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Affective Behavior in Parent Couples Undergoing Couple Therapy: Contrasting Case Studies

Being in a romantic relationship is characterized by a high degree of intimacy and affective involvement. Affective behavior indicates the emotional content in couple interactions and therefore promotes an understanding of the evolution of romantic relationships. When couples are also parents, their...

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Autores principales: Liekmeier, Esther, Darwiche, Joëlle, Pinna, Lara, Repond, Anne-Sylvie, Antonietti, Jean-Philippe
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Frontiers Media S.A. 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8015940/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33815220
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.634276
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author Liekmeier, Esther
Darwiche, Joëlle
Pinna, Lara
Repond, Anne-Sylvie
Antonietti, Jean-Philippe
author_facet Liekmeier, Esther
Darwiche, Joëlle
Pinna, Lara
Repond, Anne-Sylvie
Antonietti, Jean-Philippe
author_sort Liekmeier, Esther
collection PubMed
description Being in a romantic relationship is characterized by a high degree of intimacy and affective involvement. Affective behavior indicates the emotional content in couple interactions and therefore promotes an understanding of the evolution of romantic relationships. When couples are also parents, their affective behavior reflects their romantic and coparental bonds. In this paper, we present an observation of parent couples’ affective behavior during a coparenting conflict discussion task to document whether and how much it improved during couple therapy. Two contrasting cases of affective behavior change are included. Observational coding of affective behavior within pre- and post-intervention coparenting conflict discussion tasks was carried out to compute means and CIs for each partner in both cases. In addition, the partners’ coparental and romantic satisfaction were evaluated through validated self-report questionnaires in pre- and post-intervention assessments; this helped document whether the partners’ coparental and romantic satisfaction were dissimilar between the two cases. Finally, a clinical analysis of both cases was realized with the contribution of the therapists to investigate possible differences within therapy sessions. Statistical analyses revealed negative means of affective behavior for couple A in the pre-intervention assessment and positive means in the post-intervention assessment. Partners from couple B had negative means of affective behavior in the pre- and post-intervention assessments. Results concerning coparental and romantic satisfaction differed: Couple A’s coparental satisfaction slightly increased and the romantic satisfaction somewhat decreased, whereas couple B’s coparental satisfaction remained stable and the romantic satisfaction slightly increased between the pre- and post-intervention assessments. The clinical analysis revealed that the interactional quality of couple A slightly improved within therapy sessions and that both partners succeeded in working together as coparents, notwithstanding their romantic distress. Couple B conveyed coparental distress and exhibited poor interactional quality throughout therapy sessions (e.g., repeated criticism and contempt). This study contributes to enriching the more traditional empirical research methods in the field of couple psychotherapy, as it takes into account microlevel affective changes within parent couples’ interactions in addition to self-reported data. Furthermore, the analysis of therapy sessions supports the importance of working with affective behavior in couple therapy.
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spelling pubmed-80159402021-04-02 Affective Behavior in Parent Couples Undergoing Couple Therapy: Contrasting Case Studies Liekmeier, Esther Darwiche, Joëlle Pinna, Lara Repond, Anne-Sylvie Antonietti, Jean-Philippe Front Psychol Psychology Being in a romantic relationship is characterized by a high degree of intimacy and affective involvement. Affective behavior indicates the emotional content in couple interactions and therefore promotes an understanding of the evolution of romantic relationships. When couples are also parents, their affective behavior reflects their romantic and coparental bonds. In this paper, we present an observation of parent couples’ affective behavior during a coparenting conflict discussion task to document whether and how much it improved during couple therapy. Two contrasting cases of affective behavior change are included. Observational coding of affective behavior within pre- and post-intervention coparenting conflict discussion tasks was carried out to compute means and CIs for each partner in both cases. In addition, the partners’ coparental and romantic satisfaction were evaluated through validated self-report questionnaires in pre- and post-intervention assessments; this helped document whether the partners’ coparental and romantic satisfaction were dissimilar between the two cases. Finally, a clinical analysis of both cases was realized with the contribution of the therapists to investigate possible differences within therapy sessions. Statistical analyses revealed negative means of affective behavior for couple A in the pre-intervention assessment and positive means in the post-intervention assessment. Partners from couple B had negative means of affective behavior in the pre- and post-intervention assessments. Results concerning coparental and romantic satisfaction differed: Couple A’s coparental satisfaction slightly increased and the romantic satisfaction somewhat decreased, whereas couple B’s coparental satisfaction remained stable and the romantic satisfaction slightly increased between the pre- and post-intervention assessments. The clinical analysis revealed that the interactional quality of couple A slightly improved within therapy sessions and that both partners succeeded in working together as coparents, notwithstanding their romantic distress. Couple B conveyed coparental distress and exhibited poor interactional quality throughout therapy sessions (e.g., repeated criticism and contempt). This study contributes to enriching the more traditional empirical research methods in the field of couple psychotherapy, as it takes into account microlevel affective changes within parent couples’ interactions in addition to self-reported data. Furthermore, the analysis of therapy sessions supports the importance of working with affective behavior in couple therapy. Frontiers Media S.A. 2021-03-18 /pmc/articles/PMC8015940/ /pubmed/33815220 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.634276 Text en Copyright © 2021 Liekmeier, Darwiche, Pinna, Repond and Antonietti. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
spellingShingle Psychology
Liekmeier, Esther
Darwiche, Joëlle
Pinna, Lara
Repond, Anne-Sylvie
Antonietti, Jean-Philippe
Affective Behavior in Parent Couples Undergoing Couple Therapy: Contrasting Case Studies
title Affective Behavior in Parent Couples Undergoing Couple Therapy: Contrasting Case Studies
title_full Affective Behavior in Parent Couples Undergoing Couple Therapy: Contrasting Case Studies
title_fullStr Affective Behavior in Parent Couples Undergoing Couple Therapy: Contrasting Case Studies
title_full_unstemmed Affective Behavior in Parent Couples Undergoing Couple Therapy: Contrasting Case Studies
title_short Affective Behavior in Parent Couples Undergoing Couple Therapy: Contrasting Case Studies
title_sort affective behavior in parent couples undergoing couple therapy: contrasting case studies
topic Psychology
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8015940/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33815220
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.634276
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