Benefits of negative social exchanges for emotional closeness.

Social exchanges and subjective well-being: do sources of positive and negative exchanges matter?

OBJECTIVES To decompose the effects of positive and negative social exchanges on well-being in terms of relationship type (vertically extended family, horizontally extended family, or nonfamily) and subjective closeness (close vs. peripheral). METHODS One thousand and five Chinese older adults rated each network member on positive and negative exchanges, which were aggregated for each relatio...

The joint effects of life stress and negative social exchanges on emotional distress.

OBJECTIVE Negative social exchanges detract considerably from older adults' emotional health, but little is known about the specific factors that make some older adults more vulnerable than others to such exchanges. This study examined whether stressful life experiences compound the impact of negative social exchanges on emotional distress. We examined both linear and nonlinear models of the jo...

Social anxiety and romantic relationships: the costs and benefits of negative emotion expression are context-dependent.

In general, expressing emotions is beneficial and withholding emotions has personal and social costs. Yet, to serve social functions there are situations when emotions are withheld strategically. We examined whether social anxiety influenced when and how emotion expressiveness influences interpersonal closeness in existing romantic relationships. For people with greater social anxiety, withhold...

Signal and Noise in the Perception of Facial Emotion Expressions: From Labs to Life.

Human interactions are replete with emotional exchanges, and hence, the ability to decode others' emotional expressions is of great importance. The present research distinguishes between the emotional signal (the intended emotion) and noise (perception of secondary emotions) in social emotion perception and investigates whether these predict the quality of social interactions. In three studies,...

Risks and Benefits of Seeking and Receiving Emotional Support During the Divorce Process: An Examination of Divorcee Individual Adjustment, Closeness, and Relational Satisfaction with Multiple Partners from a Social Network