Honey, I know how you feel

When thinking about lifestyle, think about your relationships.  What you believe, feel, and do almost always has a direct or indirect social component.  Interpersonal relationships are so fundamental that the psychiatrist and theorist Harry Stack Sullivan (1953) defined personality as “the relatively enduring pattern of recurrent interpersonal situations which characterize a human life.”  He believed that virtually everything significant about you is related to your social milieu.

Even those resistant to Sullivan’s interpersonal definition of personality would have to concede that our intimate relationships powerfully influence our mental health.  The more constructively we interact with our intimates especially, the better we feel.  And, as I have written previously, research (Gottman, et al., 2006) suggests that healthful intimacy requires us to maintain a positive to negative interaction ratio, a so-called “magic ratio,” of five to one with those whom we love.  We must know how we are coming across emotionally to our relationship partners then, if we are to relate amicably with them and to sustain the five to one.

Margaret Clark and her colleagues (2016) investigated important features of intimate emotionality: how accurately we interpret a loved one’s recent emotional event and whether our own feelings color that interpretation.  To be specific, two studies were conducted.  The first included only married couples and the second, married and “romantically involved” couples.”  Each member of each study reported their own recent emotional experience, whether they had communicated about the emotions to their mate, and the way that they perceived their mate’s recent emotional experience.  First the investigators determined how accurately the partners perceived the mate’s emotions, and the extent to which their own emotions colored how they had interpreted the mate’s emotions.  They then looked at: 1) whether having heard the mate’s explanation of their given emotional experience enabled the partner to better perceive that emotion in future situations and 2) whether having heard the mate’s explanation of their given emotional experience enabled the partner to better refrain from projecting their own emotions into the mate’s emotional experiences.

As most of us would expect, the study indicated that intimate partners were generally accurate in perceiving their mate’s emotions.  That was true for happiness, sadness, guilt, and fear in study 1, and for happiness, sadness, guilt, compassion, anxiety, hurt anger/irritability, and gratitude in study 2.  The only emotion not accurately perceived by partners was “disgust,” but that likely was a statistical quirk due to the low occurrence of disgust.  

The projection of emotion portion of the study partially confirmed the investigators' expectations.  That is, the study's partners often did project their own personal experiences of emotion when interpreting the emotional experiences of their mates.  Not as confidently anticipated, however, was that partners who had frequently experienced a personal emotion tended to overestimate the extent of their mate's experience of that same emotion, and vice verse. (Namely, that partners who had infrequently experienced a personal emotion also tended to underestimate the extent of their mate's experience of that same emotion).  Noteworthy was the fact that partners were least inclined to project their own experiences of fear, anxiety, and sadness in a way that would distort how they understood those emotions in their mates  Finally, the Margaret Clark group was surprised to find only slight support for their expectation that verbalizing to each other about their recent emotional experiences would improve partners' preexisting abilities to read their mate's future emotions.

If you accept the studies' findings then, you can be encouraged to know that you stand a reasonable chance of accurately recognizing your mate's emotions.  That is, provided you are not overly confident that the intensity of your mate's emotions is necessarily the same as the intensity of yours.. For instance, she/ he might be more or less willing to forgive a given indiscretion than you would be.  So, when you confidently believe that you share a mate's feeling, you must inquire about the intensity they are experiencing.  Only then can you decide how to proceed to offer your support.   Don't make the mistake of presuming that just because you know how your mate feels, you also know the depth of the feeling.  Proper support is support that acknowledges not just the emotion, but the depth, and that is something that only the mate can tell you.  Handled properly, supporting your mate will be good for your mental health as well as for theirs.     

References

Clark, M., et al. (2016).  Accuracy and projection in perceptions of partners’ recent emotional experiences: Both minds matter. Emotion, November, No Pagination Specified. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/emo0000173.

Gottman, J., Schwartz Gottman, J., & DeClaire, J. (2006). 10 lessons to transform your marriage.  New York, NY: Crown Publishers

Sullivan, H.,S. (1953).The interpersonal theory of psychiatry. Norton: New York, NY: 1953.