Child Safety and Parent or Caregiver Monitoring

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Emotional Skillfulness: A Critical Review

This report discusses the 2005 paper by Cordova, Zee, and Warren addresses "Emotional Skillfulness in Marriage: Intimacy as a Mediator of the Relationship between Emotional Skillfulness and Marital Satisfaction," from The Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology. The authors tested and verified their hypothesis that the ability to identify and communicate emotions correlated with 'marital adjustment' for both partners in a bonded relationship, and was mediated by 'intimate safety'.

Emotional attitudes of individuals are known to vary, based on a variety of factors, particularly including childhood upbringing and learned emotional patterns (Eckman & Friesen, 1971). Eckman and Friesen go so far as to say that we are born with some emotions. The topic of this work concerns emotional attitudes and understanding between adults in a marital relationship, and the ways in which emotional communication are important, particularly with respect to 'intimate safety', which is defined as the ability to be 'vulnerable' in expressing both positive and negative experiences. The authors address the manner in which intimacy requires 'safety', in terms of being able to not only express deep-seated emotions but also in the manner by which the partner accepts and/or rejects such expression.

As a foundation for their work, Cordova, Zee, and Warren (2005) discuss models of partner intimacy and suggest that it requires three factors: (a) faith in positive responses from partner; (b) safe and dependable partner relationship; and (c) 'interpersonal vulnerability' that is reinforced. The expression of vulnerability is seen as critical or foundational in the development of intimacy, and in particular the 'meeting' of such vulnerability, whether expressing a negative or positive emotion, with a positive response from the partner. The major hypothesis Cordova and colleagues are addressing in their paper is that 'emotion skills affect marital health through their more direct effect on the intimacy process'.

Hypotheses & Approach:

In this study, Cordova and colleagues (2005) address several additional hypotheses: (1) lesser ability to communicate and/or identify emotions for men; (2) the individual's own marital satisfaction correlates with their ability to communicate and/or identify emotions; (3) each partner's ability to communicate and/or identify emotions is related to partner's marital satisfaction; (4) wives' emotional satisfaction is more strongly associated with husbands' communication of emotions than the reverse; and (5) 'intimate safety' buffers and/or mediates emotional communications both as self-perceived, and in terms of the relationship.

The research participants were ninety-two married couples; the wife and husband of each pair were instructed to complete their questionnaires separately. The 92-couple sample evaluated pairs with men having an age range of 19-78 and women having an age range from 20-72. Instruments used included the Toronto Alexithymia Scale, which measured emotional skills using a seven-item scale addressing ability to access/identify personal emotions such as "I have feelings that I can't quite identify" (Cordova et al., 2005). Two other instruments used were The Intimate Safety Questionnaire and The Dyadic Adjustment Scale. Data for the female and male partners were evaluated separately.

Results

One of the first results reported (Cordova et al., 2005) was that 'intimate safety' did not wholly account for 'dyadic adjustment', that is feeling safe to be vulnerable and express emotions was not a complete explanation for a positive relationship between the couples. Addressing specific hypotheses: [1] Expected gender differences did not hold for 'identifying emotions' (vide infra re limitations), although they did hold for 'communicating emotions'. [2] Those individuals who had difficulty understanding and/or expressing emotions did have more difficulty within the relationship in terms of 'intimate safety' and the 'dyadic adjustment. [3] Only the wives correlated their partners' inability to understand and/or communicate emotions with 'intimate safety'; there was no such correlation for the husbands (contradicting half of hypothesis three). [4] This hypothesis was validated, with emotional understanding or the converse for husbands affecting the wives' emotional satisfaction. [5] 'Intimate safety' was generally well correlated with a positive dyadic pattern; as related to hypothesis [6] it was shown that 'intimate safety' was a more important factor for wives than for husbands.

Potential Limitations

The investigators operated from a built-in bias, which is that 'men don't express and/or understand emotions well'. They stated "Because gender differences in emotional expressiveness are often found, we examined wives' and husbands' data separately" (Cordova et al., 2005). This bias was a factor throughout the study, or could have been. First, it was one of two hypotheses (#1 and #7) essentially considering that the husband would be less emotional, and would be less affected by the wife's emotions, but conversely she would be strongly affected by his. Second, the male/female data were evaluated separately, and it is possible that there could have been inherent bias in evaluating and/or comparing male/female data given 'expectations' for what the men would feel/respond to re emotions vs. female expected emotional responses.

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While there are indeed well-known data suggesting this disparity, it is possible that this is changing given the immense social/societal changes such as increased male/father/husband involvement in parenting and in household roles, concomitant with an alteration in the nature and types of female work-related activities. The 92-couple sample evaluated pairs with men having an age range of 19-78 and women having an age range from 20-72. It would have been interesting to determine whether attitudes and emotional adjustment varied in the age groups, with a pattern differing for over 45-50 years vs. younger couples. Were there to be an age variance in the male/female responses, this would be indicative of changing societal patterns affecting the presumed male indifference/inability to express emotions.

As well, it is important to notice what could be considered a 'negative bias' towards men in this study: the built-in assumption that men cannot understand or communicate emotions to some extent can be seen as a 'blame' situation. One can readily imagine a counseling session where the study results could be used as 'I told you so, men just don't listen and don't care what their wives think'. Rather, the aspect with respect to 'intimate safety' should be considered from the perspective that males are more likely to view themselves as their own source of 'safety' and not look for external validation; whether this is societal is perhaps a topic for future research. Obviously, the converse should be examined, considering 'why' women need 'external validation' to feel 'intimate safety'.

Discussion

The goals of the research were to address the extent to which 'emotional skills' impacted the dyadic relationship of a male/female marriage in terms of communication and understanding. As well, a factor being considered was that of 'intimate safety' wherein either and/or both partners feel able to be 'vulnerable' and express deep-seated emotions whether positive or negative. A set of 92 couples ranging in age from 19 to 78 were asked to complete questionnaires separately, and the data were then evaluated separately for men and women.

On the whole, the hypotheses of the investigators (Cordova et al., 2005) were borne out, with a few surprises in terms of the male responses. The limitation section of this report (written prior to reading the results) suggested a possible bias in assumptions made about men (and/or over-generalizations) given both changes in societal patterns and the concomitant changes in male attitudes and interpersonal skills, at least in part being developed as males take on stronger roles in parenting with enhanced societal support for this alteration.

Basically, the hypotheses of Cordova and colleagues (2005) were that strong dyadic interactions would be derived from strong interpersonal communication between partners, including an ability to understand and empathize with the other person's emotions. Cordova et al. (2005) also predicted a strong component of 'intimate safety' as being part of the strong dyad - with this term being defined/described as the ability to be vulnerable and to express difficult emotions (whether positive or negative) with the expectation of partner support. Among the findings of their work, Cordova et al. (2005) report that the individual's self-perceived ability to understand emotions, both their own and that of their partner, was indeed a factor in terms of the dyadic bond and intimacy. Personal 'deficits' in emotional understanding did indeed impact the relationships.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the affect of the husbands' ability to communicate and understand emotions upon the wives was stronger than the converse. That is, wives 'needed' to feel they were understood more so than was the case for husbands; wives' feelings of intimate safety were also more dependent upon the husbands' than the converse. The largest disparity between hypotheses and results came with respect to males and emotions: while men did indeed evidence more difficulty in communicating emotions, this communication difficulty did not parallel a concomitant inability to understand emotions. This could derive from a number of factors, such as societally-induced reticence or expectation of such for males with respect to discussion of emotional issues, male preference not to discuss these topics, and etc.

Finally in terms of evaluating this report, there are several aspects to consider.

[A] Is it applicable? Interpretation of this question as meaning 'Can this study….....

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