Higher Quality Partners Experience Stronger Affective Responses to Simultaneous Interpersonal Rejection and Acceptance

Interpersonal rejection and acceptance are typically investigated from the perspective of individuals receiving, or observing, such social information independent of others. However, these social experiences often unfold in dyadic contexts, and can have implications for how partners interact, relate, and support each other. Employing a novel dyadic task, we examined affective responses to simultaneous social feedback among cohabiting couples (Nparticipants = 168). Consistent with preregistered hypotheses, participants reporting higher relationship quality were more likely to experience their partner’s social feedback as a personal reward or loss. This pattern emerged even when participants received incongruent social feedback (e.g., receiving negative feedback while partner received positive feedback). Moreover, more strongly valenced affect for a partner’s social feedback was associated with positive relationship outcomes (i.e., perceived partner support, and perceived capitalization attempts). Together, findings suggest that a key signature of relationship quality may manifest as responding sensitively to a partner’s rewarding and aversive information (e.g., feeling a partner’s social feedback as one’s own), and being responsive to a partner’s outcomes (e.g., providing support during times of need, showing enthusiasm during positive events).