What happens when romantic couples discuss personal loss? Relational, emotional, and physiological impacts.

Abstract

Does talking about loss with a romantic partner have salutary personal and relationship effects? Prior evidence reveals the benefits of emotional disclosure in couple relationships, yet disclosure about loss has been overlooked in research on couple communication. Using a novel communication paradigm with young-adult heterosexual romantic partners (N = 114 couples), we investigated emotions, physiological arousal (skin conductance responses [SCR]), and relationship closeness when narrating a personal loss and listening to the partner's loss, and compared these loss discussions to discussions about desired relationship changes. Based on partners' self-reports, narrating loss elicited more vulnerable and, unexpectedly, more antagonistic emotions. Both narrating and listening to loss produced higher self-reported partner closeness, compared to discussing change. In support of the physiological benefits of disclosure, women's SCRs decreased over the discussion when they narrated their own loss. However, both women and men as listeners show a general trend of increasing SCRs over the discussion, suggesting the challenges of being a responsive partner. Moreover, in line with the putative protective effects of partners' biological interdependencies, partner closeness also was higher when both partners showed synchronous decreasing SCR as women narrated their loss. Although limited to young couples in relatively short relationships, these findings reveal some potential benefits of talking about loss in the context of romantic relationships.

Changes in Emotion Regulation across the Life Span

“…Importantly, emotional co-regulation is not limited to successfully solving conflict together. As described earlier in this chapter, partners may also share and upregulate positive emotions (e.g., positivity resonance; Wells et al, 2022), or they may support each other through loss experiences (Margolin et al, 2022). When they are sad or upset, romantic partners may regulate each other's emotions by bringing in a new perspective on the situation (co-reappraisal, Horn & Maercker, 2016), by using positive humor (e.g., Horn et al, 2019;Samson & Gross, 2012), or by exchanging physical affection (e.g., hugging, Debrot et al, 2013).…”

“…Emotion regulation flexibility has documented links with emotional wellbeing (Springstein et al, under review), but we should note that some studies find older adults use emotion regulation strategies more consistently in their daily life (therefore suggesting lower flexibility in older age, see Benson et al, 2019;Eldesouky & English, 2018). Another possibility is that older adults have an advantage over younger adults when it comes to emotion regulation in interpersonal contexts (e.g., Margolin et al, 2022). We return to this point below.…”

A day in the life: Couples’ everyday communication and subsequent relationship outcomes.

“…Couples completed Time 1 (T1) self-report online surveys and participated in a laboratory visit as part of a larger study (Margolin et al, 2022). After the laboratory visit, couples were invited to participate in the home data project (see Timmons et al, 2017, for a full description), which involved a laboratory meeting to receive the recording devices, data collection over an entire day outside the lab, and a second visit for exit interviews and to return devices.…”

Relationship closeness as a protective factor against the sensitizing effect of adversity history

“…Couples were recruited via referrals, and flyers posted online and throughout the community for a study examining relationship functioning (see Margolin et al, 2022 for details). After undergoing a phone-based eligibility screening and online survey, including consent and assessing past adverse experiences, couples participated in the initial laboratory visit, where they completed additional questionnaires and discussion tasks unrelated to the current study.…”