Poster #226 - Negative emotion during couple narratives about conflict: Links to conflict strategies

• In Event: 3-003 - Poster Session 09
  In Poster Session: PS 09 Section - Social Relationships

Integrative Statement

Emerging adulthood is marked by the transition to more serious romantic relationships characterized by greater intimacy and conflict. A challenging task in successfully navigating these relationships is managing conflict-related anger and sadness. Emotion regulation is key for understanding reliance on conflict strategies that enhance or harm relationships. Examining the reactivation of negative emotions tied to specific recollections of past conflict events can provide insight into emotion regulation processes used to interpret and guide romantic relationship behavior. Although narrative recollections are a central means for understanding emotion regulation, work that focuses on couple narratives is scarce. Addressing this gap, we examined how narrative indicators of negative emotion were related to couple member self-reported relationship functioning. We considered three features of emotion related to conflict: the use of angry and sad emotion words during the narrative; self-ratings of these emotions immediately following the narrative; and negative emotional arousal as indicated by range of vocal pitch during the narrative.

Eighty non-cohabitating heterosexual couples (Age M = 19.72, SD = 1.15, 28% ethnic minorities), in romantic relationships of at least 3 months (M = 14.86, SD = 11.05) participated in semi-structured interviews to obtain narratives about two specific times their partners did not meet their needs; couple members were interviewed separately. Immediately following the narratives, ratings of anger and sadness were obtained. Couples then completed an on-line survey that included measures of conflict strategies. The Linguistic Inquiry Word Count software assessed angry words used by couple members to describe their own feelings during the conflict events. Pitch was obtained using the Praat software from interview recordings of the conflict narratives.

Our analyses took into account the dyadic nature of the data and used 80 couples; 30 more are being transcribed (N =110 couples by January 2019). The results of paired-sample t-tests (see Table 1) indicated that female were higher than male couple members on angry words and ratings, sad ratings, pitch, withdrawal and positive problem solving. Actor-Partner-Interdependence-Models (APIM) were fit using mixed-effects regression. Models with and without interactions between gender and both actor and partner effects were compared. These APIM analyses showed some associations between negative emotions and conflict strategies for couples, but no evidence these associations were different as a function of gender (see Table 2 for actor and partner effects). When couple members used more angry words during, and rated themselves as more angry after the narration, they reported significantly higher levels of their own conflict engagement (actor effect) and each couple member’s anger was related to their partner’s conflict engagement (marginal partner effect). Couple members’ sad ratings but not words, were significantly related to their own higher conflict engagement (actor effect) and their partners’ withdrawal (partner effect). Such findings suggest that recollections of unmet needs from the past may activate negative emotions during future interactions. Couple member pitch range was related to their own ratings of more positive problem solving (actor effect) suggesting pitch was an indicator of investment in telling the relationship story and possibly the relationship itself.

Authors

• Candice Feiring, The College of New Jersey
  Presenting Author

• Elisa Liang, The College of New Jersey
  Non-Presenting Author

• Valerie Simon, Wayne State University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Charles Cleland, New York University
  Non-Presenting Author