Major and Classification
Majoring in Psychology
Faculty Mentor
Dr. Darby Saxbe – USC Dornsife, Department of Psychology
Department
USC Dornsife, Department of Psychology
Research Gateway Project
Interpersonal Emotion Regulation and Romantic Relationship Satisfaction Among Expectant Parents
Project Abstract
Conflict arises within even the happiest of romantic relationships, underscoring the need for effective emotion regulation. While emotion regulation has been primarily researched as an individual process, it often involves others. Interpersonal emotion regulation (IER) dynamics refers to patterns of interpersonal behavior that modulate affective states of self and others. The present study explores IER dynamics among a sample of 96 different-cisgender romantic dyads (N=96) who were expecting their first child. Each dyad completed a 15-minute, video-recorded conflict discussion which was observationally coded for positive and negative affective behaviors. We found that men’s total negative affective behavior predicted lower relationship satisfaction (RS) in men, whereas women’s positive affective behavior predicted higher RS in men. We also found that a higher ratio of positive-to-negative affective behaviors (M = 5.21:1) predicted greater RS in female partners, but not male partners. We represented couples’ interpersonal dynamics using state space grids and found that couples who transitioned frequently from states of positive to negative affect during their conflict discussion tended to report lower RS. However, a higher ratio of negative-to-positive transitions, versus positive-to-negative transitions, predicted greater RS in female partners, but not male partners. Lastly, in a top-down analysis of specific affective behaviors (i.e., domineering and validation), we found that domineering behavior is negatively associated with positive behaviors (e.g., humor, interest, affection) and positively associated with fear/tension and neutral affect. Validation was also positively associated with many negative conflict behaviors (e.g., anger, defensiveness, fear/tension) suggesting that validation may be a coregulatory behavior that warrants further investigation. The findings of this study have important contributions regarding couples therapy, conflict management, and overall well-being.