‘Family Violence and Football’ at 15: Revisiting the Effect of Emotional Cues on Intimate Partner Violence

This paper revisits the famous Card and Dahl study on emotional cues on intimate partner violence (IPV). This paper was one of the first to explore the effects of seemingly irrelevant outcomes—in this case, local National Football League (NFL) game outcomes—on incidents of IPV, finding that upset NFL losses are associated with a 10% increase in IPV. This paper briefly describes the current state of the “emotional cue” literature, specifically further extensions related to IPV, and then applies the Card–Dahl model to an updated 25-year crime dataset. Results suggest a deviation from the previous literature. NFL upset losses seem to have a considerably reduced effect on IPV than initially found, but some restricted samples find relationships between unexpected game outcomes and IPV.