Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, Ahead of Print.
Are intimate partners similar in how accurately they infer each other’s feelings and thoughts, and if so, does this similarity predict their relationship well-being? To answer this question, we analyzed data from two laboratory-based studies (n = 155 and n = 172 couples) in which couples participated in a conflict interaction task and afterwards reported on their own feelings and thoughts and inferred those of their partner. Relationship well-being was measured on both a global (i.e., relationship satisfaction) and a situational level (i.e., post-interaction closeness and satisfaction with the outcome of the interaction). We found that intimate partners were more similar in their empathic accuracy than randomly-paired individuals. This similarity predicted the extent to which partners reported that the conflict interaction had led to a positive outcome for their relationship, but was not associated with partners’ global relationship satisfaction or their post-interaction closeness.