Do People Know How Their Romantic Partner Views Their Emotions? Evidence for Emotion Meta-Accuray and Links with Momentary Romantic Relationship Quality

Abstract

Do people know how their romantic partner (i.e., the perceiver) views the self’s (i.e., the metaperceiver’s) emotions, displaying emotion meta-accuracy? Is it relevant to relationship quality? Using a sample of romantic couples ( Ncouples = 189), we found evidence for two types of emotion meta-accuracy across three different interactions: (a) normative emotion meta-accuracy, knowing perceivers’ impressions of metaperceivers’ emotions that are in line with how the average person may feel, and (b) distinctive emotion meta-accuracy, knowing perceivers’ unique impression of metaperceivers’ emotions. Furthermore, across interactions, normative emotion meta-accuracy was positively related to momentary relationship quality for metaperceivers and perceivers and this link was especially strong in the conflict interaction. Distinctive emotion meta-accuracy was negatively related to momentary relationship quality across interactions for perceivers and in the conflict interaction for metaperceivers. Overall, it may be adaptive for metaperceivers to accurately infer perceivers’ normative impressions and to remain blissfully unaware of their unique impressions.

Knowing how you see me: Exploring meta‐accuracy of personality, emotions and values and their links with relationship well‐being among young adults

“…Distinctive meta-accuracy could also satisfy epistemic needs for metaperceivers, as people generally have insight into whether their metaperceptions are accurate or not (Carlson & Furr, 2013). Further, the present work is consistent with past research (Carlson, 2016b;Tissera et al, 2021Tissera et al, , 2022, as we do not observe this link withindomains. Therefore, benefits of distinctive meta-accuracy appear to be cumulative, such that knowing the perceivers' distinct impressions across domains is what relates to metaperceivers' relationship well-being.…”

“…Of the remaining 410 participants (M age = 20.99, SD = 2.68), 47.3% were men and 81.5% of the participants were heterosexual. 2 Post-hoc power analyses were conducted using an initial effect size estimate from Tissera et al, (2022), due to similarities in analyses and the sample with the present study. The average effect size for the link between distinctive emotion meta-accuracy and perceiver's relationship quality was r = 0.17.…”

“…The average effect size for the link between distinctive emotion meta-accuracy and perceiver's relationship quality was r = 0.17. We chose to base our power analyses on the effect size for distinctive meta-accuracy because these effects tend to be smaller than the links with positive meta-accuracy (see Carlson, 2016b;Tissera et al, 2021Tissera et al, , 2022. The expected power was calculated using the fabs package for R (github\jbiesanz\fabs; also see Biesanz & Schrager, 2017;McShane & Böckenholt, 2016), which provides achieved power with a specified sample based on estimated correlation from a previous study.…”

“…Although a positive link between emotion meta‐accuracy and perceiver relationship well‐being is plausible, previous work has found that distinctive emotion meta‐accuracy for state‐level emotions was negatively associated with perceiver relationship quality (Tissera et al, 2022). Between the theoretical possibility of a positive association and the empirical evidence for a negative association between these constructs, it is not clear how general emotion meta‐accuracy, as indexed in the present work, may relate to well‐being for perceivers.…”

“…Across various contexts including new acquaintances, friends and romantic partners, it appears that people, on average, are accurate about others' impressions of their personality (e.g., Carlson, 2016aCarlson, , 2016bCarlson & Furr, 2009;Kenny & DePaulo, 1993;Levesque, 1997;Porter et al, 2018). There is also some preliminary evidence that people may also be accurate about their romantic partner's impressions of their emotions (Tissera et al, 2022). Yet, no work has explicitly examined the relative levels of meta-accuracy across these different domains.…”