Consistency of nonverbal affect and affect reciprocity in marital interaction.

Abstract

This article reexamines the issue of cross-situational consistency by studying the consistency of the nonverbal behavior of married couples on two tasks, a high-conflict, decision-making task about sex and a low-conflict, nondecision-making, conversational task. Consistency is explored separately for (a) the frequencies of positiveness and negativeness of affect coded from facial expressions, voice-tone cues, and selected body position and movement cues and (b) sequential analyses of positive and negative affect reciprocity. Consistency was found to be highest for negative rather than positive affect and for negative rather than positive affect reciprocity. Furthermore, there was more evidence of consistency across tasks using the sequential rather than the nonsequential variables. This article recasts the issue of crosssituational consistency in human behavior in a new mold, that of interpersonal interaction. Also, the question is asked, Does more consistency exist in sequences of be-, havior than in relative frequencies, which collapse the occurrences of the behavior over time? Although many constructs in the area of interpersonal behavior (such as dominance) are discussed theoretically in terms of sequences (e.g., one person's actions influence the other person's subsequent actions), hypotheses about the constructs have usually only been tested for frequency or relative frequency of a selected behavior (e.g., interruptions during a conversation). The present investigation explored the consistency of nonverbal aspects of social! interaction on a high- and a low-conflict task by examining both frequency and sequential measures of the same interactions within married couples. There are several reasons for these experimental choices. The general issue of cross-situati onal consistency of

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