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Shared emotions in shared lives: Moments of co-experienced affect, more than individually experienced affect, linked to relationship quality.


ABSTRACT: Motivated by collective emotions theories that propose emotions shared between individuals predict group-level qualities, we hypothesized that co-experienced affect during interactions is associated with relationship quality, above and beyond the effects of individually experienced affect. Consistent with positivity resonance theory, we also hypothesized that co-experienced positive affect would have a stronger association with relationship quality than would co-experienced negative affect. We tested these hypotheses in 150 married couples across 3 conversational interactions: a conflict, a neutral topic, and a pleasant topic. Spouses continuously rated their individual affective experience during each conversation while watching video-recordings of their interactions. These individual affect ratings were used to determine, for positive and negative affect separately, the number of seconds of co-experienced affect and individually experienced affect during each conversation. In line with hypotheses, results from all 3 conversational topics suggest that more co-experienced positive affect is associated with greater marital quality, whereas more co-experienced negative affect is associated with worse marital quality. Individual level affect factors added little explanatory value beyond co-experienced affect. Comparing co-experienced positive affect and co-experienced negative affect, we found that co-experienced positive affect generally outperformed co-experienced negative affect, although co-experienced negative affect was especially diagnostic during the pleasant conversational topic. Findings suggest that co-experienced positive affect may be an integral component of high-quality relationships and highlight the power of co-experienced affect for individual perceptions of relationship quality. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

SUBMITTER: Brown CL 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9183170 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Shared emotions in shared lives: Moments of co-experienced affect, more than individually experienced affect, linked to relationship quality.

Brown Casey L CL   Chen Kuan-Hua KH   Wells Jenna L JL   Otero Marcela C MC   Connelly Dyan E DE   Levenson Robert W RW   Fredrickson Barbara L BL  

Emotion (Washington, D.C.) 20210225 6


Motivated by collective emotions theories that propose emotions shared between individuals predict group-level qualities, we hypothesized that co-experienced affect during interactions is associated with relationship quality, above and beyond the effects of individually experienced affect. Consistent with positivity resonance theory, we also hypothesized that co-experienced positive affect would have a stronger association with relationship quality than would co-experienced negative affect. We t  ...[more]

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