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We tested the theory that emotional skillfulness, specifically the ability to identify and communicate emotions, plays a role in the maintenance of marital adjustment through its effects on the intimacy process. Ninety-two married couples completed measures of emotional skillfulness, marital adjustment, and intimate safety. As predicted, we found that the ability to identify and the ability to communicate emotions were associated with self and partner marital adjustment. Furthermore, the association between these emotion skills and marital adjustment was mediated by intimate safety for both husbands and wives. Gender differences were found in the ability to communicate emotions and in the association between the communication of emotions and partners' marital adjustment.
Evidence suggests that people are born with a basic set of emotional responses (e.g., Ekman & Friesen, 1971); however, how individuals learn to behave in the context of their emotions can vary dramatically. Some ways of behaving in the context of strong emotions such as anger, jealousy, loneliness, fear, or love are more relationally skillful than others. From this perspective, it is not having an emotion that affects relationship health, but how skillfully one has learned to behave while experiencing that emotion. We propose that emotion skills, such as the ability to identify emotions, express emotions, empathize, and manage challenging emotions, are essential to the maintenance of healthy marriages.
Research on the role of emotion in marriage occurs primarily in three areas. The first area studies the occurrence, valence, and intensity of emotional responding in marriage (e.g., Gottman, 1994). Within this area, it has consistently been found that distressed couples display more negative affect and more negative affect reciprocity than nondistressed couples (e.g., Gottman & Levenson, 1986). The second area studies the role of disordered emotions such as depression or anxiety in marital health. Within this area, research has shown a robust association between depressive affect and marital distress (e.g., Beach, 2001). The third area studies the role of emotions in couple therapy. For example, both Integrative Couple Therapy (e.g., Christensen, Jacobson, & Babcock, 1995) and Emotionally Focused Couple Therapy (e.g., Johnson & Greenberg, 1994) consider emotional evocation central to the proposed mechanism of therapeutic change. For example, Greenberg and Johnson (1986) have found that evoking emotion in couple therapy facilitates both intimacy and...