Negative Emotional Expressions Research Articles

Referential Activity Differentially Mediates Expression of Positive and Negative Emotions in Borderline Personality Disorder.

Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) is a high risk and prevalent personality disorder that is associated with increased negative emotions, decreased positive emotions, and impairments in symbolization and impaired reflective functioning. These dimensions, while they may impact one another, have not been investigated concurrently from qualitative, linguistic narratives. We hypothesized a BPD group would have lower expression of positive emotions and greater expression of negative emotions and less reflective function than healthy controls. Additionally, we explored the role of referential activity (an index of symbolic capacity) between BPD and healthy controls in the context of valenced emotional expression. An adult, female BPD group (n = 13) and a demographically matched healthy control group (n = 14) were recruited and administered the Adult Attachment Interview and/or the Object Relations Inventory. Computerized text analyses were used to assess positive emotion and negative emotion, the Weighted Referential Activity Dictionaries to assess referential activity, and the Computerized Reflective Function dictionary. On the Object Relations Inventory, the BPD group expressed more frequent negative emotions and less frequent positive emotions; on the Adult Attachment Interview, the BPD group exhibited less expression of positive emotions. There were no differences between BPD and controls on referential activity or reflective functioning on either interview. However, BPD status fully mediated the significant relationship between referential activity and negative emotion expression. The BPD group utilized more referential activity when expressing negative emotions than controls. Conversely, the control group utilized more referential activity when expressing positive emotions than controls. Referential activity seems to play an important role in explaining the BPD versus control difference in valenced linguistic emotional expression. Furthermore, these results suggest the object relations inventory elicits more robust linguistic features relevant to BPD.

From ‘Please sir, stay out of it’ to ‘You are an abomination’: (in)civility and emotional expression in emails sent to politicians

ABSTRACT Despite the excellent research on incivility in social spaces, it is unclear if this pattern of meanness holds true in more personal communication such as email. Drawing on an original sample of 2,509 e-mails sent to Florida Governor Jeb Bush in response to his efforts to reinsert the hydration and nutrition tubes of Terri Schiavo, we analyze how individuals differentially use (in)civility and emotional expression in their claimsmaking. We find that emails sent to Bush about the Schiavo case are largely polite, even when individuals’ disagreed with Bush's intervention on Terri's behalf. At the same time, we find a lot of emotional expression in the emails, and that the first emotional expression typically was negative. In order to better understand the relationship between (in)civility and emotion, we qualitatively analyze the 383 emails containing incivility, and find that individuals directed their negative emotional expressions at different targets. Additionally, we see different patterns in how negative emotional expressions are paired with uncivil communication according to the target. Emailers expressing negative emotions and incivility at Bush largely criticize him for violating individual rights, and, nearly half, blast him for prioritizing the Schiavo case over other problems facing the state. In contrast, emailers using uncivil language and negative emotional expressions at Terri's husband and a prominent judge try to persuade Bush to hold one or both of these men accountable for Terri's death. We conclude the paper by underscoring the utility in analytically distinguishing emotional expression from (in)civility.

Do Childhood Emotional Lability and ADHD Symptoms Have Shared Neuropsychological Roots?

Emotional Lability (EL) is a source of impairment in multiple mental disorders of children, including attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). It has been proposed that the overlap between EL and ADHD symptoms is the result of common neuropsychological deficits. The aim of the present study was to test this hypothesis by using a multi-method approach. In a mixed sample of 61 children (49 community sample and 12 children with an ADHD diagnosis) aged between 8 and 12 years, we examined the relationship between parental reports of ADHD and EL, real-time children’s emotional expressions in an experimental context, children’s performance on neuropsychological tasks and parental ratings of neuropsychological functioning. Parental EL ratings were significantly predicted by task-based reaction time variability and by questionnaire measures of Self-Direction & Organization and Arousal Regulation. Parental EL ratings were also significantly related to both ADHD symptom dimensions. After controlling for shared neuropsychological factors, ADHD symptoms no longer predicted parental EL ratings. Neuropsychological task performance was not significantly related to real time emotional expressions. However, positive emotional expressions were significantly predicted by higher parental ratings of Cognition and negative emotional expressions by parental ratings of low Effort engagement – accounting for some of the correlation with ADHD symptoms. The current results highlight the plausible role of cognitive energetic processes in explaining the EL and ADHD symptom association.

Reduced recognition of facial emotional expressions in global burnout and burnout depersonalization in healthcare providers.

The healthcare provider profession strongly relies on the ability to care for others’ emotional experiences. To what extent burnout may relate to an actual alteration of this key professional ability has been little investigated. In an experimentally controlled setting, we investigated whether subjective experiences of global burnout or burnout depersonalization (the interpersonal component of burnout) relate to objectively measured alterations in emotion recognition and to what extent such alterations are emotion specific. Healthcare workers (n = 90) completed the Maslach Burnout Inventory and a dynamic emotion recognition task in which faces with neutral emotional expressions gradually changed to display a specific basic emotion (happiness, anger, fear, or sadness). Participants were asked to identify and then classify each displayed emotion. Before the task, a subsample of 46 participants underwent two salivary cortisol assessments. Individuals with global burnout were less accurate at recognizing others’ emotional expressions of anger and fear, tending to misclassify these as happiness, compared to individuals without global burnout. Individuals with high burnout depersonalization were more accurate in recognizing happiness and less accurate in recognizing all negative emotions, with a tendency to misclassify the latter as positive ones, compared to healthcare workers with moderate/low depersonalization. Moreover, individuals with high depersonalization—but not participants with global burnout—were characterized by higher cortisol levels. These results suggest that the subjective burnout experience relates to an actual, but selective, reduction in the recognition of facial emotional expressions, characterized by a tendency to misclassify negative emotional expressions as positive ones, perhaps due to an enhanced seeking of positive social cues. This study adds to the understanding of emotional processing in burnout and paves the way for more nuanced studies on the role of altered processing of threat signals in the development and/or persistence of burnout.

Older Adults' Emotion Recognition Ability Is Unaffected by Stereotype Threat.

Eliciting negative stereotypes about ageing commonly results in worse performance on many physical, memory, and cognitive tasks in adults aged over 65. The current studies explored the potential effect of this “stereotype threat” phenomenon on older adults’ emotion recognition, a cognitive ability that has been demonstrated to decline with age. In Study 1, stereotypes about emotion recognition ability across the lifespan were established. In Study 2, these stereotypes were utilised in a stereotype threat manipulation that framed an emotion recognition task as assessing either cognitive ability (stereotypically believed to worsen with age), social ability (believed to be stable across lifespan), or general abilities (control). Participants then completed an emotion recognition task in which they labelled dynamic expressions of negative and positive emotions. Self-reported threat concerns were also measured. Framing an emotion recognition task as assessing cognitive ability significantly heightened older adults’ (but not younger adults’) reports of stereotype threat concerns. Despite this, older adults’ emotion recognition performance was unaffected. Unlike other cognitive abilities, recognising facially expressed emotions may be unaffected by stereotype threat, possibly because emotion recognition is automatic, making it less susceptible to the cognitive load that stereotype threat produces.

Qualitative Study on the Psychological Experience of Nursing Officers Caring COVID-19 Patients

Background: Coronavirus spreads very rapidly and nursing staff is fighting like warrior. They are facing so many psychological issues. During the pandemic, positive and negative emotions of frontline nurses interlace and exist. Objectives: To explore the psychological experience of nursing officers caring coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) patients. Materials and Methods: Phenomenological research approach was adopted. Twelve nursing officers were enrolled with nonprobability purposive sampling technique who provided care for COVID-19 patients. The interviews were conducted face-to-face and were analyzed by the Colaizzi's 7-step method. Results: The data were obtained from 12 nursing officers caring for patients with COVID-19. The mean age of the participants was 28 ± 1.87 years, with a mean work experience of 3.75 ± 1.05. Three themes were extracted from the detailed interview. First theme: the expression of negative emotions in the initial stage consisting of fear and anxiety regarding infection and family member, fatigue and discomfort related to high work intensity, and protective gear and anxiety regarding changing of ward and long duty hours. Second theme: the use of coping strategies and self-care styles consisting of communication with family members and friends and adjustment to the new era of life. Third theme: expressing positive emotions as adjusted with duty comprised of motivation and support from senior authority, feeling happy to be a part of humanity service, and satisfied with my duty and postduty quarantine facilities. Conclusions: The results of this study show that nursing officers caring COVID-19 patients are experiencing mental and emotional distress at initial stage of duty. As days passed participants used coping strategies and understand the new era of situation. Gradually, they expressed positive emotions and they were happy and satisfied with work.

Emocije u obrazovnom kontekstu i procena kvaliteta postojećih platformi za onlajn nastavu na teritoriji Kosova i Metohije

The theoretical basis of the work is represented by the theory of control and value of emotions and Pekurn's understanding of academic emotions as well. The main goal of the research was to examine the expression of positive emotions such as enjoyment, pride, relaxation or relief and negative emotions as well, such as anger, boredom, anxiety at students during online classes, as well as their relationship to overall success and quality assessment of online teaching platforms in use.The following material was used in this work: Achievement Emotion Questionnaire (AEQ), Questionnaire on Quality Assessment of ongoing Online Teaching Platforms (UPKPON1) and Questionnaire of Sociodemographic Variables. A hundred high school final year students from Kosovo and Metohija were involved in this sample. The results showed that during online classes positive emotions such as enjoyment, pride and relief are experienced more intensely than negative ones such as anger, anxiety and boredom; the most expressed positive emotion is enjoyment, and the most expressed negative emotion is boredom. Experience of positive and negative emotions during online teaching doesn't correlate significantly with students' school success. The most of students were using laptops to monitor online classes and they had adequate internet speeds as well as their own device for monitoring classes. Students expressed a neutral general attitude towards online teaching; Google Meet platform was the most used platform to follow online classes. A significant correlation between the experience of positive and negative emotions and the general attitude towards online teaching was proved. The students who felt more anxious, angry and got bored during online classes expressed more satisfaction with online classes. There is a difference in the expression of certain positive and negative emotions during online classes with regard to the gender and type of high school that students attend.

Enhancing EEG-Based Classification of Depression Patients Using Spatial Information.

Depression has become a leading mental disorder worldwide. Evidence has shown that subjects with depression exhibit different spatial responses in neurophysiological signals from the healthy controls when they are exposed to positive and negative stimuli. We proposed an effective electroencephalogram-based detection method for depression classification using spatial information. A face-in-the-crowd task, including positive and negative emotional facial expressions, was presented to 30 participants, including 16 depression patients and 14 healthy controls. Differential entropy and the genetic algorithm were used for feature extraction and selection, and a support vector machine was used for classification. A task-related common spatial pattern (TCSP) was proposed to enhance the spatial differences before the feature extraction. We achieved a leave-one-subject-out cross-validation classification result of 84% and 85.7% for positive and negative stimuli, respectively, using TCSP, which is statistically significantly higher than 81.7% and 83.2%, respectively, acquired without the TCSP (p < 0.05). We also evaluated the classification performance using individual frequency bands and found that the contribution of the gamma band was predominant. In addition, we evaluated different classifiers, including k-nearest neighbor and logistic regression, which showed similar trends in the improvement of classification by employing TCSP. The results show that our proposed method, employing spatial information, significantly improves the accuracy of classifying depression patients.

The melody of ruptures: identifying ruptures through acoustic markers

ABSTRACT Ruptures in the alliance have a potential to either undermine the treatment, leading to its premature termination, or to enhance it, leading to its success. Detecting ruptures is a critical step in therapy, especially concerning withdrawal ruptures that often go unnoticed because of the indirect expression of negative emotions. The present study explored whether acoustic data of a particular patient can serve as markers for ruptures, particularly withdrawal ruptures. Given the pioneering nature of the study, an exploratory approach based on a case study was chosen. The case-study showed that acoustic data can serve as markers of withdrawal ruptures (characterized by higher F0-span, pause proportion, and shimmer, and lower articulation rate than neutral speech) and of confrontation ruptures (characterized by higher F0-span and pause proportion than neutral speech). The limitations of a case study design are discussed. These findings add to previous knowledge and help to open the door to using feedback to assist clinicians in identifying the occurrence of ruptures and prevent deterioration in alliance and dropout.

A speech-driven embodied entrainment character system with a delayed voice back-channel based on negative emotional expression utterances

A speech-driven embodied entrainment character system with a delayed voice back-channel based on negative emotional expression utterances

High-Frequency Heart Rate Variability and Emotion-Driven Impulse Control Difficulties During Adolescence: Examining Experienced and Expressed Negative Emotion as Moderators.

Emotion-driven impulse control difficulties are associated with negative psychological outcomes. Extant research suggests that high frequency heart rate variability (HF-HRV) may be indicative of emotion-driven impulse control difficulties and potentially moderated by negative emotion. In the current study, 248 eleven- to 14-year-olds and their parent engaged in a negatively emotionally arousing conflict task at Time 1. Adolescents' HF-HRV and negative emotional expression and experience were assessed before, during, and/or after the task. Adolescents reported on their levels of emotion-driven impulse control difficulties at Time 1 and one year later. Results revealed that higher levels of HF-HRV reactivity (i.e., higher HF-HRV augmentation) predicted higher levels of emotion-driven impulse control difficulties one year later among adolescents who experienced higher negative emotion. These findings suggest that negative emotional context should be considered when examining HF-HRV reactivity as a risk factor for emotion-driven impulse control difficulties and associated outcomes.

Ethnic variations in mothers’ and children’s positive and negative emotional expressions toward each other

AbstractThis study examined whether ethnicity moderated trajectories of mothers’ and children’s positive and negative emotional expressions, as well as within‐time and lagged associations between these variables. European American and Mexican American mothers’ and children’s emotional expressions toward each other were observed when children were aged 15, 25, and 37 months. Children’s positivity increased at identical rates and maternal positivity predicted subsequent levels of children’s positivity similarly in the two groups. However, Mexican American children’s negative expressivity declined at more pronounced rates than European American children. Also, whereas at 27 months, European American children’s negativity was negatively predicted by previous levels of maternal positivity, at 37 months it was predicted by previous levels of maternal negativity. Mexican American mothers’ emotional expressivity did not predict their children’s negativity. Finally, maternal negativity declined over time only among Mexican Americans. The results are interpreted with reference to ecocultural theory, the Mexican values of simpatía and respeto, the European American value of authenticity, and the fact that cultural differences become more pronounced as children age.

Seeing the past through rose-colored glasses? Age differences in recounting a difficult memory

According to socioemotional aging theories, people better regulate their emotions in older age by reframing stressors and focusing on the positive aspects of difficult experiences. However, empirical results have been mixed. To address this gap, we examined age differences in the language use and cardiovascular reactivity of 188 adults (mean age=56, range=40-86) who relived an upsetting memory from their past. Consistent with theory, results revealed that older adults used significantly fewer negative emotion words and, among the negative emotions, marginally fewer words of anger, to describe their upsetting memory. Notably, however, there were no age differences in the expression of positive emotion or sadness. Controlling for education and cognitive function, greater expression of anger was associated with heightened systolic blood pressure (SBP) reactivity among older adults, not middle-aged individuals. Despite their expression of less negative emotion, older adults’ heart rate variability (HRV) dipped lower during disclosure than did middle-aged adults’. However, among those who used more positive emotion, sadness, and/or cognitive processing words, older adults no longer showed lower HRV than middle-aged participants. Overall, these results provide some evidence of positivity bias among older adults even when asked to recount a distressing personal memory, although this trend was not consistent for the expression of sadness or positive emotion. Further, cardiovascular responses appear more clearly tied to older adults’ level of engagement and emotional focus compared to their middle-aged counterparts’.

Analysis of body gestures in anger expression and evaluation in android robot

ABSTRACT Recent studies in human–human interaction (HHI) have revealed the propensity of negative emotional expression to initiate affiliating functions which are beneficial to the expresser and also help fostering cordiality and closeness amongst interlocutors during conversation. Effort in human–robot interaction has also been devoted to furnish robots with the expression of both positive and negative emotions. However, only a few have considered body gestures in context with the dialogue act functions conveyed by the emotional utterances. This study aims on furnishing robots with humanlike negative emotional expression, specifically anger-based body gestures roused by the utterance context. In this regard, we adopted a multimodal HHI corpus for the study, and then analyzed and established predominant gestures types and dialogue acts associated with anger-based utterances in HHI. Based on the analysis results, we implemented these gesture types in an android robot, and carried out a subjective evaluation to investigate their effects on the perception of anger expression in utterances with different dialogue act functions. Results showed significant effects of the presence of gesture on the anger degree perception. Findings from this study also revealed that the functional content of anger-based utterances plays a significant role in the choice of the gesture accompanying such utterances.

Identifying Emotional Expressions: Children's Reasoning About Pretend Emotions of Sadness and Anger.

This study aims to further understand children’s capacity to identify and reason about pretend emotions by analyzing which sources of information they take into account when interpreting emotions simulated in pretend play contexts. A total of 79 children aged 3 to 8 participated in the final sample of the study. They were divided into the young group (ages 3 to 5) and the older group (6 to 8). The children were administered a facial emotion recognition task, a pretend emotions task, and a non-verbal cognitive ability test. In the pretend emotions task, the children were asked whether the protagonist of silent videos, who was displaying pretend emotions (pretend anger and pretend sadness), was displaying a real or a pretend emotion, and to justify their answer. The results show significant differences in the children’s capacity to identify and justify pretend emotions according to age and type of emotion. The data suggest that young children recognize pretend sadness, but have more difficulty detecting pretend anger. In addition, children seem to find facial information more useful for the detection of pretend sadness than pretend anger, and they more often interpret the emotional expression of the characters in terms of pretend play. The present research presents new data about the recognition of negative emotional expressions of sadness and anger and the type of information children take into account to justify their interpretation of pretend emotions, which consists not only in emotional expression but also contextual information.

Adolescents’ Reluctance to Express Emotions: Relations to Parent Emotion Socialization

One aspect of emotional development in adolescence is the motivation to express negative emotions to others that is linked to a wide range of psychosocial outcomes (Chaplin et al. Emotion 5:80–88, 2005). Supportive and unsupportive parental emotion socialization responses to adolescent emotional displays are one mechanism that influences adolescent emotional functioning (Garside and Klimes-Dougan Sex Roles 47:115–128, 2002). The present study explored five parental socialization responses to anger, sadness, and worry and how they may differ for youth who vary in their reluctance to express emotions. Participants were 160 adolescents and their parent (74.4% mothers; 58.8% girls, Mage = 12.5 years, 78.1% White, middle-class). Parents reported on their responses to their child’s emotion expressivity and youth reported on their reluctance to express emotions. Using latent class analyses, two groups of adolescents were identified, including those with high (n = 36) and typical (n = 124) levels of reluctance to express emotion. Group and gender effects were examined. Parents reported more validation and less ignoring of negative emotions for adolescents in the typical rather than the high reluctance group. Parents reported more magnification of emotions in response to adolescents’ anger in the typical group in comparison to the high reluctance group, and more magnification of sadness for daughters than for sons. These results suggest that differing levels of adolescents’ reluctance to express emotions are related to parental emotion socialization responses in meaningful ways that may play unique roles in promoting or discouraging the expression of negative emotions.

Marital quality and children’s prospective internalizing problems: A moderated mediation model

• The results exhibited that maternal negative emotional expressivitymediated the relationship between marital quality and children’s internalizing problems, and children’s resting RSA moderated this mediation effect. • The finding suggested that the moderated mediation effect has longitudinal stability. • The finding highlights the importance of considering multiple family and individual factors to understand the development of children’s internalizing problems. The previous cross-sectional study has found that maternal negative emotional expressivity played the mediation effect between marital quality and children’s internalizing problems, and resting respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) moderated this mediation effect. The present study further examined whether this moderated mediation effect was sustained over time. Participants included 168 children at the first assessment (T1; M = 7.35 years, SD = 0.48; 54% boys) and 147 children two years later (T2; M = 9.38 years, SD = 0.42; 51% boys). At T1, electrocardiogram monitoring was performed on the children to obtain resting RSA data. The Marital Quality Questionnaire (ENRICH), the Family Expressivity Questionnaire (FEQ), and the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL) were reported by children’s mothers to assess marital quality, maternal emotional expressivity, and children’s internalizing problems. At T2, the internalizing problems were assessed again. The results showed that maternal negative emotional expressivity played a mediating role in the longitudinal relationship between marital quality and children’s internalizing problems, and children’s resting RSA moderated this mediation effect after controlling for children’s sex, family SES and internalizing problems at T1. The findings suggested that the moderated mediation effect has longitudinal stability and highlight the importance of considering multiple family and individual factors to understand the development of children’s internalizing problems.

"From cheery to "cheers"? Regulating emotions at work and alcohol consumption after work": Correction to Sayre, Grandey, and Chi (2020).

Reports an error in "From cheery to "cheers"? Regulating emotions at work and alcohol consumption after work" by Gordon M. Sayre, Alicia A. Grandey and Nai-Wen Chi (Journal of Applied Psychology, 2020[Jun], Vol 105[6], 597-618). In the article, Figure 2 contains two errors. First, the survey timing labels are inaccurate and should read "Evening, Day t" -> "Evening, Day t" ->"Morning, Day t+1". Instead, the survey timing labels from Figure 1 were accidentally duplicated for Figure 2, such that they read "Afternoon, Day t"->"Evening, Day t"->"Afternoon, Day t+1". Second, the coefficient for Motive to Detach→Alcohol consumption should have two asterisks (p<.01), but instead has only one (p<.05). (The following abstract of the original article appeared in record 2019-57614-001.) Emotional labor, or regulating emotions as part of one's work role, is needed for performance yet may come with far-reaching costs to employee health and performance. Based on ego depletion theorizing, we propose that on days employees perform more surface acting (i.e., faking positive and hiding negative emotional expressions), they will consume more alcohol later-due to reduced self-control (i.e., depletion). In 2 studies, public-facing employees completed multiple assessments per day for 2 weeks. Study 1 showed that surface acting had no direct or indirect effect on alcohol use via depletion, nor via negative mood as an alternative measure of depletion. Study 2 demonstrated that surface acting directly increased subsequent drinking only for those with high emotional demands, but not through depletion. Across both studies, daily deep acting (i.e., modifying emotions to feel positive) consistently predicted less alcohol consumption, but this did not occur through depletion. Study 2 provided evidence for an alternative, motivational shift explanation-a reduced motive to detach from work after regulating by deep acting-rather than self-control capacity. These findings contribute to debate on ego depletion theory by providing insightful field evidence, while demonstrating when emotional labor is likely to help or harm employees' health. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

웨이보에 투영된 疫情— COVID-19 관련 키워드의 SNS 빅데이터 분석

This paper investigates some of dominant linguistic and social trends of China in the context of COVID-19, through a comprehensive analysis of vocabulary usage patterns on Weibo, the biggest SNS platform in China. First, we introduce generative and informatic features of Weibo to highlight its distinctive characteristics from other media. Next, based on the actual utterances of 516 million Weibo users, we examined the individual linguistic expressions and collective mentality of Chinese people under COVID-19. In detail, we established COVID-19 Weibo big data which consists of 136,585 Weibos of 22,985,364 characters, and gave a qualitative and quantitative analysis from four different functional perspectives - information seeking, emotional release, citizenship behavior and social connection. In this analysis, we clearly demonstrated some widespread linguistic and cultural phenomena, such as the spread process of Chinese naming for COVID-19 and ‘GuanZhuangBingDu’ being widely used, broad textual tendency to avoid negative emotional expressions and prefer conceptual metaphors, and common types of social connections through hashtags.

Negative Partner Attributions Moderate the Association between Heart Rate Reactivity During Relationship Conflict and Relationship Satisfaction

Numerous theoretical models of relationship distress suggest that strong, negative reactions to conflict are directly associated with lower levels of relationship satisfaction. Consistent with this supposition, substantial evidence links higher levels of subjective negative emotion, more pronounced and frequent expressions of negative affect, and higher levels of negative communication behaviors to lower levels of relationship satisfaction (e.g., Bradbury, Fincham, & Beach, 2000, Journal of Marriage and Family, 62(4), 964). However, the evidence linking stress-related physiological responding during relationship conflict and relationship satisfaction is less compelling than would be anticipated based on theory. We propose that these theoretically unexpected but empirically well-replicated findings may be the result of different patterns in association between physiological reactivity and relationship satisfaction for couples with varying styles in how they typically perceive unwanted behavior in one another. The present study tests negative attributions for undesirable partner behaviors as a moderator of the association between heart rate reactivity (HRR) during relationship conflict and relationship satisfaction in a sample of 60 married couples. A significant interaction emerged between HRR and negative attributions of partner behavior in predicting relationship satisfaction such that higher levels of HRR were associated with lower levels of relationship satisfaction for individuals who typically made more negative attributions for undesirable partner behaviors, but with higher levels of relationship satisfaction for individuals who typically made fewer negative attributions for undesirable partner behaviors. Implications for conceptualizing reactivity during relationship conflict and couple interventions are discussed.