Communication of Emotion During Conflict: The Brief Report

Couples often experience intense negative emotions during conflict interactions. These emotions are not merely feelings that partners experience privately, but also feelings that partners may express overtly, and feelings they may perceive in each other. In other words, emotions can be communicated (Greenberg & Goldman, 2008). This is important because partners have different types of reactions to perceiving different types of emotion in each other. Perceptions of partner emotion can influence how people behave during conflict (Sanford, 2007a), what types of underlying concerns they have (Sanford & Grace, 2011), and the extent to which conflicts are resolved (Sanford, 2007b). Accordingly, current approaches to couples ’ therapy often include components designed to help couples alter problematic patterns of emotion communication (Greenberg & Johnson, 1988; Jacobson & Christensen, 1996). How, then, does the process of emotion communication work? The answer to this question is not simple, and it requires attention to three key issues