The effect of stress on empathic accuracy in romantic couples.

Abstract

Accurately understanding the thoughts and feelings of romantic partners, termed empathic accuracy, is critical for optimal relationship functioning. Empathic failure is linked to common reasons couples seek therapy (Doss, Simpson, & Christensen, 2004;Jacobson & Christensen, 1996) and is either implicitly or explicitly a target of many couple therapies (e.g., Jacobson & Christensen, 1996). More specifically, couple therapies target partners' abilities to accurately understand one another preceding and during conflict, periods characterized by high levels of stress. The current study tests the hypothesis that acute stress can be harmful for empathic accuracy in romantic couples, and tests two competing path models of the impact of stress on accuracy. Results show that an acute stressor affected accuracy of men and women differently, impairing accuracy in women but not observably affecting men's accuracy. The effect of the stressor on empathic accuracy for women was mediated by curvilinear arousal, and men's accuracy was also associated with curvilinear arousal. This pattern of results suggests that moderate arousal is optimal for empathic accuracy for both men and women, but this effect was twice as large for women relative to men. These findings point toward potential avenues to improve existing couple therapies by incorporating strategies to mitigate the effects of stress, thereby increasing couples' ability to accurately understand one another in therapy. These findings also suggest strategies for couples to be optimally productive when having important relationship conversations by attending to their level of arousal.

A replication and extension of the interpersonal process model of demand/withdraw behavior: Incorporating subjective emotional experience.

“…This process does not give spouses an opportunity to understand how the other person is actually feeling and likely contributes to inaccurate perceptions of the other’s experience. Though this possibility is consistent with the empathic accuracy literature in general (e.g., Crenshaw, Leo, & Baucom, 2019), the current study did not include a test of spouses’ perceptions of one another’s emotional experiences during these conversations, so the role of interpersonal affective perception is speculative at present; it would be valuable for future research to directly test this question.…”

Empathy in context: Socioeconomic status as a moderator of the link between empathic accuracy and well-being in married couples

“…Yet, our sample was quite comparable to other dyadic laboratory-based studies of empathic accuracy (Sened et al, 2017; e.g. Crenshaw et al, 2019), relied on a powerful within-subjects design, afforded statistical power (.80) to detect medium-sized effects (per guidelines by Cohen, 1992) at an alpha level of .05 8 and is to our knowledge unparalleled for a laboratory-based study of empathic accuracy in married couples from highly diverse backgrounds. Second, the present study focused on empathic accuracy for spouse’s emotions using paradigms widely used in prior work (Gottman & Levenson, 1992).…”

Relationship Outcomes Following Involuntary Pregnancy Loss: The Role of Perceived Incongruent Grief

“…In this study, mothers reported on their own levels of grief, as well as their perceptions of their partner's grief following their pregnancy loss. While previous studies have demonstrated that women possess better empathic accuracy than men (that is, they are better at accurately assessing the thoughts and feelings of their romantic partner); a recent study has demonstrated that when women are under stress, their empathic accuracy decreases (Crenshaw, Leo, & Baucom, 2019). Pregnancy loss is considered a traumatic stressor, which could have potentially decreased mothers' empathic accuracy, clouding their evaluation of their partner's grief.…”