Couples in Everyday Life Study

The regulation of emotions, both positive and negative emotions, is a central feature of affective life. Although this topic has been well researched, the majority of this research has focused on how individuals manage their own emotions. However, in real life, emotion regulation usually occurs in the context of close relationships. That is, people often rely on their close partners to help them manage whatever emotions they are experiencing.

Dr. Harry Reis, Professor of Psychology at the University of Rochester, and his team, have completed their very interesting and important Couples in Everyday Life Study addressing this research deficit. Consistent with MRI’s focus, the project conceptualizes emotion regulation as a dynamic, interactional process. And although the focus of partner emotion regulation appears to be on the target, emotion regulation can be beneficial for both the target as well as the regulator. A regulator’s enthusiastic response to positive emotions can help targets feel more positive emotion, and their effort in alleviating a target’s negative emotions in a stressful situation can help buffer them from also experiencing stress.

The researchers’ novel contribution is to examine these strategies from an interpersonal, interactional perspective – that is, when and how effectively do people adopt these strategies to try to help their partners regulate their emotions. In reference to negative emotions, the six regulation strategies that they investigated are: 

attention deployment: distracting a partner's attention away from the elements of a situation.

cognitive reappraisal: attempting to modify a partner’s appraisal of a situation to alter its emotional impact.

situation selection: helping a partner take action to avoid certain situations that are anticipated to elicit undesired emotions or seek out alternative situations that promote desired emotions.

situation modification: helping a partner change aspects of a present or anticipated situation, such as removing, modifying, or influencing aspects of the situation to alter its emotional impact.

suppression: attempting to help a partner modify their emotional response by reducing or holding back behavioral expression of an emotion or encouraging use of substances such as food, alcohol, or drugs to alter their emotional state.

expression: attempting to help a partner modify their emotional response by encouraging the explicit expression of their concerns and feelings.

As for positive emotions, Dr. Reis and his team studied two interpersonal emotion regulation strategies: 

savoring: helping a partner add to their appreciation of positive events, experiences, and feelings.

dampening: attempting to weaken a partner’s positive affect, such as by suggesting downsides to positive events, experiences, and feelings.

Additionally, the team compared the effectiveness of interpersonal emotion regulation strategies, observed under ordinary circumstances, before COVID-19, with emotion regulation during the stress of COVID-19. The pandemic is, and continues to be, a unique and pervasive stressor. During the lockdown, couples had to adjust their everyday activities to deal with restricted movement and sheltering-in-place, while dealing with myriad emotional, health-related, financial, and familial difficulties and anxieties. How partners dealt with the emotions created by the COVID-19 pandemic provided an opportunity for the researchers to better understand how, when, and why partners help each other regulate their emotions.

Their research Aims addressed three main questions:

Study Aim 1. To what extent were the different strategies adopted by partners before and during the COVID-19 lockdown?

Study Aim 2: To what extent was each partner-focused emotion-regulation strategy effective, from the standpoint of both the target (i.e., the partner experiencing the emotion) and the regulator (i.e., the partner attempting to regulate the emotions of the another).

Study Aim 3: Were these strategies differentially effective before and during the COVID-19 lockdown?

Data were generated by the daily-diary method, a rigorous quantitative method that captures events and emotions in the natural, spontaneous context of everyday life. These data were sent every day for 14 days. Dr. Reis’ team assessed daily partner emotion regulation by asking both partners to describe that day’s emotional experiences. Specifically, both partners answered questions assessing, for that day: (1) their own emotions; (2) their perceptions of their partners’ emotions; (3) the strategies they used to help their partner regulate emotions; and (4) their sense of how effective their own, and their partner’s, emotion-regulation strategies had been.

Overall, they found that:

1.      Expression and situation modification were the most used strategies for regulating negative emotions, both pre-COVID and during COVID. Savoring was a much more common reaction to positive emotions than dampening. Only suppression showed an increase in frequency during the pandemic.

2.      Five of the six negative-emotion regulation strategies were experienced by couples as effective both before and during the COVID lockdown. Suppression was also seen as effective by women, but not men, prior to the lockdown, but it became ineffective during the lockdown. 

3.      Savoring was more effective than dampening as a response to positive emotions.

 4.      Women’s use of reappraisal was generally seen as more effective by their male partners. On the other hand, men’s use of expression was seen as more effective by their female partners.

Importantly, this is the first study that has examined patterns of dyadic emotion regulation in everyday life.

This research is fundamentally aligned with the MRI’s mission to explore interactional, systemic approaches to understanding and improving human relationships. The theoretical model began with the assumption that among adults, emotion regulation often takes place during interaction between partners, rather than individually. The findings show that partner’s efforts to help each other regulate emotions are frequent, significant, varied, and influential. From a research perspective, work on emotion regulation processes will need to refocus on the interpersonal, rather than purely intrapersonal, models. From a therapeutic standpoint, this work may give therapists a better understanding of the strategies they can help their patients learn to apply in their lives.