Interpersonal Emotion Regulation and Cardiac Synchrony in Couples During Conflict Interactions

The present dyadic study aims to examine the association between interpersonal emotion regulation (IER) and cardiac synchrony in couples during a laboratory conflict task. In particular, it seeks to determine whether cardiac synchrony emerges between partners during conflict discussion and to analyze whether the magnitude of this synchrony is associated with different behavioral dimensions of IER. Adult couples from the community will be recruited to participate in an in-person laboratory session, during which they will complete a sociodemographic questionnaire and the Areas of Change Questionnaire (ACQ), used to select conflict topics (Margolin et al., 1983). Participants’ physiological responses will be continuously recorded throughout the task. Interactions will be video-recorded and coded offline following a standardized coding protocol based on the Interpersonal Regulation Interaction Scale (IRIS; Swerdlow & Johnson, 2022). As of the date of submission of this preregistration, data collection is ongoing but data has not been analysed yet.