Is Listening to a Partner's Negative Expressivity Always Detrimental? The Role of Perceiving Oneself as Instrumental

The interpersonal costs of expressing negativity are well-documented. Yet, expressing negativity has sometimes been associated with interpersonal benefits. I propose that negative expressivity can confer relational benefits by giving partners a chance to be instrumental—to facilitate the expressor’s goal pursuits—but that it may be difficult to be instrumental in negative expressivity contexts. Across five studies, I examined the role of listener instrumentality in determining the interpersonal consequences of receiving negative disclosures from a romantic partner. In two experiments (Studies 1 and 2), listeners perceived their romantic partners’ negative (vs. positive or neutral) disclosures as providing a greater opportunity and invitation for them to be instrumental to the partner. In two subsequent experiments (Studies 3 and 4), listeners who were made to feel instrumental (vs. non-instrumental) when their partners expressed negativity reported more positive perceptions of themselves, their partners, and their relationships. Listeners who were led to feel instrumental even reaped relational benefits beyond those of participants in a non-disclosure control condition; listeners who were led to feel non-instrumental incurred relational costs. In a correlational study of romantic couples (Study 5), listeners who reported greater situational instrumentality after a face-to-face interaction in which their partner made a negative disclosure and those who reported chronically high perceptions of their instrumentality when their partner came to them for support reported interpersonal benefits in comparison to those who reported lower situational or chronic instrumentality. Furthermore, there was some evidence that listener instrumentality moderated the effects of a discloser’s chronic and situational negative expressivity on listener outcomes. Taken together, these studies suggest that listener instrumentality is critical in determining the effects a partner’s negative expressivity.