How does remedial voice impact the target’s romantic relationship? Examining a spillover-crossover model

Purpose Positing remedial voicing as the social sharing of a negative emotional experience, and drawing on goal progress theory, and the spillover-crossover model, this study aimed to examine the effects of targets’ remedial voice on their romantic relationships. It examines whether remedial voicing is positively related to spouses’/partners’ enacted hostility toward targets through a spillover-crossover serial mediation pathway involving targets’ rumination and their spouses’/partners’ boundary management strain. Furthermore, it examines a moderated serial mediation relationship wherein relationship quality moderates the spouses’/partners’ experienced boundary management strain-enacted hostility relationship. Design/methodology/approach Quantitative data used in the study were collected from 153 spousal/romantic partner couples. Primary respondents were individuals working and residing in the United States or Canada, recruited using convenience sampling from Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTURK). Primary respondents invited their spouses/partners to participate in the study. Separate surveys completed by primary respondents and their spouses/partners were matched before data analysis. Correlational and hierarchical regression analysis were conducted in SPSS, and hypothesized mediation, serial mediation and moderated serial mediation relationships were analyzed using SPSS PROCESS. Findings Remedial voicing was found to be positively associated with targets’ rumination. Further, results showed that targets’ rumination spills over into the family domain and then crosses over to spouses’/partners’ boundary management strain, which leads to them to enact hostility toward targets. The results further indicate that high-quality relationship exacerbates the spouse/partner boundary management strain-enacted hostility relationship in the moderated serial mediation relationship examined. Originality/value To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to link remedial voicing to outcomes on targets’ romantic relationships, and to identify the psychological pathway underlying these relationships.