UC Berkeley

Emotion regulation is arguably a social phenomenon: it occurs most frequently in the closest social relationships, serves important social functions and, correspondingly, is related to social outcomes such as relationship satisfaction. Because marriage may be the closest relationship for many adults, it is an important context in which to regulate one's emotions. However, few studies have investigated the connection between how well spouses regulate emotion and how satisfied they are with their marriages.

Using a longitudinal sample of middle-aged (40-50 years old) and older (60-70 years old) long-term married couples, I evaluated the association between couples' emotion regulation and couples' marital satisfaction, both concurrently and longitudinally over a 13-year period. The study further evaluated whether the association between couples' emotion regulation and couples' marital satisfaction differed for husbands and wives, as well as for middle-aged compared to older couples.

The present study assessed emotion regulation during naturalistic conflict interactions between married spouses. This approximates the real world context in which emotion regulation occurs, an objective that has been often overlooked in existing laboratory-based studies. Emotion regulation was assessed by examining how well couples reduced levels of negative emotional arousal (in the domains of subjective experience, behavior, and physiology) following distressing events that occurred during their interactions.

Results showed that couples' emotion regulation positively predicted couples' concurrent marital satisfaction. Specifically, shorter time spent in a negative emotional state predicted greater concurrent marital satisfaction. The effect was driven primarily by the regulation of subjective experience. Furthermore, results showed that wives' emotion regulation was more strongly related to couple's marital satisfaction than that of husbands. Additionally, there was no significant difference between middle-aged and older couples in the association between emotion regulation and marital satisfaction. In terms of longitudinal prediction, after controlling for the concurrent relationship between regulation and satisfaction, regulation did not predict change in marital satisfaction over time. Finally, a comparison of the present study's direct measures of emotion regulation and a questionnaire measure of emotion regulation revealed no correlation. However, both direct and questionnaire measures each contributed uniquely to the prediction of couples' concurrent marital satisfaction.

Findings are discussed in terms of the social functions of emotion and the nature and change over time of the marital relationship. Implications with regard to future directions of research and clinical interventions are explored.