Emotional Transmission in Couples Under Stress

We examined emotional transmission in 68 couples in which one member was preparing to face a major stressful event, the New York State Bar Examination. This event is the final hurdle in the course of legal training, and it typically evokes high levels of distress in examinees. Examinees and partners provided daily diary reports of their activities and emotional states for 35 days surrounding the event. Concurrent and prospective analyses indicated that examinees' depressed mood on a given day was related to partners feeling less positive and more negative about the relationship. However as the examination approached, this association declined to a negligible level. These results suggest that partners increasingly made allowances for examinees' negative affect. In this way, partners preserved their ability to be supportive when examinees needed the support most. Key Words: anxiety, close relationships, depression, emotional contagion, relationship satisfaction, stress. A defining feature of a close relationship is that one partner's psychological states and actions have the capacity to influence those of the other partner (Rusbult Larson Coyne & Smith, 1991). Another possible reason why transmission might decrease under stress is that one spouse may attribute the distress of the other to the stressful situation and not react to it as strongly as he or she would in more ordinary circumstances (Revenson & Majerowitz, 1990). This process of making allowances for the spouse's distress can be seen as the opposite of the process described by Bradbury and Fincham (1993) in which spouses in distressed couples make distress-enhancing attributions for one another's behavior Given that stressful situations might either accentuate or diminish emotional transmission, it is of interest to determine which scenario is accurate. To date, no studies have addressed the question of how transmission changes when couples experience a stressful event. Will emotional transmission increase as a stressful event unfolds, or is a coping process set in motion in which partners become less reactive to one another's distress? …