| This study aimed to determine which characteristics of husbands and wives in long-term marriages make them successful at perceiving the emotional states of their partners. Previously, Levenson and Ruef (1992) found that a person's ability to rate accurately the negative feelings of a stranger increased to the extent that the person's physiology mirrored that of the stranger, and that ability to rate accurately the positive feelings of another was greatest when in a state of low cardiovascular arousal. In the present study, these relations were tested with intimately acquainted participants.; Couples (N = 149) in long-term marriages engaged in a 20-minute videotaped discussion about a marital problem. Spouses returned separately to the laboratory to view the video recording of their interaction using a rating dial twice, first to rate continuously how they had felt in the interaction, and then to rate how they thought their spouse had felt. During the interaction and during the rating, autonomic and somatic physiological responses were monitored continuously. Physiological linkage—similarity between a participant's physiological responses while rating his or her spouse's feelings and that spouse's physiological responses during the interaction—was determined using a bivariate time-series analysis. The extent to which the participant's affective ratings matched those of the spouse was determined using a lag-sequential analysis.; As found previously, there were no gender differences in empathic accuracy or in physiological linkage. Spouses' expressive behavior helped wives' ratings of negative emotion, but hindered husbands' ratings of positive emotion. Again, physiological arousal and linkage both played a role in accuracy, but the pattern of relations differed by gender. For both husbands and wives, a state of low cardiovascular arousal was conducive to detecting negative and positive emotion in their spouse. Linkage with one's spouse also aided in making judgments of that partner's negative and positive emotion, but only for wives. Linkage in cardiovascular and somatic activity measures accounted for this relationship. Finally, length of marriage was differentially related to wives' empathic accuracy depending upon their marital satisfaction. |
