Dissociations between Implicit and Explicit Measures of Romantic Fantasy: Actual and Ideal Partners

Abstract

We investigated why implicit and explicit measures of romantic fantasy (RF) were not correlated with each other. The participants were female college students, 65 in Study 1 and 73 in Study 2. We assessed (a) their implicit RF using the Implicit Association Test (IAT), and two explicit measures of RF, namely the participants' romantic perception of their actual partner (b), and their romantic perception of their ideal partner (c). We also assessed social desirability (d), and some other variables (e). Self-report questionnaires were used to measure the variables of (b) to (e). The results showed that implicit RF was significantly and positively correlated with explicit RF which assessed representations of ideal partners (c), but was not correlated with explicit RF which assessed their romantic perception of their actual partners (b). The findings suggest that implicit and explicit RFs had been dissociated because the IAT assessed representations of ideal partners, rather than of actual partners.View full abstract