Capitalisation, motivational effectiveness, and regulatory mode: a daily diary study of romantic partners

ABSTRACT

Positive events play an essential role in people’s wellbeing. Capitalisation – disclosing such events to others – bolsters such salutary effects. To understand capitalisation-related motivational processes in romantic partners’ daily lives, we adopted Higgins’ motivational perspective; namely, that people’s primary motivation is to feel effective with respect to Value (achieving the desired outcome), Truth (understanding what is true), and Control (managing what happens). We were particularly interested in clarifying how these aspects of effectiveness are reflected in people’s daily positive experiences, their partners’ responses to their disclosure, and the matching between the two. The role of subject’s motivational regulatory mode (assessment vs. locomotion) in these processes was also examined. The results of a diary study of 83 couples showed that assessors (those with motivation to engage in critical evaluation) characterised their positive experiences as high on truth effectiveness but reported greater benefits from partner’s responses focusing on control effectiveness. Locomotors (those with motivation to initiate action) were more likely to characterise their positive experiences as high on control effectiveness, but reported greater benefit from partner’s responses focusing on value effectiveness. Finally, response mismatching, in particular an “under-focused” response (partner’s response effectiveness focus < recipient’s event-related motivational effectiveness focus) was rated as less beneficial.

KEYWORDS:

• Capitalization
• motivation
• romantic partners
• daily diary

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 As one reviewer suggested, this item could be interpreted as though the participants’ positive event had value effectiveness for the partner (made him/her happy). We ran a cross-sectional survey (N = 187) to test the association between this item and another item that explicitly referred to the participants’ feelings (i.e., “My partner’s response helped me feel good for the thing I have achieved”) and found it to be highly associated with the original item (r = .70; My partner was happy for the thing I have achieved). Note that since this validation survey was cross-sectional, we cannot make the assumption that the daily within-person association would be equally high.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Israel Science Foundation under Grant #690/19.