Results highlighted the important role that emotion regulation plays in maintaining satisfying relationships, especially for women. Wives who downregulated negative emotions and behaviors more quickly were found to have higher marital satisfaction both concurrently and over subsequent years. Moreover, the husbands of these successful emotional regulators also reported greater concurrent and subsequent marital satisfaction, compared to spouses of less successful regulators.
The researchers then examined statistically whether changes in communication could account for these events. They found that the more wives downregulated negative emotion, the more couples engaged in constructive communications such as discussing the problem together, sharing feelings, or trying to find compromises. These constructive communications in turn predicted higher marital satisfaction in the years to come.