New research published in Motivation and Emotion provides insight into some of the psychological mechanisms underlying stalking behavior. The study suggests that threatening one’s need for relatedness can increase obsessive thinking, which in turn increases proximity-seeking towards a romantic target.
“When I first started my doctoral research, I got interested in trying to understand the motivational and social-cognitive predictors of stalking behavior,” said Timothy Jacob Valshtein (@TJValshtein), a PhD student at New York University who co-authored the study with Elizabeth R. Mutter.
“Stalking is an incredibly common experience (something like 20% of all women will be stalked at some point in their lives). Yet, so much of our understanding of why people perpetrate remains unclear. After reading the literature and talking with my advisor and co-author Dr. Gabriele Oettingen, we started thinking about the role that mental imagery plays in stalking behavior.”
“People have really rich inner lives — I think we can all relate to a time when we imagined something really terrible happening to a loved one. We thought that when these kinds of thoughts, coupled with a context where you feel really alone and yearning for human connection is what might lead someone to think obsessively about a romantic partner,” Valshtein said.
“But ultimately, our interest in the origins of obsessive thinking really stemmed from a broader interest in understanding why some individuals (often men) have such a difficult time respecting the boundaries of their romantic interests.”
In three experiments, which included 738 participants in total, the researchers found that the need to feel emotionally connected with others (psychological relatedness) and distressing fantasies were both associated with obsessive thinking. In addition, obsessive thinking was linked to heightened intentions to seek proximity to a romantic target.
“We found experimental evidence to suggest that when the need to feel related/connected to close others is interrupted and when we have fantasies about something awful happening to a romantic partner, we tend to start thinking more obsessively about the very person who may be able to quell those anxieties and satisfy that need to feel related. Put simply, we seek out the comfort of close others when we feel lonely — even if that loneliness and self-doubt is completely a figment of our imagination,” Valshtein told PsyPost.
The researchers used two different methods to induce a need for psychological relatedness. Two of the experiments asked the participants to list 16 times when their partner and made them feel loved. The participants were told that this is an easy task. However, previous research has found the opposite — people tend to have a hard time remembering 16 specific memories about feeling loved.
The third experiment used a task known as the cyberball game, in which participants are systematically ignored and excluded during a virtual ball tossing game.
But like all research, the study includes some limitations.
“Research on obsessive thinking and stalking-like proximity seeking behaviors can be really tricky to pin down. In our studies, we never actually measure behavior, just self-report of thoughts and feelings. On the one hand, as someone who’s interested primarily in human behavior, this is less than ideal. Yet on the other, I think there is a real ethical responsibility for us as scientists to consider. I don’t want to bring our research participants in the lab, make them feel bad, and then put them in a position where they might start stalking their romantic partner,” Valshtein said.
“So we tried to keep things safe and only inside the lab. Another important shortcoming is that these particular studies don’t grapple with gender differences in obsessive thinking or stalking-like behaviors. However, we know from prior research on stalking that gender is something really important to consider, as men are typically the perpetrators of stalking behavior.”
Surprisingly, the researcher did not uncover any significant gender differences when it came to obsessive thinking. “This suggests that obsessive thinking alone isn’t the only important consideration in trying to understand why people stalk — in fact, some of our ongoing work is thinking about the gender differences in the self-regulation that follows after obsessive thinking starts,” Valshtein explained.
“That is, maybe men and women don’t differ in how obsessively they think about their romantic partners, but rather it’s what comes after those obsessive thoughts that matters. Men, compared to women, may not be so effective at regulating their subsequent romantic behaviors. This is all still very ongoing, so it’s quite speculative.”
“This is such a new area of research, so there are a lot of challenging problems to work on. As I mentioned above, some of our in-progress work revolves around further developing these concepts. One area we’re starting to look forward to examining more carefully is how these dynamics unfold in the context COVID-related distancing and isolation,” Valshtein added.
“Social distancing and other forms of preventative health practices seem to be making it more difficult to feel connected to romantic partners (in situations where two individuals are dating but not cohabitating). We’re looking now to see if individuals who experience those same kinds of negative fantasies may be more willing to go out and pursue romantic partners — even if it might be dangerous or undesirable to do so in the context of a global pandemic.”
The study, “Relatedness needs and negative fantasies as the origins of obsessive thinking in romantic relationships“, was authored by Timothy J. Valshtein, Elizabeth R. Mutter, Gabriele Oettingen, and Peter M. Gollwitzer.
