Empathic Accuracy and Observed Demand Behavior in Couples

Disagreements and conflicts are inevitable in intimate relationships because each partner has his or her own expectations, goals, values and perspectives (Lewin, 1948). How partners behave, think, and feel during relationship conflict has been an important topic of psychological investigation for many decades (see Bradbury and Karney, 2014 for an overview). The current data-report extends existing research on this matter by providing data from a large-scale observational study on partners' empathic accuracy and demand behavior during conflict interactions. Empathic accuracy in couples is defined as the extent to which partners understand each other's unspoken thoughts or feelings as they spontaneously occur during the course of their everyday interactions (Ickes, 2003, p. 588). Although empathic accuracy refers to one's understanding of the inner world of the other, which is a difficult process to operationalize, (Ickes et al., 1990) succeeded in developing a paradigm (i.e., the unstructured dyadic interaction paradigm) to measure the interaction partners' levels of empathic accuracy in an objective but naturalistic manner. Within this paradigm, the perceiver's level of empathic accuracy is determined by coding the degree of similarity between the target's reported thoughts/feelings during an interaction and the perceiver's inferences about each of the target's thoughts/feelings. This paradigm has been frequently used in studies on the role of motivation in partners' level of empathic (in)accuracy. The results of these studies have provided considerable evidence that different forms of motivation—either stable long-term motives or more transient, situational-specific motives—play an important role in the perceiver's level of empathic accuracy (Ickes, 2011). This motivation may be relationship-promoting, in that a certain level of accurate insight into each other is needed when partners want to effectively coordinate their individual and shared actions (e.g., in providing adequate support, Verhofstadt et al., 2011; in reinforcing perceived closeness, Simpson et al., 2003; in accommodating behavior during relationship conflict, Kilpatrick et al., 2002; Bates and Samp, 2011). Motivation that stimulates the intention to be accurate may also stem from individual characteristics, such as being encouraged to comply with gender-role stereotypes (i.e., according to which women are more empathic; Ickes et al., 2000), or partners experiencing a sense of distrust reflected in an anxious attachment style (Dugosh, 2001). On the other hand, there is also evidence that partners can be motivated to be less accurate when doing so helps to protect their relationship (Ickes and Simpson, 1997, 2001). Specifically, individuals are motivated to be less accurate when the partner is likely to be harboring thoughts and feelings which—if accurately inferred—would have a distressing and destabilizing effect on their relationship (e.g., Simpson et al., 1995, 2003). As Smith et al. (2014) have noted, intimate partners are capable of “managing” their empathic accuracy, dialing it up or down depending on the demands of the situation or their own motives. Although relationship conflict can be perceived as a threatening or stressing event, it can also be viewed as an opportunity to reconcile partners' different goals or opinions, to expose personal needs or desires, or to express concern about the partners' inappropriate behavior or the current status of the relationship. By raising a certain topic of disagreement, partners generally want to change the status quo of the relationship or to induce a certain change in their partner's opinion or behavior (Eldridge and Christensen, 2002). In the literature, this partner is referred to as the conflict initiator or the agent of change (e.g., Christensen and Pasch, 1993). This conflict initiating partner often relies on demanding communication, which is defined as the tendency to demand change in a critical and blaming manner, for example, by nagging, complaining, criticizing or “pressing” the other. The other partner may react by withdrawing, reflected in avoiding the other partner or by terminating or escaping from the conflict (Christensen, 1988). A certain level of demand-withdraw behavior is commonly observed during conflict interactions, even in satisfied couples (Eldridge et al., 2007; Baucom et al., 2010). However, a polarized pattern of demand-withdraw behavior can be associated with relationship distress, power differences—and even violence—within the relationship (Sagrestano et al., 1999), as well as with relationship dissatisfaction in the long-term (Eldridge and Christensen, 2002). Although some studies have reported a tendency for women to take the demanding role and men the withdrawing role (Christensen, 1988; Eldridge and Christensen, 2002), other studies suggest that the role of initiating a disagreement or the conflict topic per se is more predictive of being in the demander role than is gender (Christensen and Heavey, 1990; Heavey et al., 1993; Eldridge et al., 2007). Consistent with the empirical evidence described above, we expect that a partner who desires change on a particular topic is likely to initiate a discussion and to behave in a way that allows him/her to bring about this desired change (i.e., by demanding). This same individual might also be motivated to accurately infer the partner's current thoughts and feelings about issue(s) at the heart of the conflict. Why? Because accurate insight into the thoughts and feelings of the partner during conflict might enable one to know what kinds of reactions to anticipate and which “buttons to push” in order to convince or change the partner. Our study (Hinnekens et al., 2016) was the first to examine the question of whether intimate partners who are highly motivated to induce change in their partner during conflicts will be more empathically accurate than partners who are less motivated to do so. The results of this study suggested that some forms of demand behavior are indeed associated with the level of empathic accuracy during a conflict interaction, thereby confirming the assumption that perceivers who are motivated to induce changes in their partner or the relationship are also motivated to accurately infer their partner's minds in ways that enable them to exert more influence on their partner and eventually ‘push’ the partner toward the desired outcome. The current dataset includes empathic accuracy and demand behavior data from the 310 partners of 155 couples who were observed during conflict interactions. It contributes to existing research by providing data from (a) a large sample of couples, (b) in a committed long-term relationship, and (c) it provides measures of their empathic accuracy for their partner's thoughts and feelings separately. It therefore enables researchers to further explore the associations between empathic accuracy and observed demand behavior, as well as potential moderators of this association (e.g., gender, age, relationship duration, relationship satisfaction).