{"doi":"10.1037/emo0000939","title":"Shared emotions in shared lives: Moments of co-experienced affect, more than individually experienced affect, linked to relationship quality.","abstract":"Motivated by collective emotions theories that propose emotions shared between individuals predict group-level qualities, we hypothesized that co-experienced affect during interactions is associated with relationship quality, above and beyond the effects of individually experienced affect. Consistent with positivity resonance theory, we also hypothesized that co-experienced positive affect would have a stronger association with relationship quality than would co-experienced negative affect. We tested these hypotheses in 150 married couples across 3 conversational interactions: a conflict, a neutral topic, and a pleasant topic. Spouses continuously rated their individual affective experience during each conversation while watching video-recordings of their interactions. These individual affect ratings were used to determine, for positive and negative affect separately, the number of seconds of co-experienced affect and individually experienced affect during each conversation. In line with hypotheses, results from all 3 conversational topics suggest that more co-experienced positive affect is associated with greater marital quality, whereas more co-experienced negative affect is associated with worse marital quality. Individual level affect factors added little explanatory value beyond co-experienced affect. Comparing co-experienced positive affect and co-experienced negative affect, we found that co-experienced positive affect generally outperformed co-experienced negative affect, although co-experienced negative affect was especially diagnostic during the pleasant conversational topic. Findings suggest that co-experienced positive affect may be an integral component of high-quality relationships and highlight the power of co-experienced affect for individual perceptions of relationship quality. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).","journal":"Emotion","year":2021,"id":154019,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":65,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9517,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2021-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":378060,"name":"Kuan‐Hua Chen","orcid":"0000-0002-6068-9706","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":378058,"name":"Jenna L. Wells","orcid":"0000-0002-4240-7015","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":653117,"name":"Marcela C. Otero","orcid":"0000-0003-2280-4555","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":653118,"name":"Dyan E. Connelly","orcid":"0000-0003-0246-4573","position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":378062,"name":"Robert W. Levenson","orcid":"0000-0002-2036-793X","position":5,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":58159,"name":"Barbara L. Fredrickson","orcid":"0000-0002-3890-2646","position":6,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":378057,"name":"Casey L. Brown","orcid":"0000-0002-1827-7521","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":24,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-18T23:43:49.684414Z","pmid":"33630622","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}