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Within any romantic relationship, conflicts inevitably occur. And, as most of us are well aware, the fighting evokes intense emotions.
New research now suggests that how each person perceives the other partner's emotion during a conflict greatly influences different types of thoughts, feelings and reactions in themselves.Baylor University's Keith Sanford, Ph.D., and his research team studied 105 college students in romantic relationships communicating through different arguments over an eight-week period.
Sanford focused on how emotion changed within each person across episodes of relationship conflict. He and his colleagues found demonstrated links between different types of emotion, different types of underlying concern, and different types of perceived partner emotion.
Sanford distinguished between two types of negative emotion as "hard" and "soft." "Hard" emotion is associated with asserting power, whereas "soft" emotion is associated with expressing vulnerability.
Sanford's research also identified a type of underlying concern as "perceived threat," which involves a perception that one's partner is being hostile, critical, blaming or controlling.
Another type of concern is called "perceived neglect," which involves a perception that one's partner is failing to make a desired contribution or failing to demonstrate an ideal level of commitment or investment in the relationship.
Sanford said the results show that people perceive a threat to their control, power and status in the relationship when they observe an increase in a partner's hard emotion, and they perceive partner neglect when they observe an increase in a partner's flat emotion or a decrease in soft emotion.
Both perceived threat and perceived neglect, in turn, are associated with increases in one's own hard and soft emotions, with the effects for perceived neglect being stronger than the effects for perceived threat.
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In other words, what you perceive your partner to be feeling influences different types of thoughts, feelings and reactions in yourself, whether what you perceive is actually correct," Sanford said.
"In a lot of ways, this study confirms scientifically what we would have expected," he said. "Previously, we did not actually know that these specific linkages existed, but they are clearly theoretically expected. If a person perceives the other as angry, they will perceive a threat so they will respond with a hard emotion like anger or blame. Likewise, if a person is perceived to be sad or vulnerable, they will perceive a neglect and will respond either flat or soft."
The study appeared in the journal
Personal Relationships.
Sanford said some of the most interesting results in the study pertain to a complex pattern of associations observed for soft emotion.
As expected, partner soft emotion was associated with decreased concerns over neglect, whereas self soft emotion was associated with increased concerns over neglect.
Sanford said this is consistent with the idea that soft emotion is a socially focused emotion, often triggered by attachment-related concerns, and that expressions of soft emotion signal one's own desire and willingness to invest in a relationship.
It's an uncanny coincidence that the highlighted references have been on comments about perception, as this is a subject I've been doing a lot of talking and writing about recently.
Iโm starting to believe that one of the most basic and key limiting factors in the evolution of our being seems to stem from the myriad illusions created for ourselves through our own perception of reality around us, as sin against our own soul you might say. Our perception, as has been suggested here affects so many of our thoughts, feelings and reactions, that if there is ever a limiting factor to the evolution of our being, surely it is a limited perception. The affect of the networks of brain structures of largely faulty perceptions can be catastrophic and can often lead to severe dis-ease both mentally and physically. The thing that really hurts us and our ego's, is we actually limit the growth and healthy repair of our own brain structures by limiting our own perceptions and we do it to ourselves. We create these invisible prisons of thought (panopticon's) for ourselves, specifically designed for ourselves, by ourselves and in the interest of ourselves. We then spend most of our lives like mad repair men sticking fingers in the holes of a dam about to fail catastrophically and blaming anyone or anything outside of ourselves for a situation of our own creation.
What hope? Maybe we should set to work at removing the constriction/restriction of faulty perceptions and rein in control over the ego that fights to form them. Lets begin to perceive reality collinearly as is, instead of how our morose and contradictory failings would have us perceive it and lead us to our own destruction. Let go of our own self created illusions of limitations and the irrationality of the self destructive, self interests that formed them, allow ourselves to heal, evolve and understand our being both within and without and reach for the stars before they "start a falling".