Note II
What happens when good news is shared
Most research on close relationships has studied conflict. The reasoning was practical: distress is what brings couples to clinics, and disagreement is easy to observe in a laboratory. In 2004, Shelly Gable, Harry Reis, Emily Impett and Evan Asher published a paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology that examined the opposite case — what happens in the moments after something goes well, and one person tells another about it.
The term they used, borrowed from earlier work, is capitalization: the act of retelling a positive event to someone else. Across a set of studies combining questionnaires and daily diary reports, the authors found that recounting a good event was associated with higher reported wellbeing on the day it occurred, over and above the effect of the event itself. The response the account received appeared to matter more than the account.
Four ways a response can go
The paper described responses along two axes — active or passive, constructive or destructive — producing four categories. An active-constructive response engages with the news and asks about it. A passive-constructive response is mild approval that does not pursue the subject. An active-destructive response reframes the news as a problem. A passive-destructive response changes the subject entirely, or turns to unrelated news of the responder's own.
In the reported data, only the first category was associated with higher relationship satisfaction; the other three were associated with lower satisfaction, including the mild-approval category that contains nothing hostile at all. A follow-up study published in 2006 by Gable with Gian Gonzaga and Amy Strachman brought couples into a laboratory to discuss recent positive events, had trained coders rate the exchanges, and reported that coded behaviour and partner perception both related to relationship outcomes.
The measurement difficulty
The central problem in this literature is that the strongest associations run through perception. In most of the studies, the variable is what one participant reports about the other's behaviour, and that report is collected from someone who has already formed a view of the relationship. Satisfaction plausibly shapes how a response is remembered and classified, which means the correlation can run in the direction opposite to the one usually described. The 2006 laboratory study was designed partly to address this, and it is the smaller of the two in sample terms — laboratory observation of couples is expensive, and sample sizes reflect that.
The samples themselves are also narrow. Much of the foundational work drew on university students and community volunteers in the United States, in relationships of relatively short duration by the standards of the populations the findings are often applied to. Whether the same pattern holds across decades of partnership, or across cultures with different norms about the display of enthusiasm, is not established by these papers.
A wider caution applies. Social and personality psychology has spent the years since 2011 reassessing which of its published effects reproduce reliably; the Open Science Collaboration's 2015 replication project found that a substantial share of sampled findings did not replicate at their original magnitude. That project did not test this particular body of work, and its results are not a verdict on it. It does establish that a well-cited effect from that period should be treated as a finding awaiting further replication rather than a settled quantity.
What survives all of this is modest and still interesting: in the data collected, what happened after good news was reported was associated with relationship outcomes at least as strongly as what happened after bad news — a pattern the field had largely not looked for, because it had been studying arguments.
Sources
- Gable, S. L., Reis, H. T., Impett, E. A., & Asher, E. R. (2004). What do you do when things go right? The intrapersonal and interpersonal benefits of sharing positive events. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 87(2).
- Gable, S. L., Gonzaga, G. C., & Strachman, A. (2006). Will you be there for me when things go right? Supportive responses to positive event disclosures. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 91(5).
- Open Science Collaboration (2015). Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science. Science, 349(6251).