Stressful life events leave us more aware of a partner's negative behaviour

Periods of stress can have a detrimental effect on our personal relationships. Research has found that we are less able to control irritation towards our partners when we're stressed, and less likely to make positive appraisals of our relationships, and that stress can make us communicate poorly no matter how satisfied we are in our relationship.

A new study, published in Social Psychological and Personality Science, looks at the impact of stress in the context of new marriages. It found that newlyweds who had recently experienced more stressful life events paid far more attention to daily changes in their partner's negative behaviours – but not their positive ones.

Participants were newly-wed couples in their first marriage, all of whom had been married for less than six months and had no children. In an initial questionnaire, participants were presented with a list of 106 stressful life events, falling into nine domains related to marriage, work, school, family and friends, finances, health, personal events, living conditions, and legal matters. For each event, they indicated whether it had happened to them in the last six months and how much it had impacted them on a scale from one to seven. They also completed questionnaires measuring self-esteem, attachment style, and neuroticism.

Each member of the couple then completed a 10 day daily diary task, answering questions every day about the status of their relationship. First, they completed a measure of daily, non-relationship stress, indicating whether they had experienced common stressors such as hassle with transport, an argument with someone, or stresses at work or school. Next, participants indicated whether they had exhibited various positive and negative behaviours  towards their partner (such as showing interest in their day, or criticising them). They also stated whether or not their partner had engaged in the same positive or negative behaviours that day.

Overall, husbands reported behaving negatively on 19.1% of days, and wives 24.9% of days, while husbands reported receiving negative behaviour on 23.7% and wives 21.9% of days. People tended to underestimate how much their partner was negative towards them overall, but were good at detecting day-to-day changes in negative behaviour.

However, those who had experienced a greater number of recent stressful life events were less likely to underestimate their partner's negative behaviours, and were especially attentive to day-to-day fluctuations in negativity. This was the case even when the researchers took into account participants' self-esteem, levels of neuroticism, and attachment styles.

Participants were also good at tracking day-to-day changes in how positive their partners were towards them, but neither under- nor overestimated overall positive behaviour by their partners. Neither their perception of their partner's overall positive behaviours nor their sensitivity to day-to-day changes were influenced by whether or not they had experienced stressful life events. This suggests that, while stress can make us pick up on negative facets of our partner, it does nothing to make us notice the positive parts. Previous research has already shown that happiness can help us overlook insensitivity from our partners – and it seems like the opposite effect is true, too.

Daily hassles did not change the way that individuals detected their partners' behaviour, positive or negative – it was only serious life events that seemed to influence these perceptions. The team suggests this may be because more serious events make us more sensitive to other negative things going on around us.

The self-report nature of the study presents limitations. Individuals may have under-reported their own negative behaviour, for one; their understanding of their partner's behaviour may also be more complex than a self-report measure could capture. For instance, insidious forms of criticism or negativity from a partner may have been noticed but written off by some individuals as not important, and therefore left unreported.

The study illustrates how challenging life events can have a knock-on effect on our relationships and our perceptions of a partner's behaviour. Yet being aware of this effect may help mitigate it, encouraging people to actively take time to focus on the positive parts of their relationship during stressful times