Fighting the good fight: Relating warmth and dominance across romantic conflict to resolution

Abstract

Research on romantic conflict has persuasively documented that the way partners communicate with one another during disagreements is a driving factor in predicting how they perceive the conflicts in their relationships. The current research added to this literature by differentiating couples who resolve conflicts more, versus less, successfully. Specifically, the current work examined how couples’ behavioral trajectories across the course of conflict related to their perceptions of conflict resolution. To this end, we coded warmth and dominance behaviors exhibited by 173 couple members (346 individuals) over the course of an eight-minute conflict discussion. We examined how participants’, and their partners’, perceptions of conflict resolution were related to their interpersonal behaviors. In line with predictions, less average interpersonal warmth was associated with worse perceptions of resolution, and declining warmth over time was also associated with worse perceptions of resolution. Dominance behaviors were not associated with conflict resolution perceptions.