Abstract

Being in a romantic relationship is characterized by a high degree of intimacy and affective involvement. Affective behavior indicates the emotional content in couple interactions and therefore promotes an understanding of the evolution of romantic relationships. When couples are also parents, their affective behavior reflects their romantic and coparental bonds. In this paper, we present an observation of parent couples’ affective behavior during a coparenting conflict discussion task to document whether and how much it improved during couple therapy. Two contrasting cases of affective behavior change are included. Observational coding of affective behavior within pre- and post-intervention coparenting conflict discussion tasks was carried out to compute means and CIs for each partner in both cases. In addition, the partners’ coparental and romantic satisfaction were evaluated through validated self-report questionnaires in pre- and post-intervention assessments; this helped document whether the partners’ coparental and romantic satisfaction were dissimilar between the two cases. Finally, a clinical analysis of both cases was realized with the contribution of the therapists to investigate possible differences within therapy sessions. Statistical analyses revealed negative means of affective behavior for couple A in the pre-intervention assessment and positive means in the post-intervention assessment. Partners from couple B had negative means of affective behavior in the pre- and post-intervention assessments. Results concerning coparental and romantic satisfaction differed: Couple A’s coparental satisfaction slightly increased and the romantic satisfaction somewhat decreased, whereas couple B’s coparental satisfaction remained stable and the romantic satisfaction slightly increased between the pre- and post-intervention assessments. The clinical analysis revealed that the interactional quality of couple A slightly improved within therapy sessions and that both partners succeeded in working together as coparents, notwithstanding their romantic distress. Couple B conveyed coparental distress and exhibited poor interactional quality throughout therapy sessions (e.g., repeated criticism and contempt). This study contributes to enriching the more traditional empirical research methods in the field of couple psychotherapy, as it takes into account microlevel affective changes within parent couples’ interactions in addition to self-reported data. Furthermore, the analysis of therapy sessions supports the importance of working with affective behavior in couple therapy.

Highlights

  • Adult romantic partners experience intense emotions related to their relationships and have to cope with their emotional lives, both individually and as couples (Mirgain and Cordova, 2007; Sanford and Grace, 2011)

  • Results from the contrasted cases indicate that the affective behavior change patterns that could be observed in the coparental discussion tasks were not systematically related to similar coparental and romantic questionnaire results

  • Couple A displayed a positive affective behavior change in the coparental discussion task which was reflected in the coparental satisfaction questionnaire but not in the romantic satisfaction questionnaire

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Summary

Introduction

Adult romantic partners experience intense emotions related to their relationships and have to cope with their emotional lives, both individually and as couples (Mirgain and Cordova, 2007; Sanford and Grace, 2011). One communicates to their partner how they perceive a situation or might react (Sanford and Grace, 2011). Coan and Gottman (2007) defined the apparent and observable features of emotional content in couple interactions as affective behavior. Empirical literature shows that affective behavior is an important sign of what is going on in couple interactions (e.g., Gottman and Krokoff, 1989; Ben-Naim et al, 2013; Bloch et al, 2014). Previous research has demonstrated that couple interactions ( affective behavior) are linked with romantic satisfaction (e.g., Kim et al, 2007; Bloch et al, 2014)

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