Abstract
According to Brehm’s emotional intensity theory (EIT), the strength of feelings of romantic affect towards a romantic partner should vary as a cubic function of increasing levels of relationship stress (i.e., deterrence to feelings of romantic affect). The study tested this hypothesis in a true experiment with 80 young adults actually engaged in a romantic relationship, by systematically manipulating stress, through a recall procedure, across four distinct levels of intensity (control vs. low vs. moderate vs. high levels of manipulated stress). As predicted by emotional intensity theory, feelings of romantic affect were strong in the control condition, reduced in the low stress condition (low deterrence), maintained intense in the moderate stress condition (moderate deterrence), and reduced, again, in the high stress condition (high deterrence). Findings and both theoretical and practical implications for professionals and future research are discussed, with special emphasis on how to promote partners’ everyday adjustments to stress and emotional intensity regulation.
Highlights
According to Brehm’s emotional intensity theory (EIT), the strength of feelings of romantic affect towards a romantic partner should vary as a cubic function of increasing levels of relationship stress
Required sample size was estimated on the basis of a recent meta-analytical integration of effects of deterrence on feelings of positive romantic affect (Sciara & Pantaleo, 2018), which documented an average effect size (ES) of d = .85 in pairwise comparisons
The categories of stressful events on which participants focused in the low, moderate, and high deterrence conditions were uniformly distributed among experimental conditions, χ2(14) = 18.21, p =
Summary
According to Brehm’s emotional intensity theory (EIT), the strength of feelings of romantic affect towards a romantic partner should vary as a cubic function of increasing levels of relationship stress (i.e., deterrence to feelings of romantic affect) The study tested this hypothesis in a true experiment with 80 young adults engaged in a romantic relationship, by systematically manipulating stress, through a recall procedure, across four distinct levels of intensity (control vs low vs moderate vs high levels of manipulated stress). As predicted by emotional intensity theory, feelings of romantic affect were strong in the control condition, reduced in the low stress condition (low deterrence), maintained intense in the moderate stress condition (moderate deterrence), and reduced, again, in the high stress condition (high deterrence) Findings and both theoretical and practical implications for professionals and future research are discussed, with special emphasis on how to promote partners’ everyday adjustments to stress and emotional intensity regulation. Sprecher (2011) found that social network’s disapproval made the relationship stronger, as 14% of her participants reported that their disapproval of a friend’s romantic relationship contributed to fortify, rather than weakening, the relationship
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