Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

While conversing face-to-face, romantic partners are thought to form a coupled and co-regulatory system, uninten-tionally shaping each other’s emotional states on a moment-by-moment basis. What has been less explored, however, are theways in which this coupling is modulated by high-level interpersonal factors, such as discussing topics that are stressful forone or both partners. We provide an initial exploration by examining the emotion ratings of 42 romantic, heterosexual couplesduring conversations involving stress or enjoyment. Ratings were generated via continuous dials (sampled every second) asparticipants watched video playback of their interactions. The resulting time series were assessed for time-lagged patterns ofemotional coupling using cross recurrence quantification analysis. Initial results show that for topics that involved a mutualsense of stress or enjoyment, overall coupling was high, but this coupling was largely disrupted once the stress was moreasymmetrically experienced.