UC Berkeley

We frequently encounter other people’s emotions, and how we respond to them should have important implications for the quality of our relationships. Individuals who value emotion control (i.e., think emotions should be controlled versus expressed) may respond more negatively to others’ emotional expressions, and in turn, experience lower-quality relationships. We tested this proposition across six samples using multi-method designs. Valuing emotion control was associated with lower relationship quality in three diverse samples: US undergraduates, US community adults, and US Chinese-American adolescents (Study 1; N total=780). Furthermore, valuing emotion control was associated with more negative judgments of romantic partners’ emotions during a laboratory conflict conversation (Study 2; N=376; 187 couples), and more negative responses to a friend’s or romantic partner’s emotions, which in turn accounted for lower relationship quality (Studies 3a, 3b; Ns = 226, 353). In sum, these results suggest that valuing emotion control is linked with crucial drawbacks for people’s relationships.