Abstract
Emotion work, or devoting effort toward assessing and managing another person’s emotional needs to support their emotional well-being, is a common dynamic in intimate relationships that helps foster intimacy and closeness between spouses. While emotion work generally benefits the well-being of the recipient, providing it can be stressful and might undermine the emotion worker’s psychological well-being. Previous research on heterosexual couples suggests that emotion work may more strongly undermine psychological well-being for women than for men. In the brief, PRC director Debra Umberson, former PRC trainee Meike Thomeer, and PRC postdoctoral fellows Amanda Pollitt and Sara Mernitz use diary data with individuals in same-sex and different-sex marriages and find that emotion work exacts a psychological toll on the emotion worker in both same- and different-sex marriages, but the toll is highest when the spouse is a man with depressive symptoms.
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