Research Shows One Skill Can Keep Your Relationship Happy

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Relationship satisfaction is an important part of living a happy, healthy, and meaningful life. When we are unhappy in our most intimate partnerships, our physical and mental health are likely to suffer. Conflict and anger are normal experiences in long-term relationships, and they are not toxic in themselves. The problem occurs when partners mimic each others’ negativity and escalate the conflict. Bringing down our own emotional negativity and communicating in less emotionally negative ways is an important skill in preserving relationship happiness over the long haul. The well-designed study described below sheds some light on how effective emotion regulation can preserve or improve the quality of relationships over time.

Emotion regulation and marital satisfaction study

In this 2014 study, researchers from Stanford University, University of California–Berkeley, and Northwestern University studied how the ability to bring down negative emotional experiences and behaviors during conflict would impact concurrent and future marital satisfaction. The researchers utilized data from a 13-year study of middle-aged (40-50) and older heterosexual married couples who provided data at three different time points across the 13 years.

The rationale for the study was that keeping negative emotional experience and behavior in check is an important way of protecting and preserving intimate relationships. The researchers suggest that when we experience strong negative emotional events in relationships (e.g., perceived betrayals, disappointments, anger resulting from conflict), we tend to get triggered into a primitive, self-protective emotional state. In this state, it is difficult to empathize with our partners and we start seeing them as a threat to our happiness or freedom of choice. This results in defensive, critical, and contemptuous behavior. The goal becomes winning the fight or proving ourselves right and the partner wrong. In such states, the original issue often gets lost and the negative emotionality stops us from reaching mutual understanding and compromise. The ability to bring down your own emotional negativity should beneficially impact both you and your partner and open the door for effective communication and conflict resolution.

Study methods

The researchers asked couples to discuss a problem issue affecting the relationship for 15 minutes. They videotaped the discussion then had each partner watch the videotape and rate how they were feeling at each moment by turning a dial. Raters also watched the videotapes and rated whether or not a negative emotional behavior (e.g., anger, belligerence, contempt, etc.) was present during each time point. Separate total scores were then calculated for negative emotional experience and behavior. Emotional regulation was assessed by measuring how long it took for negative emotionality to decrease following a negative emotional event (e.g., negative feelings beyond a certain threshold or belligerence).

Results

Results highlighted the important role that emotion regulation plays in maintaining satisfying relationships, especially for women. Wives who downregulated negative emotions and behaviors more quickly were found to have higher marital satisfaction both concurrently and over subsequent years. Moreover, the husbands of these successful emotional regulators also reported greater concurrent and subsequent marital satisfaction, compared to spouses of less successful regulators.

The researchers then examined statistically whether changes in communication could account for these events. They found that the more wives downregulated negative emotion, the more couples engaged in constructive communications such as discussing the problem together, sharing feelings, or trying to find compromises. These constructive communications in turn predicted higher marital satisfaction in the years to come.

Interpretation

This study highlights the importance of managing your emotions during relationship conflict so that you don’t exacerbate the negativity and can focus on constructively communicating, listening, and trying to find compromise and solutions. When emotional negativity is too high, our brains kick into primitive defensive states in which we see the other person as a threat or a rival to be defeated. When the focus is only on winning, everybody loses! Negative emotional behaviors such as harsh criticism, belligerence, or contempt can push our partners away and make them feel less close to us and less happy with the relationship.

It is not clear why wives’ emotional regulation was more impactful given that husbands did about the same amount of emotional downregulation during the discussions. Women tend to be the emotional barometer of the marriage and perhaps men follow their lead when it comes to emotionally-charged communication.