The Result of Biases About Partners’ Negative Emotions

Positive feelings are pretty common in relation­ships - love, passion, support, and care are all usual occurrences. However, negative experiences can occur as well, such as jealousy, anger, or frus­tration. In these moments, some people may have difficulty regulating their own negative emotions and dealing with partners' anger and frustration. Often, partners' negative emotions are particularly important to recognize because they communicate problems in the relationship that need attention. Psychologists have set out to explore how attach­ment may be related to people's ability to accu­rately identify negative emotions that partners are experiencing.

As a quick summary, attachment describes the way people bond with others. Anxious individu­als seem "clingy" - they're concerned with being abandoned by romantic partners and need a lot of reassurance that they're loved. Those who are avoidant, however, prefer to be independent and more distant from partners. Secure people are more of a happy medium - they are comfortable with being close to their partners, but aren't overly concerned with being abandoned.

A partner’s anger or frustration isn't fun for any­body, but may be particularly hard on avoidant individuals. Nickola Overall and colleagues have investigated how avoidant attachment affects how people identify and perceive negative emo­tions that their partners are experiencing. The researchers compared how accurately avoidant participants, as compared to anxious or secure individuals, could identify anger, sadness, or hurt in their partners. In particular, the researchers wanted to know if avoidant participants were less accurate than anxiously or securely attached participants in identifying these emotions and gauging how intensely their partners experienced those emotions. In one study, couples had two discussions in which they talked about changes each partner wanted to see in the other. For example, the couple would first discuss Partner N's desired change about Partner B, and then they would discuss Partner B's desired change about Partner A. Next, both partners watched the vid­eotape of their "desired changes" discussions and reported their negative emotions at that moment during the discussion and their per­ceptions of their partners' negative emotions at each 30 second mark of the recording. By do­ing this, the researchers were able to compare the partners' actual feelings to the participants' perceptions of their partners' feelings to assess accuracy in identifying emotions and intensity of those emotions.

The researchers found that avoidantly attached individuals were no better or worse than secure or anxious people at identifying when their part­ners experienced negative emotions, but they consistently overestimated how negatively their partner was feeling. So, when their partners were angry, hurt, or frustrated, avoidant individuals were more likely to perceive partners as being more angry, hurt, or frustrated than the partners themselves reported feeling at that moment. Additionally, when highly avoidant individuals perceived their partners to be experiencing high levels of negative emotion, those avoidant individuals displayed more hostile and negative behavior during the discussion. In other words, when avoidant participants believed their part­ners were feeling especially negative (which they believed happened more often than the partner reported), they responded in a more hostile way.

In a second study, participants recorded their own negative emotions, their partners’ negative emotions, and both peoples' hostile behaviors every day for three weeks. Again, avoidant indi­viduals were no different than secure or anxious individuals in recognizing a partner's negative emotions, but significantly overestimated the intensity of negative emotions their partners were feeling. Highly avoidant individuals also reported using more hostile behaviors on days when they believed their partners to be experiencing highly negative emotions.

This pattern of findings across two studies sug­gests that avoidant individuals have more nega­tive biases about their partners' emotions, and when they perceive their partners' feelings as more negative, they engage in more hostile be­haviors. Why might avoidant individuals perceive their partners' emotions inaccurately? These inac­curate perceptions may be guided by expecta­tions people have about relationships in general. Avoidant people are reluctant to engage closely with romantic partners, and, to protect themselves against conflict, may anticipate partners to act more negatively than they actually would. So, if you expect that romantic partners are generally untrustworthy and unreliable, you may perceive your partner in a more negative way. This bias can be pretty harmful, especially in light of the re­searchers' finding that avoidant people responded with more hostility and more defensiveness in response to highly negative emotions from their partners. From this research, it seems that avoid­ant people may expect their partners to be more angry or upset than they actually are. Although the researchers didn't explore the consequences of hostile behaviors in their studies, you can imagine that hostile behavior could have a detrimental effect on relationships, such as limiting effective conflict resolution, stifling open communication, or diminishing positive experiences between part­ners. As these studies demonstrate, expectations about romantic partners, separate from partners' actual behavior, can have important implications for relationships.

© By Amy Newberg, Ph.D. Student. All Rights Reserved.