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A Dual-Process Perspective on How Sexual Experiences Shape Automatic Versus Explicit Relationship Satisfaction: Reply to Brody, Costa, Klapilová, and Weiss (2018)

In our original article (Hicks, McNulty, Meltzer, & Olson, 2016), we reviewed evidence that sexual behaviors tend to be unrelated to self-reported relationship satisfaction. We then described two studies demonstrating that a measure of the frequency of various sexual behaviors was unassociated with self-reported relationship satisfaction but positively associated with implicitly assessed automatic partner attitudes. Brody, Costa, Klapilová, and Weiss (2018) presented evidence that, when specifically assessed, penile-vaginal intercourse (PVI) tends to be associated with self-reported relationship satisfaction, whereas other sexual behaviors do not. In this Reply, we articulate how the theories of implicit social cognition that guided our original research, including the wellsupported associative propositional evaluation (APE) model (Gawronski & Bodenhausen, 2006, 2011) and the motivation and opportunity as determinants (MODE) of judgments and behavior model (Fazio & Olson, 2014), can reconcile our findings with those described by Brody et al.; we support this reconciliation with preliminary data. According to dual-process models, experiences with a person can lead to evaluations of that person that manifest in two ways: as automatic attitudes and as explicit attitudes. Automatic attitudes are object-evaluation associations that are activated spontaneously and without intention and are best captured by implicit measures. Explicit attitudes are based on deliberative reasoning processes and are best captured by self-report measures; they may or may not align with automatic attitudes, depending on one’s motivation and opportunity to deliberate (Fazio & Olson, 2014). The APE model, as well as decades of research on evaluative conditioning (see Jones, Olson, & Fazio, 2010), suggests that experiences involving an attitude object, such as a relationship partner, can lead to positive or negative affect that becomes associated with that object to influence one’s automatic attitude (for effects involving relationship evaluations, see McNulty, Olson, Jones, & Acosta, 2017; for effects in the sexual domain, see Hoffmann, 2017). Given the evolved benefits of PVI and the different experiences associated with PVI and non-PVI sexual behaviors highlighted by Brody et al., humans may experience more positive affect during PVI compared with other sexual behaviors, which may lead to a stronger link between PVI and automatic partner attitudes. This could explain why our general measure of sex was associated with automatic partner attitudes. However, we argue that the general measure of sex we used in our original research was associated with automatic partner attitudes because even non-PVI sexual behaviors can result in positive affect (e.g., from orgasm) that can become automatically associated with one’s partner. Indeed, a preliminary test of this hypothesis (N = 202; some participants failed to complete all measures) revealed a positive association between the frequency of orgasm from PVI and automatic partner attitudes, t(142) = 2.30, p = .023, effect-size r = .19, and a similar, though nonsignificant, pattern of results for frequency of orgasm from oral sex, t(142) = 1.73, p = .085, effect-size r = .14 (the Supplemental Material available online provides details). Of course, the most critical point in light of Brody and colleagues’ Commentary regards why PVI may predict explicit relationship satisfaction on average, whereas other sexual behaviors do not. Both the APE and MODE 760848 PSSXXX10.1177/0956797618760848Hicks et al.Sexual Experiences and Relationship Evaluations research-article2018