acknowledgement this is a draft of a chapter that has been … · 2020-07-31 · emotion regulation...

Emotion Regulation in Couples UNCORRECTED FIRST PROOF

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Acknowledgement: This is a draft of a chapter that has been accepted for publication by Oxford University Press in the forthcoming book The Oxford Handbook of Emotional Development edited by Dr. Daniel Dukes, Prof. Andrea C. Samson, and Prof. Eric A. Walle, and due for publication in 2021.


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Emotion Regulation in Couples Across the Life Span

Jacquelyn E. Stephens*, Emily F. Hittner*, & Claudia M. Haase

Northwestern University

Word count: 4,348

Author Note

Jacquelyn E. Stephens and Emily F. Hittner contributed equally to the chapter. Jacquelyn Stephens and

Emily Hittner, School of Education and Social Policy. Claudia M. Haase, School of Education and Social

Policy and (by courtesy) Department of Psychology.

Emily F. Hittner is funded through the Multidisciplinary Program in Education Sciences (U.S

Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences, Multidisciplinary Program in Education

Sciences, Grant Award #R305B140042).

Correspondence concerning this article may be sent to Claudia M. Haase, Northwestern

University, School of Education and Social Policy, Annenberg Hall, 2120 Campus Drive, Evanston, IL

60208. E-mail: [email protected].


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Abstract

Intimate relationships are hotbeds of emotions. Much of what psychologists know about emotion

regulation comes from single-subject studies, but a growing body of research has examined emotion

regulation in couples. In this chapter, we provide an overview of dimensions of emotion regulation in

couples (with a focus on dynamic, iterative, and co-regulatory qualities) and measures (with a focus on

differences between self-report and performance-based measures). We then discuss developmental

origins of emotion regulation in couples (with a focus on early attachment) and highlight changes across

the life span (with a focus on longitudinal studies). Finally, we review consequences of emotion

regulation in couples (with a focus on well-being and health) and close with a discussion of directions for

future research.

Keywords: Emotion regulation, couples, intimate relationships, life-span development


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Emotion Regulation in Couples Across the Life Span

Intimate relationships are hotbeds of emotions (Levenson, Haase, Bloch, Holley, & Seider, 2013).

As couples navigate emotional ups and downs of their relationships, they encounter ample

opportunities to express and modify joy or anger, become calm or upset, and get closer or drift apart.

The vast majority of our emotion regulation episodes takes place in social contexts (reports suggest up

to 98%; Gross, Richards, & John, 2006). Thus, one might expect the emotion regulation literature (e.g.,

Gross, 2013) to be ripe with studies of emotion regulation in couples. However, nothing could be further

from the truth. In a review of emotion regulation studies since 2001, Campos and colleagues estimated

that less than 12% of studies assessed emotion regulation in the presence of another person (Campos et

al., 2011). This was an optimistic estimate that included studies involving imagined as well as real others.

Thus, much of what psychologists know about emotion regulation comes from single-subject studies

(e.g., as participants watch pictures or film clips and are instructed to regulate their emotions).

However, a growing body of research has examined emotion regulation in couples, for example, as

couples talk about areas of disagreement or pleasant topics in their relationship while their emotional

experiences, expressions, and physiology are monitored and emotions are regulated. In the present

chapter, we review current directions in research on emotion regulation in couples across the life span.

We zoom in on defining qualities and measurement questions, review developmental origins and

changes across the life span (see chapters DeFrance; Méndez Leal; Riediger, this volume), highlight

consequences for well-being and health, and provide suggestions for future research.

Defining Qualities

Definitions of emotion regulation traditionally often emphasized emotion regulation in

individuals. For instance, James Gross, initially defined emotion regulation as “the processes by which

individuals [emphasis added] influence which emotions they have, when they have them, and how they


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experience and express these emotions (Gross, 1998, p. 275). More recent definitions have been more

attuned to interpersonal dimensions (e.g., Zaki & Williams, 2013) and Gross (2013) defined emotion

regulation as the “capacity to modify aspects of the emotional response system (e.g., emotional

experiences, physiology) to meet personal, interpersonal, and social [emphasis added] goals”. But what

about emotion regulation in couples in particular?

Levenson and colleagues (2013) proposed that emotion regulation in couples has a number of

special defining qualities. Emotion regulation in couples is (a) dynamic and iterative as partners act and

react to each other’s emotions (see chapter Lougheed, this volume). This can make it difficult if not

impossible to parse out, for example, which partner really started a fight (Gottman & Levenson, 1999).

Emotion regulation in couples is also (b) co-regulatory as partner regulate not only their own but also

each other’s emotions often with quite different emotion regulation goals and strategies. This can result

in partners’ emotions linking up, synchronizing, and resonating with each other – or unlinking,

desynchronizing, and not resonating (Butler & Randall, 2013; Fredrickson, 2016). Emotion regulation in

couples is often (c) bidirectional as partners need to down- and upregulate emotions. To be able to dial

emotions both down and up is important for individual emotion regulation, but may become particularly

important in couples when partners come from very different emotional places in order to find some

common ground. Finally, emotion regulation in couples is often (d) bivalent as partners need to regulate

both negative and positive emotion. Again, this is also a defining quality of emotion regulation in

individuals but may become particularly important in couples when partners need each other to

downregulate positive and upregulate negative emotions in times of despair (Clark, Ouellette, Powell, &

Milberg, 1987).

Measurement


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Studies of emotion regulation in couples have used many different measures, including self-report and

performance-based measures. Reflecting the prevailing individualistic focus in the emotion regulation

literature, most self-report measures were designed to measure emotion regulation in individuals. For

example, the arguably most widely used self-report measure of emotion regulation, the Emotion

Regulation Questionnaire (Gross & John, 2003), measures cognitive reappraisal and suppression in

individuals on a 10-item scale (e.g., “I keep my emotions to myself.”). We are unaware of self-report

measures that have been specifically designed to assess emotion regulation in couples, but there are

several promising alternatives.

One of the first instruments to measure interpersonal emotion regulation, the Emotion

Regulation of Others and Self Scale (EROS; Niven, Totterdell, Stride, & Holman, 2011) sought to measure

different intrinsic (e.g., self-directed) and extrinsic (e.g., other-directed) strategies to improve affect

(e.g., “I thought about something nice” or “I spent time with someone”) or worsen affect (e.g., “I

thought about my shortcomings” or “I explained to someone how they had hurt myself or others”).

However, Hofmann, Carpenter & Curtiss (2016) note there was limited empirical evidence for the affect-

worsening strategies, and that these dimensions were infrequently endorsed. Thus, the 20-item

Interpersonal Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (IERQ; Hofmann, Carpenter, & Curtiss, 2016) was

developed next with the intention of building on the EROS and eliminating the unsupported affective

dimensions. The IERQ assesses how and when individuals receive emotion support from others (e.g., “I

look to others for comfort when I feel upset.”). More recently, Williams and colleagues (Williams,

Morelli, Ong, & Zaki, 2018) developed and validated the 16-item Interpersonal Regulation

Questionnaire, which measures (a) individuals’ tendency to pursue interpersonal emotion regulation in

response to positive and negative emotional events and (b) the efficacy with which they perceive

interpersonal emotion regulation to improve their emotional lives (e.g., “When something good


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happens, my first impulse is to tell someone about it”). Although these are not specific to the couple

context, these scales seem like measures that could be adapted to assess emotion regulation in couples.

There are also a number of measures of couples’ communication, conflict resolution,

relationship functioning, as well as adult attachment that all include items that could be used to

measure emotion regulation in couples (Levenson et al., 2013). For example, the Experiences in Close

Relationships Scale (Brennan, Clark, & Shaver, 1998) assesses attachment anxiety and avoidance using

36 items that tap heavily into couples’ emotion regulation (e.g., “I prefer not to show a partner how I

feel deep down.”).

Self-report measures of emotion regulation have many virtues. They clearly capture important

information, are easy to administer, are cost efficient, and can be scaled up for use with large samples

and hard-to-reach populations. However, these self-report measures also have limitations (e.g.,

Robinson & Clore, 2002) and they do not seem to track couples’ actual emotion regulation well. For

example, Bloch (2011) found no link between questionnaire and performance-based measures of

couples’ emotion regulation. This is consistent with many other findings in affective science showing

weak or nil associations between self-report and performance-based measures of aspects of emotional

functioning (e.g., cognitive empathy; Murphy & Lilienfeld, 2019).

Performance-based measures thus seek to evaluate emotion regulation in couples while it

occurs. These measures can assess emotion regulation (a) abilities (as relationship partners are

instructed to regulate emotions and their success in implementing the instructions is assessed), as well

as (b) practices (as relationship partners’ emotion regulation is observed “in the wild” or in the lab and

emotion regulation success is quantified using different metrics).

In studies of emotion regulation abilities, participants are instructed to suppress, reappraise or

otherwise regulate their emotions. These studies often use dyads (e.g., Butler et al., 2003; Peters,

Overall, & Jamieson, 2014), but there are also a number of studies that have manipulated emotion


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regulation (e.g., suppression, reappraisal) in romantic couples (e.g., Ben-Naim, Hirschberger, Ein-Dor, &

Mikulincer, 2013).

Studies of emotion regulation practices have a strong tradition of using experience sampling

approaches (Hektner, Schmidt, & Csikszentmihalyi, 2007; Perrez, Schoebi, & Wilhelm, 2000). These

approaches often involve couples reporting on their and their partners’ affect, stressors, and social

support multiple times a day across a week or longer (e.g., Horn, Samson, Debrot, & Perrez, 2019).

Experience sampling methods provide ecologically valid and non-intrusive assessments that reduce bias

associated with recollected reports of emotion and emotion regulation strategies (Robinson & Clore,

2002) and can provide unique insights into couples’ emotion regulation in real-world contexts.

There is also a long tradition of observing couples’ emotion regulation as they discuss areas of

conflict, pleasant topics, or “events of the day” and their emotional experiences, behaviors, autonomic

physiology, or hormonal changes are monitored in the laboratory (Gottman & Gottman, 2017; Levenson

et al., 2013). These laboratory-based studies have examined many different aspects of emotion

regulation . For example, focusing on the dynamic nature of emotion regulation in couples, Bloch, Haase

and Levenson (2014) examined downregulation of negative emotion in couples by assessing how long

spouses stayed in “hot zones” of negative emotional experiences, behavior, and physiological arousal

during marital conflict discussions. There is also growing momentum to zoom in on the co-regulatory

nature of emotion regulation in couples by studying linkage, synchrony, or resonance (e.g., covariation

in moment-to-moment behavioral or physiological states between relationship partners) in married

couples and other dyads, such as parent-infant dyads (Butler, 2015; Feldman, 2007; Helm, Sbarra, & Ferrer,

2014; Levenson & Gottman, 1983; Otero et al., 2019; Timmons, Margolin, & Saxbe, 2015). As such, these

laboratory-based approaches allow researchers to capture the multidimensional and mechanistic nature of

emotion regulation in close relationships in a more controlled setting.


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Developmental Origins

In many ways, the relationship between infant and caregiver is the cradle for emotion regulation in

couples. Infants rely heavily on their caregiver to regulate their emotions (Thompson, 1991), be it

through physical touch (e.g., nursing, rocking, cradling, cuddling, petting, tickling), voice (e.g., prosody,

laughter, singing), or facial expressions (e.g., smiling, raising eyebrows). The importance of the

caregiver’s face, in particular, for regulating infant emotions has been well-documented through

experimental paradigms. For example, the closed-eyes (Papousek, 2007) and the still-face (Tronick,

1989) paradigms elicit powerful emotional reactions in the infant as caregivers close their eyes or cease

to provide facial feedback, respectively. At the same time, emotions are also regulated at a physiological

level with evidence showing that mothers’ stressful experiences can be physiologically contagious to

their infants and set in motion reciprocal upregulation of physiological arousal resulting in greater

physiological linkage between mothers and infants (Waters, West, & Mendes, 2014). This reminds us

that emotion regulation in infant-caregiver dyads (much like in couples across the life span) is deeply co-

regulatory with infants also regulating caregivers’ emotions in powerful ways (Papousek, 2007).

Bowlby’s theory of attachment famously asserts that early infant-caregiver interactions create

an internal working model of the self and close others that guide beliefs and behaviors of what a close

relationship is or should be like – with important consequences for development across the life span

(Bowlby, 1988). Infant-caregiver dyads greatly differ in their attachment styles and, accordingly, in their

capacity for emotion regulation. Securely attached infants (Ainsworth & Bell, 1970) react with distress

when their caregiver leaves but seek proximity and contact and are easily soothed when she or he

returns. Insecurely attached infants remain distressed (when insecure-ambivalent) or avoid the

caregiver (when insecure-avoidant) when he or she returns.

The idea that there are parallels between infant-caregiver and romantic partner relationships

was developed in depth by Hazan and Shaver (1987) who asserted that romantic relationships work in a


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similar way to early attachment relationships and share underlying motivations. Longitudinal research

has documented the consequences of early differences in attachment styles for long-term

developmental outcomes, including emotion regulation and intimate relationship functioning later in life

(Mikulincer, Shaver, & Pereg, 2003; Sroufe, 2005). Such studies can be remarkably difficult to conduct,

as they require careful measurement of early attachment and later emotion regulation in couples and

longitudinal designs spanning decades. In one landmark study, Simpson and colleagues (Simpson,

Collins, Tran, & Haydon, 2007) used a double-mediation model to show that secure attachment at 12

months of age predicted greater social competence during early elementary school. This then predicted

more secure relationships with close friends at age 16, which in turn predicted more positive daily

emotional experiences in adult romantic relationships. Thus, there were important indirect (i.e.,

mediated) effects of early attachment on emotion regulation in adult romantic relationships, but no

direct effects. Such findings illustrate that, although attachment is relatively stable (Fraley, 2002; Fraley,

Vicary, Brumbaugh, & Roisman, 2011), there is important within-person fluctuation in attachment

security across the life span, depending on relationship experiences over time (Girme et al., 2018). In

sum, early attachment experiences appear to be an important cradle for couples’ emotion regulation,

but this cradle can be “rocked” and early attachment experiences can be disrupted by later relationship

experiences, for better or worse.

Changes across the Life Span

As individuals age, they experience loss and decline in many life domains (Heckhausen, Dixon, & Baltes,

1989). Their memory declines (Park & Bischof, 2013; Salthouse, 2004); their health deteriorates; many

earlier sources of meaning (e.g., careers) are no longer as important (Erikson, 1950), and social networks

dwindle (Wrzus, Hänel, Wagner, & Neyer, 2013).


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However, not all is lost as we age. People maintain and even experience gains in some domains

of functioning – with intimate relationship functioning as a prime example (Carstensen, Isaacowitz, &

Charles, 1999; Carstensen et al., 2011). Although broader social networks shrink (Wrzus, Hänel, Wagner,

& Neyer, 2012), relationships with spouses, family members, and close friends actually tend to grow

closer and more satisfying well into late life (e.g., Carstensen, 1992; Carstensen, Gottman, & Levenson,

1995; Gurung, Taylor, & Seeman, 2003; Henry, Berg, Smith, & Florsheim, 2007).

We now have longitudinal evidence that the emotional climate in marriages becomes

increasingly favorable with age (Verstaen et al., 2020). Tracking objectively coded emotional behaviors

during marital conflict discussions across 3 waves over a 13-year interval in long-term married couples,

we (Verstaen et al., 2020) found that positive emotional behaviors (primarily humor, enthusiasm, and

validation) increased and negative emotional behavior (primarily belligerence, defensiveness,

fear/tension and whining) decreased with age. These effects were found for husbands and wives, for

middle-aged and older spouses, and in satisfied and unsatisfied marriage.

What explains these improvements? Socioemotional selectivity theory (e.g., Carstensen, 2006;

Carstensen et al., 1999) famously proposes that, as time horizons shrink, older adults prioritize

socioemotional goals and seek to upregulate positive emotions and downregulate negative emotions –

and close relationships offer prime opportunities to do so. Thus, when we come to realize that our time

on this earth is limited, we seek to make the most of now with the people we love. It is possible that this

tuning of the emotion regulation system towards the positive and away from the negative not only

benefits subjective well-being but also protects physical health. Positive emotions have soothing effects

(Fredrickson & Levenson, 1998) and reduce physiological arousal in couples (Yuan, McCarthy, Holley, &

Levenson, 2010), which may be one reason for why upregulating them become so important as we age.

Conversely, negative emotions have powerful negative effects on physical health (Haase, Holley, Bloch,


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Verstaen, & Levenson, 2016), which may be one reason for why downregulating them becomes so

important as we age.

Supporting basic premises of socioemotional selectivity theory, a rich body of work has shown

that emotion regulation capacities are not only preserved but can actually flourish in late life (for a

review see Haase & Shiota, in press). Older adults are more likely to avoid situations that induce

negative emotions (Birditt, Fingerman, & Almeida, 2005; Charles, Piazza, Luong, & Almeida, 2009;

Stawski, Sliwinski, Almeida, & Smyth, 2008), prefer positive over negative information (Reed, Chan, &

Mikels, 2014), engage in emotion regulation strategies that upregulate positive emotions (Charles &

Carstensen, 2007), perform better when instructed to reappraise negative emotions (Shiota & Levenson,

2009), and report using more reappraisal and less suppression strategies (but see Eldesouky & English,

2018; John & Gross, 2004) compared to younger adults. Moreover, older adults prune their social

networks by cutting down on peripheral but not core social partners; they experience less negative and

more positive emotions in these social relationships and this appears to benefit emotional experience in

daily life (English & Carstensen, 2014). To be clear, older adults do not outperform younger adults in all

emotion regulation strategies all the time (Charles, 2010; Eldesouky & English, 2018); and there is

evidence that the stakes for emotion regulation to go awry become particularly high in late life (Haase &

Shiota, in press).

However, the available empirical evidence highlights heightened emotion regulation as an

important resource for late-life functioning. To date, the vast majority of emotion regulation studies has

used single-subjects paradigms and many have used cross-sectional designs (which confound age and

cohort effects). At the same time, existing longitudinal studies with couples (Verstaen et al., 2020) have

studied the product of successful emotion regulation in the form of increased positive and decreased

negative emotional behavior in married couples. What is missing are studies to examine how specific

emotion regulation strategies in couples change with age. Do partners increasingly avoid conflict and


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resort to more pleasant topics in their conversations, as some longitudinal work showing increased

avoidance behavior suggests (Holley, Haase, & Levenson, 2013)? Do partners willfully look the other way

and forget each other’s misgivings? Do partners become better at looking at “the bright side” when

confronted with each other’s flaws and shortcomings (Shiota & Levenson, 2009)? Or do partners

increasingly switch from activating emotions that may antagonize others, such as anger, to deactivating

emotions that may help elicit sympathy and support, such as sadness (Haase, Seider, Shiota, &

Levenson, 2012; Kunzmann, Kappes, & Wrosch, 2014; Lwi, Haase, Shiota, Newton, & Levenson, in

press)?

Consequences for Well-Being and Health

How individuals regulate their emotions has important consequences for their short- and long-

term well-being and health. A wealth of single-subject studies has documented that effective emotion

regulation has positive links with individual and relational well-being (e.g., Gross & John, 2003;

Quoidbach, Berry, Hansenne, & Mikolajczak, 2010; Williams et al., 2018), physical health (DeSteno,

Gross, & Kubzansky, 2013), mental health (Aldao, Nolen-Hoeksema, & Schweizer, 2010), and human

capital outcomes (Côté, Gyurak, & Levenson, 2010).

Among the studies that have examined emotion regulation in couples, most have focused on

consequences for relationship functioning. Self-report studies show that couples who report less

frequent use of “containment” (akin to suppression) of negative emotion have higher marital

satisfaction (Feeney, 1999). Conversely, the inability to regulate negative emotions has been linked with

profound relationship dysfunction, including higher likelihood of partner abuse (McNulty & Hellmuth,

2008).

Performance-based studies of emotion regulation in couples have often used laboratory-based

paradigms to study how the type, timing, and intensity of emotion regulation during couples’


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interactions predict relationship well-being and stability (for a review see Gottman & Gottman, 2017;

Levenson et al., 2013). For instance, lower levels of negative emotions for individuals and lower levels of

negative emotion reciprocity predicted higher levels of marital satisfaction both concurrently (Levenson

& Gottman, 1983) and longitudinally (Levenson & Gottman, 1985). In contrast, high levels of shared

negative emotions are an important predictor for divorce (Gottman, 1994). In a similar vein, less

escalation of negative emotions and a higher ratio of positive to negative emotions during conflict has

been linked with higher levels of marital satisfaction and relationship stability concurrently and

longitudinally (Gottman & Levenson, 1992). Moreover, there is now considerable support for the idea

that linkage or synchrony (i.e., physiological linkage) plays an important role in predicting relationship

functioning with high levels of linkage in negative contexts predicting lower levels of marital satisfaction

(Levenson & Gottman, 1983) and higher levels of positive linkage (i.e., positivity resonance) predicting

higher levels of marital satisfaction (Otero et al., 2019). There is also evidence for the long-term

consequences of couples’ emotion regulation in predicting marital satisfaction. Specifically, we (Bloch et

al., 2014) have shown that how quickly wives (but not husbands) downregulated negative emotions in

marital conflict discussions was an important predictor of wives’ increases in marital satisfaction over 13

years. The downregulation of negative emotional behaviors (i.e., anger, belligerence, contempt,

defensiveness, disgust, domineering, fear/tension/worry, sadness, and whining) emerged as a key

predictor, which we interpreted as supporting wives’ roles as the emotional center in a marriage.

Experience sampling and diary studies of emotion regulation provide another important pillar of

empirical evidence to support the importance of emotion regulation for relationship functioning (e.g.,

Luginbuehl & Schoebi, 2019). For example, using a dyadic ambulatory assessment framework, Horn and

colleagues (2019) examined positive humor experienced with one’s romantic partner as an

interpersonal emotion regulation strategy. Their findings showed that positive humor predicted changes


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in daily affect for oneself and one’s partner with the latter effect partially mediated by changes in

psychological intimacy (i.e., feeling cared for, close to, understood, and secure).

In addition to studies linking emotion regulation in couples and relationship well-being, there is

a sizable literature examining the consequences of relationship functioning for physical health (Kiecolt-

Glaser & Wilson, 2017; Robles & Kiecolt-Glaser, 2003). This literature focuses on physiological regulation

mechanisms (Smith et al., 2011) that predict sickness or health outcomes. Two prominent mediating

pathways are increased sleep problems and metabolic alterations (Kiecolt-Glaser & Wilson, 2017). Other

studies have zoomed in on other outcomes and correlates of couples’ emotion relation, including

mental health (Holley, Haase, Chui, & Bloch, 2018) and memory functioning (Richards, Butler, & Gross,

2003). For example, building on a sizable literature documenting benefits of physical touch (Coan,

Schaefer, & Davidson, 2006), Debrot, Schoebi, Perrez, and Horn (2013) examined dating couples who

completed an electronic diary four times a day over the course of a week. Findings showed that physical

touch was associated with enhanced affect in the partner and predicted better psychological well-being

six months later.

With mounting evidence supporting links between couples’ emotion regulation and well-being

and health outcomes, recent research has begun to examine mechanisms and moderators for these

associations. For instance, we have shown that higher levels of constructive communication mediated

the longitudinal association between wives’ downregulation of negative emotions and increases in their

marital satisfaction (Bloch et al., 2014). Moreover, all regulation strategies are not created equal; some

approaches to managing emotions are healthy while others can be unhealthy (e.g., John & Gross, 2004).

Adaptive emotion regulation strategies (e.g., perspective taking) predict higher levels of relationship

satisfaction (Rusu, Bodenmann, & Kayser, 2019), whereas maladaptive emotion regulation strategies

(e.g., suppressing emotions) predict lower levels of marital quality longitudinally (Velotti et al., 2016)

and more thoughts of breaking up (Impett et al., 2012).


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Finally, life stage appears to be an important moderator with the consequences of emotion

regulation for well-being and health becoming amplified in late life. As older adults spend increasing

time with their spouse (Charles & Carstensen, 2007) compared to friends and strangers, appropriately

regulating emotions to maintain these close ties can afford protection against health declines (Rook &

Charles, 2017). However, older adults may also face more dire consequences when they cannot

effectively use emotion regulation to change their emotion state (Charles, 2010; Charles & Carstensen,

2007). For example, doses of negative emotional behaviors (e.g., eye rolls) have been shown to be

particularly problematic for couples in late life (Rauer, Williams, & Jensen, 2017). Moreover, the

perception of spouses’ warmth and hostility during marital interaction more strongly predicts

relationship satisfaction among older than among middle-aged adults, suggesting greater sensitivity to

the emotional climate of close relationships (Henry, Berg, Smith, & Florsheim, 2007).

Future Directions

Intimate relationships are one of the most important social relationships in the lives of many people.

According to the US census, 96% of US adults over the age of 65 have been married at least once in their

life. At the same time, societies are aging across the globe. Average life expectancies are expected to

continue to increase and half of babies born in the 2000s are expected to see their 100th birthday

(Christensen, Doblhammer, Rau, & Vaupel, 2009).

In 2020, we will enter the Decade of Healthy Aging, as announced by the World Health

Organization (www.who.int/ageing/10-priorities/en/). Emotion regulation (in particular in intimate

relationships) appears to be a key factor in successful aging, and our chapter points to a number of

fruitful directions to pursue in future research emotion.

First, studies are direly needed to examine emotion regulation in couples across the life span

with a focus on how couples’ emotion regulatory goals, abilities, and practices develop over time, when

http://www.who.int/ageing/10-priorities/en/


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they are malleable, and when they become stable. In particular, future studies should go beyond self-

report measures to assess actual emotion regulation performance in couples by examining multiple

response systems (e.g., subjective experience, emotional behavior, language, autonomic physiology) and

collecting data in the laboratory as well as in the field. Ideally, these studies would use longitudinal

designs and examine samples that are more diverse than existing samples in terms of relationship status

(e.g., marriage vs. cohabitation); socioeconomic status, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or religious

orientation.

Second, more research should be directed toward the consequences of couples’ emotion

regulation, with special attention given to linking different kinds of emotion regulation with different

kinds of outcomes. In particular, more studies are needed that examine consequences not only for

relationship satisfaction and stability, but also well-being, health, or cognitive performance (Waldinger,

Cohen, Schulz, & Crowell, 2015), to name just a few domains of interest (Schoebi & Campos, 2019) .

Third, more research is needed on the sources of emotion regulation in couples, looking both at

psychological (e.g., attachment history) as well as biological (e.g., genetic) factors that predispose

individuals and couples to develop particular adaptive or maladaptive ways of regulation emotions. This

research will be highly fruitful in understanding the more and the less malleable aspects of couples’

emotion regulation across the life span.

Finally, we hope that this work will inspire more counseling and therapy research and practice.

Interventions have traditionally been regarded as the province of earlier life periods. However, there

now exist effective intervention protocols that have proven effective in boosting emotion regulation

capacities in late life, particularly among dementia caregivers (Moskowitz et al., 2019). One important

direction for future research will be to extend this work to the couple context. As emotion and close

relationships become more important and consequential in late life, there is good reason to assume that

emotion-focused couples therapy approaches (which have demonstrated remarkable success; Gottman


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& Gottman, 2008; Johnson & Greenman, 2006; Lebow, Chambers, Christensen, & Johnson, 2012) could

prove to be a tremendous resource for healthy aging.


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