Fluctuations In Pronoun Use In Everyday Life: Understanding Couple Aggression In Context

Everyday language use, including the pronouns people choose when speaking to romantic partners, may reflect underlying aspects of relationship functioning and may have important implications for understanding couple conflict and dating aggression more generally. The current study measured couples' hour-to-hour "we," "I," and "you" speech in daily life and examined symmetry in pronoun use, or the extent to which partners mirror each other in the frequency of the pronouns they use. First, we examined associations between symmetry in pronoun use and overall levels of dating aggression. Second, we investigated whether aggressive couples evidence patterns of pronoun use distinct from nonaggressive couples when they become annoyed with each other. Multilevel models showed that symmetry in "we" speech and symmetry in "I" speech each were related to lower levels of dating aggression. In addition, symmetry in couples' "you" speech increased during hours of annoyance, but only among those couples reporting high levels of aggression in their relationships. These results demonstrate how everyday language use relates to couples' general tendencies toward aggression and how such patterns are linked to ongoing fluctuations in the emotional tone of the relationship. The discussion focuses on implications for intervention and the use of novel ambulatory assessment methods for capturing couple processes in real-life contexts.