Relationship advice concentrates almost entirely on handling the bad days, which leaves the good ones unexamined. Four studies looked at what happens when people seek someone out after something goes right, a move researchers call , and at how the listener answers. Daily diaries tracked mood, well-being and the state of the relationship. Does the reply matter, or is telling someone enough?
Telling someone helped, and the reply decided how much. Sharing a personal positive event went with higher daily positive feeling and well-being, over and above the event itself and everything else that happened that day. When the listener answered rather than passively or dismissively, the benefit grew. And couples whose partner reliably answered with enthusiasm reported more intimacy and higher .
Relationship research grew up around conflict and coping, so the literature on what to do when things go wrong is enormous. What to do when things go right stayed thin, which is odd given how much of a shared life is made of ordinary good news.
Four studies put a name on the act of telling someone: capitalization, meaning seeking out another person after a personal positive event. Two of them used daily diaries, so each person’s sharing days could be set against their own quiet days, with the size of the event and the rest of the day taken into account.
Sharing went with higher positive affect and well-being on the day, beyond the event itself. The listener’s answer then changed the size of it. Answers judged active and constructive, meaning enthusiasm and genuine questions, enhanced the benefit. Passive or destructive answers did not.
The other two studies moved up to the relationship. Partners with a habitual of enthusiasm were in relationships reporting more intimacy and higher daily marital satisfaction. All four studies are correlational, though, which leaves an obvious alternative standing. People in close relationships may simply have more to be enthusiastic about, and the enthusiasm may be a symptom of the closeness rather than a cause of it.
wat. Sharing good news lifted the day on its own, and a listener who answered with real enthusiasm lifted it further still.
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It names a cheap and specific skill. Most people know not to ignore a partner’s bad news, and far fewer realize that a flat answer to good news is costing them something measurable.
How do we know?
Gable, Reis, Impett and Asher ran four studies, two tracking daily sharing and mood, two testing whether a partner’s habitual response style went with relationship well-being.
What is still unknown
These are diary and questionnaire studies, not experiments, so an enthusiastic partner and a close relationship could easily be two faces of the same thing.
Learn something?
Where to next
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