Mindful Relating: Exploring Mindfulness and Emotion Repertoires in Intimate Relationships

TLDR

The study examined whether mindfulness enhances intimate relationship satisfaction by promoting skillful emotion repertoires. The authors surveyed married couples, measuring mindful awareness, emotion skills, and marital quality. Results showed that mindfulness and emotion skills are linked to marital adjustment, and that emotion repertoire skills—especially identifying, communicating emotions, and regulating anger—fully mediate the mindfulness–marital quality relationship.

Abstract

This study tested the theory that mindfulness contributes to greater intimate relationship satisfaction by fostering more relationally skillful emotion repertoires. A sample of married couples was administered measures of mindful awareness, emotion skills, and marital quality. We hypothesized that mindfulness would be associated with both marital quality and partners' emotion skills and that the association between mindfulness and marital quality would be mediated by emotion repertoire skill. Findings suggested that emotion skills and mindfulness are both related to marital adjustment, and that skilled emotion repertoires, specifically those associated with identifying and communicating emotions, as well as the regulation of anger expression, fully mediate the association between mindfulness and marital quality. Theoretical implications are discussed.