Influence strategies used by relational partners during disagreements.

Interpersonal influence refers to the strategies and tactics relational partners use to establish, reinforce, or alter each other's cognitions, emotions, and behaviors. It is argued that in close relationships, influence is used to attain instrumental goals, manage the relationship, and maintain desired identities. Six strategic categories, involving 36 tactics, were created to assess influence during the videotaped disagreements of fifty couples (N = 100). Correlational results suggest that: (1) relational partners are more persuasive when using strategies of other-support and content-validation and less persuasive when using content-invalidation, (2) greater satisfaction is experienced when one's partner uses other-support strategies and does not use accusations, and (3) relational message interpretations of equality, immediacy, informality, and similarity are associated with content-validation and other-support strategies; while interpretations of dominance, lack of immediacy, and lack of equality are associated with content-invalidation and other-accusations. An exploratory effort is made to determine which nonverbal behaviors are most closely associated with verbal strategies and how they predict outcome and global measures