Cognitive and Affective Empathy and Romantic Relationship Satisfaction
Abstract
This study examined whether objectively measured cognitive empathy and affective empathy are associated with romantic relationship. The experiment involved 50 couple who had been dating for more than a month. They completed self-report measures of relationship period and satisfaction, then talked for six minutes about good and bad moments and memories with their partner. They were recorded in a room without the researcher. After the conversation, the participants recorded their positive/negative emotion every second during conversation and the positive/negative emotion that their partner may have experienced during the conversation in the same way. We calculated how accurately the partner's positive/negative emotion were inferred―emotion recognition accuracy―and operationally defined it as cognitive empathy. After the experiment, objective raters watched the video and recorded the positive/negative emotions expressed by each participant in the conversation. We calculated the match in emotional expressions of the romantic relation―emotional expression uniformity―and operationally defined it as affective empathy. The results of this study are: First, cognitive and affective empathy in positive conversation is positively correlated with relationship satisfaction. Second, women’s cognitive empathy in positive conversation predicts women’s relationship satisfaction, and a couple’s affective empathy in positive conversation predicts men’s relationship satisfaction. Finally, the implications and limitations of this study are discussed.
- keywords
- romantic relationships, cognitive empathy, affective empathy, relationship satisfaction, gender differences, 연인관계, 인지적 공감, 정서적 공감, 관계만족, 성차
Reference
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