATED COGNITION Every few years, I run across a new journal article with a title something like "Why isn't social psychology really social?" It has been the case that social psychologists have often focused more on how people think about and process information concerning interpersonal contexts, and have paid less attention to the dynamics of social interaction itself. Fincham et al. (2007) have addressed this issue directly by suggesting that an individual's representations of one's partner and one's relationship are important areas of study because of how such cognitive processes shape patterns of interaction at the level of the dyad. This emphasis parallels a growing body of research on what Resnick (1991) has termed socially situated cognition, concerning how cognitive activity in a social context both shapes and is shaped by that context. Although this framework has informed research on such topics as a child's development of basic number skills in classroom settings or the operation of work groups in organizations (see Resnick, Levine, & Teasley, 1991, for these and a number of other examples), its application to marital process research has been slow and is a welcome advance. Fincham et al. (2007) also suggest that the study of social cognition will be greatly enhanced by attending not just to cognitive representations of partner or relationship but also by bringing motivation back into the equation. The voluminous body of research on cognitive models of motivation has emphasized the idea of goals as internal representations of desired states (Austin & Vancouver, 1996) and provides a variety of concepts worth mining for their application to models of marital process. Here, I suggest two areas likely to bear fruit in studying marriage: full extensions of motivational domains from attachment theory and models of goal activation in real time. Making Full Use of Attachment Theory It is true, as Fincham et al. (2007) point out, that adult attachment models have generated substantial research relevant for understanding marital process (Mikulincer & Goodman, 2006). The primary construct in this work has been attachment style, denned as patterns of behavior, thought, and affect that are organized around the goal of seeking comfort or security in the face of threat. Developmental models of the evolution of attachment style have been filled in by substantial empirical work, as have models of how cognition is organized within each general style (Collins, Ford, Guichard, & Allard, 2006). This emphasis on the goal of security seeking, however, has not been matched by work on the complementary goal of caretaking, even though caretaking actions are clearly an important part of couples' interactions involving security seeking. …