Dating Couple Aggression: Using Mobile Technology to Assess Emotions, Vocalizations, and Physiology

University Of Southern California, Los Angeles CA

Investigators

Abstract

Aggression between dating partners is a serious societal, health, and criminal justice problem that affects many persons, particularly adolescents and young adults. Although often understood as a phenomenon that is transmitted across generations, growing up in an aggressive household does not necessarily lead to aggressive romantic relationships. Identifying factors associated with resilience versus risk for young adult dating aggression is an important step for developing effective and targeted educational and intervention programs. Much of the prior research focuses on static individual characteristics to identify who is at risk for dating aggression. However, this study focuses on the dynamic interplay between individual, contextual and emotion regulation processes as they unfold in real time. Conflict sensitization theories, which guide this study, propose that conflict can be escalated when individuals experience both heightened physiological arousal and behavioral and emotional sensitivity. Young adult dating couples are relatively unfamiliar with the challenges of handling conflict in romantic relationships. Therefore they offer a prime opportunity for understanding how conflict is triggered in everyday interactions and for linking conflict patterns to earlier family relationships. This study advances science by taking the study of dating aggression out of the laboratory and into real-world, ecologically-valid home environments. The study examines everyday interactions between dating partners, and how individuals adjust and adapt, a process called "self-regulation," via behavioral, physiological, emotional, and vocal processes. Such processes will vary in dating couples' home environments as a function of naturally-occurring changes in relationship stress. These measures capture regulatory processes that will be time-linked to couple irritation and conflict, allowing for the assessment of the beginning phases of negative escalation cycles. Smartphone technology is used to capture momentary assessment of partners' activities, emotions, spoken words, vocally encoded arousal, and physical proximity. Mobile health technologies assess physiological arousal through measurements of skin conductance and heart rate. Using multi-modal cutting-edge methodologies for data collection in couples' naturalistic environment, this research may provide new insights into how regulatory systems are linked in real time within and across partners. The research will also yield new insights about how aggression affects regulatory processes, and how dating aggression can be reduced.