Marina's blog

Intent and impact00:49)

Happy and unhappy couples don't differ in their intent. Everybody tries to be nice, but the impact turns out to be negative, the impact in unhappy couples tends to be way more negative than the impact in happy couples. So, you can pull apart the conversational sequence - this is one way that disentangles some of this elements that social theory tells us we should be doing

1. observational coding
2. negative reciprocity is another sort of interactional exchange:

Unahappy couples have a lot of structure in their conversations - there is a high degree of predictability. If one person says something negative, the other person will say something negative as well. If you are in a negative relationship, if you've ever been in a negative relationship you'll probably know this phenomenon: You feel it is hard to extract yourself from arguments, like you get stuck in a swamp, kind of, and you cannot really see the bigger issue that your partner is raising, but you do see the negative emotion that they are delivering towards you.

Happy couples are able to break up that negative reciprocity. They are able to say "Aaah, Jo is a little bit unhappy now, it won't do me any good to start screaming back at him, I might even try to understand him. So, instead of saying 'Oh, yeah!!!', I will say 'tell me more about it'". Right?
Unhappy couples get locked into high degree of structure, high degree of predictability. It is hard for them to extract themselves from that negative emotionality. And that's what we have learnt, one of many things that we have learnt from social learning theory that negative reciprocity is a kind of a hallmark, kind of signature of an unhappy couple. They argue and they get more locked in, they get more entrenched,