ABSTRACT
How do we know in advance that our partner will soothe us when we are sad or that our child will like a birthday present? Sure, we are not always correct, but we do fairly well in predicting the behavior of relationship partners. This capacity is due to a mental representation of personal relationship that has been termed internal working model in attachment theory (Bowlby, 1969), or relational schema in a more general perspective on relationship representation (Baldwin, 1992). Because relationship research traditionally relies on behavior observation and verbal self-report data, the cognitive representation of relationships has mainly had the status of a postulated background concept and has not been an object of investigation in its own right. This has changed since the 1990s when relationship researchers became increasingly interested in using experimental methods such as affective and semantic priming to study relational schemata. In this chapter I review this work and some of its historical precursors. The aim is to show how priming has been successfully used in relationship research, to discuss the limitations of this approach, and to make some suggestions for future research.
