Yale Emotions in Romantic Relationships Video Study, 2016

82 romantic dyads (164 individuals; 85 women) participated in a two part study designed to examine emotional experience and expression in romantic relationships within everyday, naturalistic emotional conversations. The primary aim of the study is to better understand a number of antecedents and consequences of verbal and nonverbal emotional expressions within close relationships.
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Participants were collected from the greater New Haven area, and the majority of participants (97%) were between 18-50 years old. Participants had to be romantically involved with their partner for at least 6 months to participate, and they were largely heterosexual (83%).
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Participants first completed an online battery of questionnaires independent from their partner. The measures included are the following:
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EEBQ (a measure of beliefs about expressing emotion designed by Hay & Clark), EES (Kring, Smith, & Neale, 1994), PANAS-General (Watson, Clark, & Tellegen, 1988), Self-Esteem (Rosenberg, 1965), ECR-Short Form (Wei, Russell, Mallinckrodt, & Vogel, 2007), Life Orientation Scale (Scheier, Carver, & Bridges, 1994) and modifications for optimism in relationships (Bink & Clark), Relationship Satisfaction (Hendrick, 1988), Relationship Commitment (Rusbult, Martz, & Agnew, 1998), Communal Strength (Mills, Clark, Ford, & Johnson, 2004), ACT (Friedman, Prince, Riggio, & DiMatteo, 1980), BEQ (Gross & John, 1995), Trust (Rempel, Holmes, & Zanna, 1985), emotional experience and expression questions adapted from the CMU Marriage Study (1997; Clark, 2019), Self Disclosure Index and Opener Scale (Miller, Berg, & Archer, 1983), demographics.
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After completing the online questionnaire, participants came into the lab with their partner. After being videotaped completing two practice discussions of neutral topics (furniture and groceries), each participant generated several positive and negative topics that they could discuss with their partner. Participants then discussed these topics together for about five minutes each, with each participant initiating a conversation on one of their negative topics as well as one of their positive topics (for a total of four conversations- one positive and one negative for each participant). The order of discussions was counterbalanced across participants.
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Between each of these discussions (and before the first), participants independently completed a PANAS measure (Watson, Clark, & Tellegen, 1988) of their emotional experience in the moment. Additionally, following each participant’s set of emotional topics (one positive and one negative topic for each participant), participants independently completed a series of questions (adapted from the CMU Marriage Study 1997; Clark, 2019) measuring the expression of emotion by the primary expresser in that discussion (the one who had generated the topic) as well as interpretations and consequences of that expression.
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At the end of the study, participants completed several demographic questions about the length of their relationship (and marriage, if applicable) as well as the length of their acquaintance. Participants were thanked, debriefed, and compensated. We also asked participants if they would be interested in being contacted for follow up studies.
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Currently, we are in the process of completing coding for verbal and nonverbal emotional expression of these videos.
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Yale University HSC number: 1602017214