Tuning emotions and affects in committed couples

Building an intimate relationship is a challenge especially now when available alternatives to ongoing relationship have increased. So, it is important for the next researches focus on the way in which Self can coordinating and tuning with partner feelings and emotions. For this reason, we utilized intersubjectivity construct and applied to the field of close relationships (Beebe and Lachmann, 2003). We refer intersubjectivity to the mental space that occurs between two minds, both characterized by positive and negative correspondence. Usually studied in the dyadic relation between caregiver and child (Ammaniti, Gallese, 2014), we are trying to study intersubjectivity inside the close relationships. Our study is focused on the possibility that intersubjectivity implies to share emotions and affects, overcoming the inevitable disconnection processes, so evident in destructive conflicts. We elaborated a new measure, couple intersubjectivity, with the aim to evaluate positive correspondence between partners in 100 heterosexual committed couples. Besides, subjects filled scales of empathy and closeness to measure concurrent validity and test construct validity of couple intersubjectivity. Results showed that own capacity to stay tuned with the partner influences directly couple satisfaction. We found small effect for the interactive perspective but no evidence for the correlation between partner perspective and own couple satisfaction. Again, we found that quality of alternatives is an important mediator between self-intersubjectivity and couple satisfaction. We discussed our results in order to develop an intervention on conflictual and destructive couples.