Sentiment Override

Conflict researchers have focused on the degree to which relational satisfaction influ­ences how individuals interpret their partner’s behaviors, or what is known as the sentiment override hypothesis.

The research on sentiment override has been extended in two ways. First, some research has focused on how relational satisfaction influ­ences recall of a partner’s traits and actions. Jose, Rajaram, O’Leary, and Williams (2010) reasoned that sentiment override might stem from schematic processing of information about partners. Individuals have conceptions of what their partners are like, which are related to their relational satisfaction. When their partner schemas are activated, they tend to remember partner traits that are consis­tent with their relationship satisfaction. The researchers report an experiment in which individuals indicated how applicable positive and negative traits were to their partners, and later after being distracted, they reported how many traits they originally felt were applicable and whether most were positive or negative.

Satisfied individuals felt that more positive traits applied to their partners than did those who were dissatisfied, while the latter felt that negative traits were more applicable to their partners. In addition, satisfied individuals recalled more positive traits than did dissatis­fied ones, but relational satisfaction was unre­lated to recalling negative traits. However, regardless of relational satisfaction, individu­als estimated that they had indicated that most of their partner’s traits were positive. They found evidence for positive sentiment override when recalling traits but not for negative senti­ment override.

Halford, Keefer, and Osgarby (2002) exam­ined recall of relational events occurring over a week. Relational partners kept diaries of everyday events, including disagreements, and at the end of the week, they were interviewed about how often positive and negative interac­tions took place. For males and females, their diary entries were significantly correlated with their global assessment of both positive and negative interactions, but martial satisfaction was a statistically significant predictor after controlling for daily assessments. Individuals showed a hindsight bias in that relatively dissatisfied individuals recalled a higher fre­quency of negative interactions and lower frequency of positive interactions than did satisfied ones.

A second area of research on sentiment override examined how it occurs during a disagreement. Story et al. (2007) wondered if sentiment override is related to age and to different interaction contexts. They had middle aged (40 to 50 years old) and older (60 to 70 years old) spouses discuss an issue about which they disagreed or engage in a problem-solving task focused on how to accomplish errands. The data indicated that older husbands and wives who had engaged in a disagreement rated their partner’s behavior more positively than did outside observers and more frequently than did middle aged couples. When problem solving, the positive sentiment override was only observed for wives evaluat­ing their husband’s behavior. Moreover, the age differences in positive sentiment override were mediated by marital satisfaction. This seems to indicate that older spouses are prone to viewing their partner’s actions in a more positive light than do others.

Waldinger and Schulz (2006) examined how sentiment override might be related to relational satisfaction and emotional reactions that individuals have during a disagreement. They found that attributions of a partner’s intentions were weakly to moderately related to the partner’s judgments of his or her own intentions, and these relationships were partly mediated by relational satisfaction. For both men and women, martial satisfaction was positively related to making attributions that their spouses were trying to be facilitative and negatively related to perceiving the partners as being dominating even after controlling for the partner’s own intentions to be facilitative or dominating. Also, the relationship between relational satisfaction and sentiment override was mediated by the emotions that individu­als reported feeling during the disagreement. Hence, sentiment override seems to be driven by the momentary emotional reactions occur­ring during a disagreement.