Partners' Support During Good Times: Associations With Fears of Positive and Negative Evaluation

Abstract

Capitalization interactions within romantic couples, in which they share positive events with each other, are significantly tied to their satisfaction and overall wellbeing. Recent work suggests that social anxiety is negatively associated with beneficial capitalization interactions (i.e., making capitalization bids and responding with active and constructive responses). To further investigate this understanding, we offer a deeper and differentiating look at two core components of social anxiety: fears of positive and negative evaluation. In addition, we offer an innovative look at the varying self-disclosures of capitalization recipients, by using a novel index—Relevant Talking Time (RTT) which examines the duration of relevantly disclosing and discussing one's own good event. We reasoned that the two types of evaluative fears might have different connections to capitalization processes, considering provision, receipt, and self-disclosure. Our findings (N = 74; 37 community couples in a lab-videotaped‘ interaction) suggest that high fear of positive evaluation is associated with poorer provision of active-constructive capitalization, whereas high fear of negative evaluation is associated with a reduced disclosers' RTT. In addition, our results interestingly demonstrate that disclosers' RTT is tied to their partners' anxiety characteristics as well. We discuss the possible implications and explanations of our findings.

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