Does it matter whether we or I talk about us? Distinguishing we-talk in couples’ conflict discussions and partners’ private thoughts before and after conflict

2021 ◽  
pp. 026540752110511
Author(s):  
Stephanie J Wilson ◽  
Lisa M Jaremka ◽  
Christopher P Fagundes ◽  
Rebecca Andridge ◽  
Janice K Kiecolt-Glaser

According to extensive evidence, we-talk—couples’ use of first-person, plural pronouns—predicts better relationship quality and well-being. However, prior work has not distinguished we-talk by its context, which varies widely across studies. Also, little is known about we-talk’s consistency over time. To assess the stability and correlates of we-talk in private versus conversational contexts, 43 married couples’ language was captured during a marital problem discussion and in each partner’s privately recorded thoughts before and after conflict. Participants were asked to describe any current thoughts and feelings in the baseline thought-listing and to focus on their reaction to the conflict itself in the post-conflict sample. Couples repeated this protocol at a second study visit, approximately 1 month later. We-talk in baseline and post-conflict thought-listings was largely uncorrelated with we-talk during conflict discussions, but each form of we-talk was consistent between the two study visits. Their correlates were also distinct: more we-talk during conflict was associated with less hostility during conflict, whereas more baseline we-talk predicted greater closeness in both partners, as well as lower vocally encoded arousal and more positive emotion word use in partners after conflict. These novel data reveal that we-talk can be meaningfully distinguished by its context—whether language is sampled from private thoughts or marital discussions, and whether the study procedure requests relationship talk. Taken together, these variants of we-talk may have unique implications for relationship function and well-being.

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (Supplement_1) ◽  
pp. 562-563
Author(s):  
Stephanie Wilson ◽  
William Malarkey ◽  
Janice Kiecolt-Glaser

Abstract Social-emotional well-being is said to improve with age, but evidence for age differences in couples’ behavior and emotions—studied primarily during marital conflict—has been mixed. Characteristics of jointly told relationship stories predict marital quality among newlyweds and long-married couples alike, yet younger and older couples’ accounts have never been compared. To examine age differences in couples’ emotional responses and in their I/we-talk, emotion word use, and immediacy (i.e., self-focused, present-tense style), 42 married couples ages 22–77 recounted their relationship’s history then rated the discussion and their moods. Compared to younger couples, older couples used more we than I language, more positive than negative words, and less immediacy. Partners in older pairs shared more similar language patterns. In turn, lower immediacy mediated links between older age and less negative mood, and explained husbands’ more positive appraisals. Indeed, relationship accounts reveal novel insights into age differences in marriage and well-being.


Crisis ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 32 (5) ◽  
pp. 288-292 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jenna L. Baddeley ◽  
Gwyneth R. Daniel ◽  
James W. Pennebaker

Background: Henry Hellyer was an accomplished surveyor and explorer in Australia in the early 1800s whose apparent suicide at the age of 42 has puzzled historians for generations. He left behind several written works, including letters, journals, and reports. Aims: The current study assessed changes in the ways Hellyer used words in his various written documents during the last 7 years of his life. Methods: Hellyer’s writings were analyzed using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count program. Results: Hellyer showed increases in first-person singular pronoun use, decreases in first-person plural pronoun use, and increases in negative emotion word use. As this is a single, uncontrolled case study, caution is recommended in generalizing from the current results. Conclusions: Results suggest Hellyer’s increasing self-focused attention, social isolation, and negative emotion. Findings are consistent with increasing depression and suicidal ideation. Implications for using computerized text analysis to decode people’s psychological states from their written records are discussed.


2019 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 345-354 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juwon Lee ◽  
Vicki S. Helgeson ◽  
Meredith Van Vleet ◽  
Eunjin L. Tracy ◽  
Robert G. Kent de Grey ◽  
...  

We-talk (first-person plural pronoun usage) is frequently used to represent the degree to which a person views an illness as shared within a couple. There is evidence that we-talk is related to good relationship and health. However, research has failed to examine the implications of we-talk for spouses and the interpersonal mechanisms that underlie relational and health benefits. To address these limitations, we investigated the association of we-talk to relationship and health among 199 couples in which one person had type 1 diabetes. We-talk was assessed in the context of a brief coping interview with patients and spouses separately. Patients reported their perceptions of their spouse’s behavior over the past month. Actor–partner interdependence, regression, and bootstrap models showed that patient we-talk was unrelated to patient and spouse well-being, but greater spouse we-talk was associated with higher patient relationship satisfaction, higher patient self-efficacy, and better patient self-care behavior. For spouses, greater spouse we-talk also was associated with higher relationship satisfaction, lower stress, and fewer depressive symptoms. Mediational analyses showed that patients’ perceptions of spouses’ greater emotional support and fewer critical behaviors partially accounted for these associations. Spouse we-talk may be more important than patient we-talk because it signifies that spouses are involved in helping with diabetes management, namely by providing emotional support and refraining from criticizing the patient.


2019 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 503-509
Author(s):  
Amy Rauer ◽  
Lyndsey M. Hornbuckle

The current study explored concordance in spouses’ perceptions about exercise and how these perceptions predicted observed and self-reported marital functioning using a sample of 64 older married couples. Although couples were similarly motivated to exercise, their views on their physical fitness and potential barriers to exercise were uncorrelated. Dyadic analyses suggested that spouses’ exercise perceptions, particularly husbands’, were associated with how spouses treated each other during a marital problem-solving task and with their concurrent and future marital satisfaction. Exploring how spouses’ views of exercise are related to their marital functioning and for whom these links are most salient may highlight potential opportunities and challenges for those wishing to strengthen couples’ individual and relational well-being through exercise.


Author(s):  
Y. Feng ◽  
X. Y. Cai ◽  
R. J. Kelley ◽  
D. C. Larbalestier

The issue of strong flux pinning is crucial to the further development of high critical current density Bi-Sr-Ca-Cu-O (BSCCO) superconductors in conductor-like applications, yet the pinning mechanisms are still much debated. Anomalous peaks in the M-H (magnetization vs. magnetic field) loops are commonly observed in Bi2Sr2CaCu2Oy (Bi-2212) single crystals. Oxygen vacancies may be effective flux pinning centers in BSCCO, as has been found in YBCO. However, it has also been proposed that basal-plane dislocation networks also act as effective pinning centers. Yang et al. proposed that the characteristic scale of the basal-plane dislocation networksmay strongly depend on oxygen content and the anomalous peak in the M-H loop at ˜20-30K may be due tothe flux pinning of decoupled two-dimensional pancake vortices by the dislocation networks. In light of this, we have performed an insitu observation on the dislocation networks precisely at the same region before and after annealing in air, vacuumand oxygen, in order to verify whether the dislocation networks change with varying oxygen content Inall cases, we have not found any noticeable changes in dislocation structure, regardless of the drastic changes in Tc and the anomalous magnetization. Therefore, it does not appear that the anomalous peak in the M-H loops is controlled by the basal-plane dislocation networks.


2020 ◽  
Vol 90 (5-6) ◽  
pp. 439-447 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Hadinata Lie ◽  
Maria V Chandra-Hioe ◽  
Jayashree Arcot

Abstract. The stability of B12 vitamers is affected by interaction with other water-soluble vitamins, UV light, heat, and pH. This study compared the degradation losses in cyanocobalamin, hydroxocobalamin and methylcobalamin due to the physicochemical exposure before and after the addition of sorbitol. The degradation losses of cyanocobalamin in the presence of increasing concentrations of thiamin and niacin ranged between 6%-13% and added sorbitol significantly prevented the loss of cyanocobalamin (p<0.05). Hydroxocobalamin and methylcobalamin exhibited degradation losses ranging from 24%–26% and 48%–76%, respectively; added sorbitol significantly minimised the loss to 10% and 20%, respectively (p < 0.05). Methylcobalamin was the most susceptible to degradation when co-existing with ascorbic acid, followed by hydroxocobalamin and cyanocobalamin. The presence of ascorbic acid caused the greatest degradation loss in methylcobalamin (70%-76%), which was minimised to 16% with added sorbitol (p < 0.05). Heat exposure (100 °C, 60 minutes) caused a greater loss of cyanocobalamin (38%) than UV exposure (4%). However, degradation losses in hydroxocobalamin and methylcobalamin due to UV and heat exposures were comparable (>30%). At pH 3, methylcobalamin was the most unstable showing 79% degradation loss, which was down to 12% after sorbitol was added (p < 0.05). The losses of cyanocobalamin at pH 3 and pH 9 (~15%) were prevented by adding sorbitol. Addition of sorbitol to hydroxocobalamin at pH 3 and pH 9 reduced the loss by only 6%. The results showed that cyanocobalamin was the most stable, followed by hydroxocobalamin and methylcobalamin. Added sorbitol was sufficient to significantly enhance the stability of cobalamins against degradative agents and conditions.


Author(s):  
Ana Cristina Macário Lopes

This paper is a contribution to the description of the structures that express emotional deixis, in European contemporary Portuguese. The analysis of our empirical data show that, in Portuguese, demonstratives are not the only category that encodes emotional deictic meaning; possessives and first person plural display the same function, in some contexts. It is also discussed the semantic bleaching of the deictic space adverbs cá and lá and it is argued that it can only be described and explained in illocutionary terms, and not in the framework of emotional deixis.


Materials ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (13) ◽  
pp. 3567
Author(s):  
Faiza Faiza ◽  
Abraiz Khattak ◽  
Safi Ullah Butt ◽  
Kashif Imran ◽  
Abasin Ulasyar ◽  
...  

Silicone rubber is a promising insulating material that has been performing well for different insulating and dielectric applications. However, in outdoor applications, environmental stresses cause structural and surface degradations that diminish its insulating properties. This effect of degradation can be reduced with the addition of a suitable filler to the polymer chains. For the investigation of structural changes and hydrophobicity four different systems were fabricated, including neat silicone rubber, a micro composite (with 15% micro-silica filler), and nanocomposites (with 2.5% and 5% nanosilica filler) by subjecting them to various hydrothermal conditions. In general, remarkable results were obtained by the addition of fillers. However, nanocomposites showed the best resistance against the applied stresses. In comparison to neat silicone rubber, the stability of the structure and hydrophobic behavior was better for micro-silica, which was further enhanced in the case of nanocomposites. The inclusion of 5% nanosilica showed the best results before and after applying aging conditions.


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