Soap Opera Viewers and Relationship Beliefs

Many individuals anecdotally express concern about whether watching too many soap operas is somehow "bad" for viewers. Does watching soaps cause viewers to have a distorted set of beliefs about and expectations toward relationships in their everyday lives? This book contains a monograph of the author's doctoral dissertation, in which he explores the social cognition and relationship learning that occurs from soap operas. Do soap opera viewers hold different sets of beliefs about sex in relationships? About conflict? About romance? About break-up? In the first study, Dr. Hoekstra tests the existence of such beliefs in the context of both relationships in general and in the context of a viewer's actual current relationship. In the second study, Dr. Hoekstra examines whether soap viewers have a different capacity for recognizing, remembering, and constructing hypothetical relationship plots with typical soap-opera sorts of themes.