Relational Turbulence and Openness to Social Network Support for Marital Conflicts

Abstract

This paper examines associations between relational turbulence, whether people talk about marital conflicts with their close social network members, and defensive processing of hypothetical support messages. Married adults (N = 479) identified a disagreement within their marriage and indicated whether they discussed the disagreement with a social network member. Those who did (n = 292), evaluated a hypothetical support message and completed measures assessing defensive processing. Relational turbulence was not significantly associated with disclosure about marital conflicts, but it was positively associated with counterarguing, source derogation, and negative affect, which in turn, were negatively associated with evaluations of support quality.

Keywords:

• Defensive Processing
• Motivated Reasoning
• Relational Turbulence
• Social Support
• Supportive Communication

Disclosure Statement

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

Notes

1. These data were collected as part of a larger study. In a separate paper, we reported the effect of verbal person-centeredness, as manipulated by these six messages, on responses to support messages. In this paper, we focus on the effects of qualities of the marital relationship on message processing. Examining these issues in separate papers allowed us to more clearly examine message effects, controlling for relationship qualities, and relationship quality effects, controlling for message features. We did not observe interactions between message features or relationship qualities in either report. Measures of counterarguing and negative affect contributed to both papers.

2. Of the total participants, 292 (Males = 118, Females = 172, 1 did not disclose) reported that they disclosed to a member of their social network about their marriage. These participants were primarily European American (88%; African American, 4%; Latinx, 4%). Ages ranged from 21 to 83 (M = 49.69, SD = 14.57), and participants were married between 1 and 63 years (M = 19.55, SD = 14.71). Approximately 33% of participants reported being married previously.

Individuals who did not disclose to a social network member were significantly older (M = 56.63, SD = 14.61) than individuals who did disclose (M = 49.69, SD = 14.57), t(477) = 5.08, p < .001. Accordingly, participants who had not disclosed to a social network member had also been married longer (M = 25.21, SD = 15.44) than those who had disclosed (M = 19.55, SD = 14.71), t(477) = 4.03, p < .001. They also perceived the hypothetical messages to be lower in support quality (participants who did not disclose: M = 4.10, SD = 1.13, participants who disclosed: M = 4.35, SD = 1.31), t(477) = −2.19, p < .05.

3. Analysis of the individual effects of the six messages is reported in Tian, Solomon, and Brisini (2020).

4. For further analysis of the associations between evaluations of support and verbal person centeredness, see Tian et al. (2020).

5. Given the high correlations among some of the control variables, we also examined the model without covariates. The resulting model was similar to a model with the covariates with two exceptions: in the model without covariates (1) associations between the three forms of motivating reasoning and support quality were slightly stronger, and (2) the association between relational turbulence and counterarguing remained the same, but was not significant.