Negative Relationship Events Research Articles

Changes in happiness, sadness, anxiety, and anger around romantic relationship events.

Most people agree that romantic relationships greatly affect how we feel. For example, we typically feel happier when getting married but sadder when breaking up. However, previous research primarily focused on changes in cognitive but less so affective well-being around positive and negative relationship events. Set-point theory suggests that subjective well-being might change shortly around such experiences but bounce back in the long run. Using data from the Socio-Economic Panel study (SOEP), we examined changes in life satisfaction, happiness, sadness, anxiety, and anger in the 5 years before and 5 years after moving in with a partner (N = 4,399), marriage (N = 3,731), separation (N = 3,538), and divorce (N = 1,103). Life satisfaction and happiness increased slightly in the years before moving in and marriage. For marriage, these effects were short-lived and diminished after 1 year. Separation and divorce were associated with much larger well-being impairments (especially a strong increase of sadness) that were most pronounced shortly before and after the event and attenuated in the following years. Changes in anxiety and anger were much smaller. Our findings suggest that romantic relationship events not only relate to substantial changes in life satisfaction but also affective well-being. These changes vary for different well-being facets, are most pronounced for happiness and sadness at the time of the event, and bounce back in the long run. As one of the first studies, we demonstrate that set-point theory not only applies to cognitive but also affective well-being around romantic relationship events. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Managing customer satisfaction after a product recall: the joint role of remedy, brand equity, and severity

Firms struggle to respond to product recalls and manage post-recall customer satisfaction. In three studies, we examine the impact of firms’ remedy choice on satisfaction and provide evidence that firms’ post-recall remedy efforts are often not optimal. In Study 1 (field study), we estimate the longer-term effects of remedy on different satisfaction metrics and show that offering full remedy is much more important for low and high (vs. medium) brand equity firms, especially when failure severity is high. In Study 2 (experiment), we find further evidence that the positive impact of full remedy on satisfaction is moderated by brand equity in a u-shaped fashion. Finally, Study 3 (experiment) provides further evidence that the relationship between remedy and brand equity is contingent on failure severity. The findings contribute to the literature on firms’ management of negative relationship events and provide managers with the empirically grounded 5R guidelines to make better remedy decisions in response to product recalls.

The Association Between Relationship Events and Experiences and Partner Evaluations: An Ideal Standards Perspective.

Drawing on the Ideal Standards Model, the current study investigated whether the relationship events and experiences that occur on a given day in romantic relationships were associated with partner evaluations. Individuals in a current romantic relationship (N = 104) completed daily measures of positive and negative relationship events and experiences and partner evaluations for seven consecutive days. As hypothesized, findings demonstrated that on a given day negative relationship events and experiences were associated with evaluating partners as falling short of mate ideals, while positive relationship events and experiences were associated with evaluating partners as more closely meeting ideals. The findings demonstrate the importance of the relational context in evaluations of a partner against ideal standards.

Emotion dynamics and responsiveness in intimate relationships.

Responding appropriately to an intimate partner's emotional signals and needs requires that one's emotional responses be reactive to significant interpersonal experiences. The adaptive function of emotions is likely compromised if an individual's emotional states are insufficiently attuned to interpersonal events. The present studies examine how individual differences in moment-to-moment emotion dynamics affect interpersonal responsiveness and relationship satisfaction. Study 1 examines associations between emotion dynamics and emotional reactivity to positive and negative relationship events. Emotion dynamics were operationalized using assessments of emotional inertia, which is defined as the degree to which emotions are resistant to change over time. Momentary assessments from 44 participants were collected four times per day over 4 weeks. Emotional inertia showed a curvilinear association with context-sensitive emotional responses to conflict, with individuals high or low in emotional inertia experiencing blunted emotional reactions to conflict. Study 2 assessed emotion dynamics based on four emotion reports per day over 10 days of both partners in a total of 103 couples. Associations of emotion dynamics with perceptions of partners' responsiveness and relationship satisfaction over 12 months were examined. Partners of individuals with high (inert) or low (erratic) emotional inertia perceived them to be less responsive, which then predicted steeper declines in their relationship satisfaction across 12 months. The results suggest that individuals with inert or erratic emotion dynamics exhibit less context-sensitive emotional responding to conflicts and are perceived by their partners to be less responsive which subsequently undermines the quality of their intimate relationships. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

A Multilevel Examination of Interpartner Intimate Partner Violence and Psychological Aggression Reporting Concordance

Low concordance of reports across partners has consistently been observed when partners report the frequency of intimate partner violence (IPV) and psychological aggression (PA) in their relationship. Researchers have been unsuccessful in the quest to discover systematic biases across reporters, perhaps due to examining constructs that are not the source of bias (e.g., gender, victim/perpetrator status) or examining potentially fruitful constructs using underpowered statistics or erroneous conceptualizations (e.g., examining variables at a dyadic, rather than an individual, level). We used multilevel modeling with two samples ( Ns = 88 and 164 couples) to examine husbands' and wives' relationship satisfaction as individual-level correlates of husband- and wife-perpetrated IPV and PA reporting concordance. Consistent with prior literature, low to moderate levels of agreement were observed, and gender and victim/perpetrator status were not consistently associated with reporting concordance. In contrast, for both husbands and wives, relationship satisfaction was associated with reporting concordance such that high relationship satisfaction was related to reporting less of one's partner's PA than the partner reported, whereas low relationship satisfaction was related to reporting more of one's partner's PA than the partner reported. A similar pattern of results emerged for the reporting of IPV, but results did not cross validate between samples. These findings suggest that relationship satisfaction may lead to either reluctance, or increased willingness, to attribute negative relationship events to partner behavior, potentially due to partner blame and relationship schemas. In addition, the influence of individual-level factors may be occluded when aggregated across partners to examine correlates of interpartner reporting concordance.

The Effects of Unmitigated Communion and Life Events among Women with Fibromyalgia Syndrome

This study examined the effects of the personality trait of unmitigated communion (UC) within the context of positive and negative relationship events. Ninety-one women diagnosed with fibromyalgia syndrome completed initial measures of UC as well as weekly measures of positive and negative relationship events and positive and negative affect. Positive events were related to positive affect while negative events were related to negative affect. Negative and positive affect were also predicted from the interaction of UC and negative events. These results suggest the interrelationships among UC and relationship events can combine in meaningful ways to predict psychological well-being.

Social flexibility and anxious attachment

AbstractSocial flexibility was predicted to correlate with anxious/ambivalent attachment among individuals reminded of attachment‐related uncertainties. In the experiment reported here, subjects wrote about positive versus negative relationship events and then responded to a series of interpersonal conflict situations. Correlations between their responses and previously obtained attachment style scores provide supportive evidence for the predictions. The results suggest that anxious/ambivalent attachment may limit social flexibility by interfering with information processing in complex social situations. Results are discussed in terms of models of test anxiety.

Control, Coping, and Victimization in Dating Relationships

This study examined the role of perceived control and coping in mediating the relationship between violent and nonviolent negative relationship events and women's experience of distress. Results based on the responses of 48 victims of dating relationship violence and 74 nonvictims indicated that perceived control was negatively related to distress for victims but not nonvictims. While both victims and nonvictims engaged in both problem- and emotion-focused coping, and different patterns of coping emerged for the two groups, appraisals of control were not related to choice of coping strategies for violent or nonviolent negative relationship events. Psychological distress was not significantly predicted by coping strategies or the interaction of control and coping for either type of event of for either group. These results suggest that control appraisals may be particularly important in reducing distress for victims. However, appraisals of perceived control may place them at increased risk for abuse in the long run, as victims are unlikely to be able to control the violence as it escalates in both severity and frequency over time.

Ambivalence over emotional expression and negative life events: Mediators of depressive symptoms in dependent and self-critical individuals

We examined life events, emotional intensity, and ambivalence over the expression of emotion as possible mediators to account for the relation between Dependency, Self-Criticism and depressive symptoms. Dependency in both men ( N = 74) and women ( N = 76) was related to a greater number of negative relationship events and ambivalence over the expression of emotion, both of which predicted self-reported, depressive symptoms. Self-Criticism in women was related to a greater number of negative academic events and ambivalence, both of which also predicted depression. Self-Criticism in men was related only to ambivalence, which predicted depression. The mediational model including life events and ambivalence successfully accounted for 74% of the effect of personality on depression for women, and 47% of the effect for men.