Journal
EMOTION
Volume 22, Issue 6, Pages 1387-1393Publisher
AMER PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSOC
DOI: 10.1037/emo0000939
Keywords
dyad; marriage; empathy; interpersonal interactions; positive psychology
Categories
Funding
- National Institute of Health National Research Service Award [F31AG059378]
- National Institute of Aging [R01AG041762, P01AG019724, R01AG007476]
- James McKeen Cattell Fellowship
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The study found that in interactions between couples, co-experienced positive affect is associated with better marital quality, while co-experienced negative affect is associated with worse marital quality. Individual level affect factors contribute little to explaining marital quality. Overall, co-experienced positive affect generally outperforms co-experienced negative affect.
Motivated by collective emotions theories that propose emotions shared between individuals predict group-level qualities, we hypothesized that co-experienced affect during interactions is associated with relationship quality, above and beyond the effects of individually experienced affect. Consistent with positivity resonance theory, we also hypothesized that co-experienced positive affect would have a stronger association with relationship quality than would co-experienced negative affect. We tested these hypotheses in 150 married couples across 3 conversational interactions: a conflict, a neutral topic, and a pleasant topic. Spouses continuously rated their individual affective experience during each conversation while watching video-recordings of their interactions. These individual affect ratings were used to determine, for positive and negative affect separately, the number of seconds of co-experienced affect and individually experienced affect during each conversation. In line with hypotheses, results from all 3 conversational topics suggest that more co-experienced positive affect is associated with greater marital quality, whereas more co-experienced negative affect is associated with worse marital quality. Individual level affect factors added little explanatory value beyond co-experienced affect. Comparing co-experienced positive affect and co-experienced negative affect, we found that co-experienced positive affect generally outperformed co-experienced negative affect, although co-experienced negative affect was especially diagnostic during the pleasant conversational topic. Findings suggest that co-experienced positive affect may be an integral component of high-quality relationships and highlight the power of co-experienced affect for individual perceptions of relationship quality.
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