Source: UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA submitted to
EMOTION REGULATION AND HEALTH IN CLOSE RELATIONSHIPS
Sponsoring Institution
National Institute of Food and Agriculture
Project Status
TERMINATED
Funding Source
HATCH
Reporting Frequency
Annual
Accession No.
0225229
Grant No.
(N/A)
Project No.
ARZT-1367310-H07-204
Proposal No.
(N/A)
Multistate No.
(N/A)
Program Code
(N/A)
Project Start Date
Jul 1, 2011
Project End Date
Sep 30, 2015
Grant Year
(N/A)
Project Director
Butler, E. A.
Recipient Organization
UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA
888 N EUCLID AVE
TUCSON,AZ 85719-4824
Performing Department
Family & Consumer Sciences
Non Technical Summary
The quantity and quality of a persons social relationships predicts all-cause morbidity and mortality (House, Landis, & Umberson, 1988; Ryff & Singer, 2001). Understanding the mechanisms underlying these associations is critical for advancing public health and well-being. There are likely many pathways between relationships and health, but emotion has emerged as one of the central factors (Ryff, Singer, Wing, & Love, 2001). Emotions have immediate physiological effects, such as increased sympathetic activity, that may have health relevant cumulative effects over time (Glei, Goldman, Chuang, & Weinstein, 2007). Emotions also contribute to engaging in healthy versus unhealthy behaviors (Berking, Orth, Wupperman, Meier, & Caspar, 2008). Furthermore, emotions do not just come and go beyond our control; Most emotional responses are regulated in some way (Gross, 1998b, 1999a) and the way in which people regulate their emotions is predictive of both direct physiological effects and health behaviors (Berking, Orth et al., 2008; Gross, 1998a). For example, suppressing emotions has been shown to be associated with increased blood pressure (Butler et al., 2003) and eating more than normal for overweight women (Butler, Young, & Randall, 2010). Thus research investigating emotion regulation has the potential to inform health interventions targeting both direct physiological and indirect behavioral pathways. Most research on emotion regulation and health has focused on the individual isolated from any social context. Many of our strongest emotions occur, however, in the context of close relationships or social interactions (Keltner & Haidt, 2001; Keltner & Kring, 1998; Keltner & Gross, 1999). In addition, important health behaviors such as eating (Anderson, Marshall, & Lea, 2004; Black & Threlfall, 1989; Wing, Marcus, Epstein, & Jawad, 1991) and smoking (Johnsen, Spring, Pingitore, Sommerfeld, & MacKirnan, 2002; Rohrbaugh et al., 2001) often occur in a family context. For example, both women and men gain weight following marriage or starting to cohabit (Anderson et al., 2004) and having a spouse or partner who smokes is a major risk factor for continued smoking and failure in future quit attempts (Ferguson, Bauld, Chesterman, & Judge, 2005; Homish & Leonard, 2005; Murray, Johnston, Dolce, Lee, & O'Hara, 1995). The pathways connecting close relationships, emotion regulation, and health outcomes are poorly understood, however. The proposed research will address this gap by focusing on obesity relevant factors (weight status and eating) and the cancer relevant behavior of smoking, as they relate to emotion regulation in the context of committed heterosexual couples. The proposed research has particular relevance for the health and well-being of rural populations because both obesity (Jackson, Doescher, Jerant, & Hart, 2005) and smoking (Doescher, Jackson, Jerant, & Hart, 2006) are more prevalent in rural communities.
Animal Health Component
(N/A)
Research Effort Categories
Basic
100%
Applied
(N/A)
Developmental
(N/A)
Classification

Knowledge Area (KA)Subject of Investigation (SOI)Field of Science (FOS)Percent
7036010307033%
7246020307033%
8027310307034%
Knowledge Area
703 - Nutrition Education and Behavior; 724 - Healthy Lifestyle; 802 - Human Development and Family Well-Being;

Subject Of Investigation
6010 - Individuals; 7310 - Experimental design and statistical methods; 6020 - The family and its members;

Field Of Science
3070 - Psychology;
Goals / Objectives
Objective 1 The first objective is to analyze existing data collected by the PI from a laboratory study of committed romantic couples to answer the following questions: 1) Is there evidence that coregulation occurs in adult romantic couples, where coregulation is defined as a bilateral linkage of experiential and physiological emotional channels between partners, taking the form of a negative feedback process, and resulting in physiological and experiential homeostasis for both partners 2) If coregulation as defined here is observed, is it associated with couple weight status (both normal weight, both overweight, one partner normal weight and the other partner overweight) 3) If coregulation is observed, is it associated with self-reported physical health or with physical measures of resting blood pressure and sympathetic activation 4) If coregulation is observed, is it associated with daily health behaviors (eating, activity), and 5) If coregulation is observed, do the associations between it and health behaviors and indicators differ depending upon the weight status of the couple Objective 2 The second objective is to analyze existing data collected by collaborators of the PI from a laboratory study of committed romantic couples in which one or both partners smoked, despite serious accompanying health problems, to answer the following questions: 1) Is self-reported protective buffering versus engagement during conversation about a disagreement related to dynamically escalating sequences of negative versus positive emotional experience and 2) Do the associations between protective buffering / engagement and emotional experience depend upon whether one or both partners are smokers, and whether or not they are currently smoking Expected outputs: The results of the analyses will be reported in peer reviewed journals and presented at academic conferences.
Project Methods
The proposed research will use existing data from two laboratory studies of couples to investigate two forms of interpersonal emotion regulation (coregulation and protective buffering), their impact on temporal interpersonal emotion systems, and their associations with health. The first analysis will assess coregulation of physiology (indexed by continuous interbeat interval during the conversation) and experience (indexed by the continuous self-report dial). This requires producing estimates of the first and second derivatives of the observed variables for each partner. This preprocessing will be accomplished using Matlab and following the steps recommended by Boker (2002). Next, the original data and the estimated derivatives are used in a multilevel model that predicts the second derivative (acceleration) from the original data (displacement), and the first derivative (velocity), along with functions of those terms including the coupling parameter (the difference between partners displacement) (Boker & Nesselroade, 2002; Butner et al., 2005). Evidence for coregulation would take the form of significant coupling and velocity (dampening) parameters, in combination with the lack of a linear trend. The second analysis will use state-space grids (SSGs)to investigate negative escalation and protective buffering. SSGs provide a combination of qualitative and quantitative information for assessing stability and flexibility of a system within a two-dimensional space (Granic & Hollenstein, 2003). Preliminary analyses will check for distributional assumptions and the protect/engage and positive/negative variables will be binned into 10 second aggregates to reduce noise and then broken into 5 ordinal categories as required for use with Gridware. Change variables will be created to assess increases and decreases in protect/engage and positive/negative. Estimates of the number of events (number of times a couple enters a given cell in the grid) and return times (how quickly a couple moves back to a given cell after leaving it) will be used to assess the degree to which a couple is attracted to the various escalating/de-escalating spaces in the state-space grids. These estimates (event number, return time) for each sequence are expected to non-linearly distributed and so a non-linear dyadic multilevel model will be used to assess whether couples smoking status (single-smoker, double-smoker), experiment phase (baseline, smoking), or their interaction predict the presence of ironic or functional protect/engage associations with positive/negative emotional experience.

Progress 07/01/11 to 09/30/15

Outputs
Target Audience: Our target audience is scientists and students studying interpersonal relationships and health. Changes/Problems: Nothing Reported What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided? Approximately 30 undergraduates and 6 graduate students have been involved in this research, including attending group meetings where the goals and methods are discussed with other faculty collaborators, as well as attending and presenting at international professional conferences. How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest?Our results have been disseminated through 3 peer-reviewed journal publications, one book chapter, 2 outreach presentations to the public, and numerous presentations at professional conferences and invited talks. What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals? Nothing Reported

Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals? We had two objectives, both of which have been achieved. The first objective was to analyze existing data collected by the PI from a laboratory study of committed romantic couples to answer questions about coregulation (how a couple jointly manages their emotions) and health. We used measures of couples' emotional experience and attempts to regulate their emotions when with their partner to investigate connections between coregulation and body weight. We found that couples in which the woman was an unhealthy weight, but the man was healthy, engaged in poor coregulation when discussing their health, suggesting that such couples may find it difficult to jointly manage their emotions when making lifestyle choices. We also found that women in couples where the partners engaged in unhealthy behaviors together and had high relationship cohesion, had higher body mass indices. These results suggest that shared unhealthy behaviors may be good for relationships, but bad for women's health. Our second objective was to analyze existing data collected by collaborators of the PI from a laboratory study of committed romantic couples in which one or both partners smoked, despite serious accompanying health problems. We found evidence for both successful coregulation (associated with improving emotional state) and unsuccessful coregulation (associated with worsening emotional state). The pattern of results suggests that interpersonal emotion regulation may interfere with smoking cessation differently depending upon whether one or both partners smoke. Our results have been reported in 3 peer-reviewed journal publications. Impact: (Payoff to society) Our findings have contributed to scientific knowledge about close relationships and physical health, which ultimately could be translated into interventions to enhance the health of the community at large. The research has particular relevance for the health and well-being of rural populations because both obesity (Jackson, Doescher, Jerant, & Hart, 2005) and smoking (Doescher, Jackson, Jerant, & Hart, 2006) are more prevalent in rural communities. Importantly, individuals are embedded in families, making it critical to understand how close relationships impact health behaviors. We found that the way couples manage their emotions when interacting with each other is related to their body weight and whether one or both of them smoke. Public health efforts to improve weight status and reduce smoking will need to take into account the fact that people do not exist in isolation. An intervention that works for smokers whose partner does not smoke (or women who are overweight but their partners are not) is unlikely to work if both of them smoke (or both are overweight). Ultimately, turning this knowledge into effective interventions has the potential to improve public health.

Publications

  • Type: Journal Articles Status: Published Year Published: 2014 Citation: Skoyen, J. A., Randall, A. K., Mehl, M.R, & Butler E. A. (2014). We overeat, but I can stay thin: Pronoun use and body weight in couples who eat to regulate emotion. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 33, 742-765.


Progress 10/01/13 to 09/30/14

Outputs
Target Audience: Our target audience is scientists and students studying interpersonal relationships and health. Our results have been presented at professional conferences, as invited presentations at 3 universities (University of Zurich, University of Toronto, and Queen's University), and in the form of journal manuscripts either in press or published. Changes/Problems: Nothing Reported What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided? Approximately 20 undergraduates and 3 graduate students have been involved in this research, including attending group meetings where the goals and methods are discussed with other faculty collaborators. How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest? We have disseminated our results at professional conferences and in peer-reviewed publications. What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals? We will conduct analyses to address our remaining questions with respect to Objective 1 and present the results at conferences and in journal submissions.

Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals? Objective 2 has been accomplished and reported in a journal publication that will appear in print in 2015. Questions 1 & 2 for Objective 1 have also been answered and reported in a journal publication to appear in 2015.

Publications

  • Type: Journal Articles Status: Accepted Year Published: 2015 Citation: Butler, E. A., Hollenstein, T., Shoham, V., & Rohrbaugh, M. J. (in press). A dynamic state-space analysis of interpersonal emotion regulation in couples who smoke. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships.
  • Type: Journal Articles Status: Accepted Year Published: 2015 Citation: Reed, R. G., Barnard, K., & Butler, E. A. (in press). Distinguishing co-regulation from co-dysregulation: An investigation of emotional dynamics and body-weight in romantic couples. Emotion.
  • Type: Journal Articles Status: Published Year Published: 2014 Citation: Skoyen, J. A., Randall, A. K., Mehl, M.R, & Butler E. A. (2014). We overeat, but I can stay thin: Pronoun use and body weight in couples who eat to regulate emotion. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 33, 742-765.


Progress 01/01/13 to 09/30/13

Outputs
Target Audience: Researchers and practitioners working with families to support healthier lifestyle behaviors. Changes/Problems: Nothing Reported What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided? Approximately 10 undergraduates and 5 graduate students have been involved in this research, including attending group meetings where the goals and methods are discussed with other faculty collaborators. How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest? We have disseminated our results at professional conferences and in peer-reviewed publications. What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals? We will conduct analyses to address our remaining questions with respect to Objective 1 and present the results at conferences and in journal submissions. We will also continue to work with our computational collaborators to improve our model of coregulation to make it more predictive of real-world outcomes. We have achieved our goals with respect to Objective 2 and so nothing further will be done in that direction.

Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals? For Objective 1, we have collected additional data from 80 committed heterosexual couples, which will give us greater power to detect coregulation when it is present. To address question 1, we have implemented a coupled oscillator model, both using standard techniques and in a Bayesian framework, and established that there is evidence for the presence of coregulation as we have defined it for some couples. We have also found that it is associated with couple weight status, such that couples where the man was heavier than woman showed coregulation, but couples in which the woman was heavier than the man showed co-dysregulation. These findings have been presented at several conferences and in a journal manuscript that is under second review. For Objective 2, we completed analyses and found that protective buffering and engagement were related to dynamically escalating emotional sequences as we predicted. In summary, our results support the idea that people are motivated to protect or engage their partner in order to alter emotions, since we found evidence of moment-to-moment contingent sequences occurring between worsening emotional state and increasing regulatory intentions. Our results also support the idea that protection and engagement can have desirable emotional correlates at least some of the time, making these processes viable candidates as mechanisms by which relationships impact health. Importantly, however, we also found evidence that protection and engagement can have unintended emotional correlates. For example, our results suggest that smoking cessation may be hindered for couples in which both partners smoke by the fact that shared smoking contributes to desirable emotional and relational outcomes. In contrast, smoking cessation may be hindered for couples in which only one partner smokes by their successful use of protective buffering, whereby conflict and distress surrounding smoking are mutually avoided. These results have been accepted for publication in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships.

Publications

  • Type: Journal Articles Status: Published Year Published: 2013 Citation: Butler, E. A. & Randall, A. K. (2013). Emotional coregulation in close relationships. Emotion Review, 5, 202-210.
  • Type: Journal Articles Status: Published Year Published: 2013 Citation: Meltzer, A. L., Novak, S. A., McNulty, J. K., Butler, E. A., & Karney, B. R. (2013). Marital satisfaction predicts weight gain in early marriage. Health Psychology, 32, 824 - 827.
  • Type: Journal Articles Status: Published Year Published: 2013 Citation: Reed, R. G., Randall, A. K., Post, J. H. & Butler, E. A. (2013). Partner influence and in-phase versus anti-phase physiological linkage in romantic couples. International Journal of Psychophysiology, 88, 309-316.
  • Type: Journal Articles Status: Published Year Published: 2013 Citation: Skoyen, J. A., Blank, E., Corkery, S. A., & Butler, E. A. (2013). The interplay of partner influence and individual values predicts daily fluctuations in eating and physical activity. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 30, 1000-1019.
  • Type: Journal Articles Status: Published Year Published: 2013 Citation: Randall, A. K., & Butler, E. A. (2013). Attachment and emotion transmission within romantic relationships: Merging intrapersonal and interpersonal perspectives. Journal of Relationships Research, 4, 1-10.


Progress 01/01/12 to 12/31/12

Outputs
OUTPUTS: In support of Objective 1, a collaboration has been established with faculty and students in Computational Science. Together we have developed a Coupled Linear Oscillator (CLO) model of coregulation and begun to investigate the effects of couples weight status on their emotional dynamics. Preliminary results have been reported in several conference posters and talks (see citations below). We have also submitted a second NSF application to provide additional funding for the project. Analyses were completed in support of Objective 2 and the results have been reported in a journal manuscript that is currently under review (see publications). Butler, E. A. (2012, October). Interpersonal emotional dynamics in mixed-weight couples. Invited talk presented at the annual meeting of the Society of Experimental Social Psychology, Austin, Texas. Reed, R. G., Randall, A. K., Corkery, S. A., Young, V. J., Post, J. H., & Butler, E. A. (2012, January). Emotion regulation and physiological linkage in couples. Poster presented at the 2012 Society for Personality and Social Psychology, San Diego, CA. Skoyen, J. A., Randall, A.K., Corkery, S. A., Young, V. J., Butler E. A. (2012, April). Eating as emotion regulation is associated with body composition. Poster presented at the Society of Behavioral Medicine Conference, New Orleans, Louisiana. Skoyen, J.A., Blank, E., Corkery, S.A., Butler, E.A. (2012, October). Partner influence and health beliefs predict daily fluctuations in exercise. Poster presented at the National Council on Family Relations Conference, Phoenix, Arizona. Reed, R. G., & Butler, E. A. (2012, October). Emotion regulation and patterns of physiological linkage in couples. Poster presented at the annual meeting of the National Council on Family Relations, Phoenix, AZ. PARTICIPANTS: Collaborators included Drs. Barnard, Hollenstein, Novak, Rohrbaugh, Shoham, and Young. Research training and mentoring was provided to 1 post-doctoral researcher, 5 PhD students, and 25 undergraduates. TARGET AUDIENCES: Not relevant to this project. PROJECT MODIFICATIONS: Nothing significant to report during this reporting period.

Impacts
Our preliminary results relevant to Objective 1 suggest that heterosexual romantic couples in which the woman has a higher BMI than the man experience unstable, volatile emotional dynamics when discussing their shared lifestyle and health behavior choices. In contrast, couples in which the man has the higher BMI show evidence of successful coregulation. If our ongoing analyses further suggest that interpersonal emotion regulation is influenced by the relative weight of the partners and contributes to couples health behaviors then this information could be incorporated into interventions that would simultaneously promote healthy behaviors and strong marital relationships. Our findings relevant to Objective 2 support the idea that people are motivated to protect or engage their partner in order to alter emotions, since we found evidence of moment-to-moment contingent sequences occurring between worsening emotional state and increasing regulatory intentions. Our results also support the idea that protection and engagement can have desirable emotional consequences at least some of the time, making these processes viable candidates as mechanisms by which relationships impact health. Importantly, however, we also found evidence that protection and engagement can have unintended emotional outcomes. Thus, the emotional impact of relationship-focused coping appears to depend upon additional factors. In particular, the act of smoking appeared to increase the tendency to try to regulate ones own negative emotion by protecting the partner. These attempts seemed to be somewhat successful for the single-smoker couples. During the smoking phase single-smoker couples engaged in more frequent and recurring sequences in which changes in protective buffering were followed by desirable changes in emotional experience. This successful within-person regulation of emotion via protective buffering may have come at a cost, however, because the single-smoker couples also experienced lower overall levels of positive emotion and engagement during the smoking phase of the conversation. In contrast, the double-smoker couples actually increased in overall levels of positive emotion and engagement when smoking. Thus, although protective buffering while smoking may have successfully regulated single-smoking couples negative experience it may also have prevented positive engagement with each other.

Publications

  • Skoyen, J. A., Kogan, A. V., Novak, S. A., & Butler, E. A. (2012). Health behavior and emotion regulation in romantic couples. To appear in Health and social relationships.
  • Van Campen, K. S., & Butler, E. A. (2012). Womens weight and emotions: The impact on relationships and eating behaviors (Frances McClelland Institute for Children, Youth, and Families ResearchLink, Vol. 4, No. 2). Tucson, AZ: The University of Arizona.


Progress 01/01/11 to 12/31/11

Outputs
OUTPUTS: In support of Objective 1, behavioral ratings of emotional intensity and valence were made by a trained team of undergraduate research assistants and the physiological data was cleaned and preprocessed. In addition, an NSF Career application was submitted to provide additional funding for this aspect of the project. In support of Objective 2, the raw data was prepared for Gridware analysis, escalation sequences were defined and constructed within the state-space grids, and statistical parameters indicating frequency, recurrence, and immediacy were extracted. Those variables were used in non-linear multilevel models to investigate differences between single-smoker and double-smoker couples. The results are being written up for publication. PARTICIPANTS: Three graduate and 8 undergraduate students have worked on this project. It is also being conducted in collaboration with Dr.Rohrbaugh and Dr.Shoham from the University of Arizona and Dr.Hollenstein from Queens University, Canada. TARGET AUDIENCES: Nothing significant to report during this reporting period. PROJECT MODIFICATIONS: Nothing significant to report during this reporting period.

Impacts
The state-space analyses suggest that single-smoker couples become caught up in conflict avoidance sequences to a greater extent than couples in which both partners smoke, suggesting that their smoking behavior is protected by avoidant emotion regulatory strategies. Successful interventions exist for changing emotion regulation in ways that reduce symptoms of psychopathology and improve social functioning (Berking, Wupperman et al., 2008; Clyne & Blampied, 2004). If our ongoing analyses further suggest that emotion regulation contributes to couples health behaviors then these existing techniques could be incorporated into interventions that would simultaneously promote healthy behaviors and strong marital relationships

Publications

  • Butler, E. A. (2011). Three views of emotion regulation and health. Social & Personality Psychology Compass, 5, 563 577.
  • Butler, E.A. (2011). Temporal interpersonal emotion systems: The TIES that form relationships. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 15, 367-393.
  • Butler, E. A. & Randall, A. K. (2011). Emotional coregulation in close relationships. Emotion Review.