Feelings of Annoyance and Spoken Anger Words in Couples’ Everyday Lives: The Role of Family-of-Origin Aggression

Abstract

Little is known about the words that romantic couples use during emotionally heightened moments such as when feeling annoyed with their partner. In the present study, young adult couples received mobile phones that audio-recorded 50% of their day and prompted hourly self-reports of partner-related annoyance. Actor–partner models tested within-person (hourly) and between-person (across the day) associations between feelings of annoyance and spoken anger words; furthermore, exposure to retrospectively assessed parent-to-child aggression (PCA) was examined as a moderator of these links. Men reporting more annoyance across the day as well as greater PCA used more overall anger words. For women, hourly anger words fluctuated in relation to men’s annoyance; moreover, greater PCA strengthened the link between women’s own hourly reported annoyance and anger words. Our findings highlight nuances in couples’ communication of everyday relationship distress and point to the role of PCA in next-generation romantic relationships.

Feelings in words: Emotion word use and cardiovascular reactivity in marital interactions.

“…Moreover, spouses used fewer positive emotion words in the conflict (vs. positive) conversations. While our mean levels of emotion word use are in line with other studies (see, e.g., Han et al, 2021;Pennebaker et al, 2003;Vine et al, 2020), our ability to detect associations between positive emotion word use and cardiovascular reactivity may have been reduced, particularly in the conflict conversation.…”

“…Taken together, previous work (e.g., Boyd & Schwartz, 2021;Han et al, 2021;Monin et al, 2012) suggests emotion word use as an indicator of negative and positive emotional processes, which tend to go along with changes in cardiovascular reactivity (see e.g., Eichstaedt et al, 2015;Fredrickson, 2001;Kreibig, 2010;Monin et al, 2012). Drawing from this and from functional accounts of emotion (Keltner & Gross, 1999;Levenson, 1999; but see Feldman Barrett, 2017) that see emotion as manifesting across different response systems, we expect negative emotion word use to be linked with higher and positive emotion word use to be linked with lower cardiovascular reactivity.…”

“…Negative Emotion Word Use Relates to Higher, Positive Emotion Word Use Relates to Lower Cardiovascular Reactivity A different view suggests that the use of negative emotion words relates to higher cardiovascular reactivity, while the use of positive emotion words relates to lower cardiovascular reactivity during conversations. This view is informed by emotion models (e.g., Levenson, 1999) that view emotions as psychological-physiological phenomena, which manifest across different response systems (e.g., physiology and language; Seider et al, 2009) and is supported by studies on natural word use (e.g., Boyd & Schwartz, 2021;Han et al, 2021;Horn & Meier, 2022;Markowitz, 2022;Monin et al, 2012), which view emotion word use as an indicator of emotional processes that may go along with changes in physiological activation. From this perspective, several negative emotions (e.g., anger) activate the sympathetic nervous system and deactivate the parasympathetic nervous system, resulting in greater cardiovascular activation; this view is supported by a sizable body of empirical evidence (e.g., Kreibig, 2010).…”

“…Surprisingly few studies have examined emotion word use in couples. Those that have done so show that partners are more likely to use negative emotion words (especially anger-related words) during moments of relationship distress (i.e., when feeling annoyed with the partner; Han et al, 2021) and have linked negative emotion word use to lower dyadic adjustment (Karan et al, 2017). In contrast, the use of positive emotion words (e.g., happy, glad, grateful) during couple interactions has been linked to beneficial outcomes, including more positive reframing, lower levels of stress, greater dyadic adjustment to a cancer diagnosis (Karan et al, 2017; Robbins et al, 2019), and higher relationship satisfaction (Slatcher et al, 2008).…”

“…Emotions in dyadic interaction are inherently systemic and may relate to both one’s own and one’s partner’s outcomes (e.g., Levenson et al, 2014), including cardiovascular reactivity (Butler & Randall, 2012; Chen et al, 2021). While partner effects have been observed between emotion word use and other aspects of emotional functioning (e.g., use of negative emotion word and partners’ annoyance, Han et al, 2021), they have yet to be explored for cardiovascular reactivity.…”