From dyadic coping to emotional sharing and multimodal interpersonal synchrony: Protocol for a laboratory experiment

During interpersonal emotion regulation, relationship partners mutually regulate each other’s emotional states. Interpersonal emotion regulation occurs at three main timescales: phasic (from several hundred milliseconds to about 10s), tonic (from 10s to 1 hour), and chronic (from weeks to months and years). Prior research has examined interpersonal emotion regulation at only one or two timescales simultaneously. The proposed research will examine variables relating to interpersonal emotion regulation in close relationships across all three timescales. A total of 150 romantic couples will engage in an emotional sharing task, in which they will be instructed to either engage in natural sharing or co-rumination. At the phasic timescale, primary outcomes will be interpersonal synchrony in movements and cardiovascular responses throughout the sharing task. At the tonic timescale, primary outcomes will be changes in mood and emotional appraisals pre- and post-sharing. At the chronic timescale, the study will primarily assess individual differences in relationship quality and dyadic coping style prior to the task, which are expected to shape phasic and tonic patterns during emotional sharing. Our general expectation is that phasic patterns in interpersonal emotion regulation (e.g., movement synchrony) will be meaningfully related to tonic patterns (e.g., mood change), which, in turn, will be meaningfully related to chronic patterns (e.g., relationship quality). More differentiated hypotheses and exploratory analyses are detailed in the protocol. The results of this research will contribute to the integration of interpersonal emotion regulation theories across different time scales.