Title: Targeting interpersonal emotion dynamics as a mechanism for increasing wellbeing in romantic couples

 

High-quality romantic relationships predict greater wellbeing and better physical health, whereas relationship distress is associated with a range of poor outcomes. Understanding the mechanisms driving these associations requires investigation of emotional sequences that unfold over time, both within people and between-partners. The proposed research focuses on couples’ emotional communication, physiological linkage (over-time dependencies in partners’ autonomic physiology), and subjective wellbeing. A central premise of this proposal is that understanding relationship-health associations is stymied by linear-causal models that do not fully represent the dynamic nature of these processes, including whether physiological linkage contributes to emotional stability versus instability, whether physiological linkage varies as a function of context, and which physiological systems are involved. Accordingly, the proposed research is designed to: (1) test whether healthy couples show context dependent patterns of physiological linkage that promote emotional stability, whereas distressed couples show patterns that undermine it; (2) use couple therapy as an experimental tool to test whether improving distressed couples’ emotional communication alters physiological linkage toward healthy couples; and, (3) examine whether improving couples’ emotional communication sets in motion a mutually reinforcing cycle of changes in physiological linkage and wellbeing over time, that in turn promotes long-term wellbeing. Given that roughly 3 of 10 marriage (or marriage-like) relationships are severely discordant, identifying markers of risk is an important endeavor. By combining an investigation of between-couple differences and within-couple change, the results of the proposed study will provide evidence that can be used to focus future clinical trials on empirically supported process-level behavioral change.