Willingness to express emotion depends upon perceiving partner care.

Two studies document that people are more willing to express emotions that reveal vulnerabilities to partners when they perceive those partners to be more communally responsive to them. In Study 1, participants rated the communal strength they thought various partners felt toward them and their own willingness to express happiness, sadness and anxiety to each partner. Individuals who generally perceive high communal strength from their partners were also generally most willing to express emotion to partners. Independently, participants were more willing to express emotion to particular partners whom they perceived felt more communal strength toward them. In Study 2, members of romantic couples independently reported their own felt communal strength toward one another, perceptions of their partners' felt communal strength toward them, and willingness to express emotions (happiness, sadness, anxiety, disgust, anger, hurt and guilt) to each other. The communal strength partners reported feeling toward the participants predicted the participants' willingness to express emotion to those partners. This link was mediated by participants' perceptions of the partner's communal strength toward them which, itself, was a joint function of accurate perceptions of the communal strength partners had reported feeling toward them and projections of their own felt communal strength for their partners onto those partners.

Accuracy and projection in perceptions of partners' recent emotional experiences: Both minds matter.

In 2 studies involving 96 married couples (Study 1) and 118 romantic couples (Study 2), we investigated partners' perceptions of each others' recently experienced emotions. In both studies, both individuals within each couple independently provided reports of (a) their own recently experienced emotions, (b) their perceptions of their partners' recently experienced emotions, and (c) the extent to which they had expressed the emotions they had experienced to their partner. We then assessed the extent to which perceptions of partners' emotions were (a) accurate (i.e., in agreement with partners' independent reports of their own feelings) and (b) a function of the perceiver's own emotions (i.e., projected). Significant evidence for both accuracy in perceiving emotions (4 of 7 emotions in Study 1; 8 of 9 emotions in Study 2) and for projection of perceivers' own emotions onto partners was obtained (5 of 7 emotions in Study 1; 9 of 9 emotions in Study 2). Effects for all remaining emotions trended in the same directions. There was almost no moderation of these effects by targets' having knowingly expressed the emotions. Implications of the patterning of findings for different emotions for the social functions of accuracy and projection in perceiving emotions are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record

Unpacking grit: Motivational correlates of perseverance and passion for long-term goals.

In two cross-sectional studies, we explored the motivational orientations correlates of the character strength of grit and its two component facets: perseverance of effort and consistency of interests over time. Specifically, we examined how individual differences in grit are explained by distinct approaches to pursuing happiness in life: pleasure in immediately hedonically positive activities, meaning in activities that serve a higher, altruistic purpose, and engagement in attention-absorbing activities. In both samples, grit demonstrated medium-sized associations with an orientation toward engagement, small-to-medium associations with an orientation toward meaning, and small-to-medium (inverse) associations with an orientation toward pleasure. These motivational orientations differentially related to the two facets of grit: pursuing engagement was more strongly associated with perseverance of effort, whereas pursuing pleasure was more strongly (inversely) associated with consistency of interests over time. Collectively, findings suggest that individual differences in grit may derive in part from differences in what makes people happy.