Comparing the behavioral responses in face of spouse’s emotion expression between women with high and low level of emotional intimacy

The way the spouse's emotional expression is responded to is one of the factors playing a role in the formation of marital intimacy. The current study intended to compare the behavioral responses to the spouse's emotional expression between women with high and low levels of emotional intimacy. A qualitative approach with a descriptive phenomenological design was applied to conduct this study. A sample of 20 married women in Tehran (2021) was selected using a purposive sampling method and considering the principle of saturation. The data were collected through semi-structured interviews and were analyzed using Colaizzi’s seven-step method of phenomenological data analysis. Data analysis resulted in extracting six main themes from each group. The main themes extracted from the high emotional intimacy group include "encouragement, attending to emotions and accepting it", "companionship in the cognitive processing of emotion", "proactive responding", "timing in responding to spouse's emotion", "corrective actions" and "managing the environmental stimuli" and the main themes extracted from the low emotional intimacy group include "non-encouragement, not attending to emotions and not accepting it", "rationalization", "reactive emotional responding", "rush in response", "retaliatory actions" and "selective responding". The results indicate that there are some differences between the behavioral responses of the two groups in four dimensions flexibility, constructiveness, companionship, and agency.