By Ashley K. Randall, M.S.*
Happy New Year!
I guess it’s the time to start making the new years resolutions, which appear to come up year after year: lose 10 lb., start walking everyday, call friends more often, attend more social events, volunteer, and quit smoking. BUT – can quitting smoking have NEGATIVE effects on your relationship????
Interestingly research has shown that couple’s emotions, physiology, and behavior are linked. There have been a number of terms that have defined this linkage, such as mutual influence, psychobiological attunement, synchrony, and coregulation. Therefore, relationships play a large part in how individuals can successfully regulate their emotions.
What is linked between partners?
Emotions. Partner’s levels of positive and negative affect were found to be linked, above and beyond the influence of their own daily interactions. Interestingly, this effect was greater on days when couples spent more time together.
Physiology. Psychological linkage in adult relationships can arise due to empathy or due to conflict. For example, physiological linkage between marital partners has been shown to be higher during conflict conversations than during neutral ones. In addition, in at least two studies linkage was negatively correlated with marital satisfaction, with less satisfied couples showing higher levels of linkage.
Behavior. Behavioral coregulation can occur through several modalities, such as touch, eye contact, facial expressions, and vocalizations from one partner to the other,
How can this happen?
One way this linkage can occur is through shared emotional experiences arising from jointly engaging in activities.
Smoking. One study found that couples in which both partners smoked were more likely to show high levels of shared positive emotions while smoking compared to couples in which only one partner smoked.
Nevertheless, this is not to say that engaging in healthy activities together cannot produce the same effect! Research has found that couple’s emotions are linked even when you control for those shared emotions.
Implications
Relationships can yield many outcomes: they can buffer against negative health outcomes or be a risk factor for mortality and morbidity for a wide range of diseases.
New research has begun to focus on how couple’s emotions are linked and what are some of the individual (attachment, personality) and dyadic factors (coping together, problem solving, relationship length, relationship satisfaction) that may impact the degree to which couple’s may feel the same things at the same time.
Not that you need to think twice about quitting smoking – but think twice about how your relationship may be impacted.
------
References:
Broadhead, E. W., Kaplan, B. H., James, S. A., Wagner, E. H., Schoenbach, V. J., Grimson, R., et al. (1983). The epidemiological evidence for a relationship between social support and health. . American Journal of Epidemiology, 117, 521-537.
Butner, J., Diamond, L. M., & Hicks, A. M. (2007). Attachment style and two forms of affect coregulation between romantic partners. Personal Relationships, 14, 431-455.
Feldman, R. (2003). Infant-mother and infant-father synchrony: The coregulation of positive arousal. Infant Mental Health Journal, 24, 1-23.
House, J. S., Landis, K. R., & Umberson, D. (1988). Social relationships and health.
Science, 241, 540-545.
Levenson, R. W., & Gottman, J. M. (1983). Marital interaction: Physiological linkage and affective exchange. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 45, 587-597.
Levenson, R. W., & Ruef, A. M. (1992). Empathy: A physiological substrate. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 63, 234-246.
Randall, A. K., & Butler, E. A. (under review). Emotional coregulation in close relationships. Emotion Review.
Rohrbaugh, M. J., Shoham, V., Butler, E. A., Hasler, B. P., & Berman, J. S. (2009). Affective synchonry in dual- and single-smoker couples: Further evidence of 'symptom-system fit'? Family Process, 48(1), 55-67.
Saxbe, D., & Repetti, R. L. (2010). For better or worse? Coregulation of couples' cortisol levels and mood states. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 98, 92-103.
Schoebi, D. (2008). The coregulation of daily affect in marital relationships. Journal of Family Psychology, 22, 595-604.
*About the author:
Ashley K. Randall is a doctoral student in Family Studies and Human Development. She received her Master's in Clinical Psychology from North Dakota State University and her B.S. in Psychology from Indiana University. During her Fulbright Fellowship (2007-2008), she spent time examining the role that stress plays on dyadic coping and its effects on romantic relationships. At The Magis Foundation she is an Executive Board member, director of the Couple's Corner and an EduBlog contributor.
