Empathic accuracy for a partner’s negative affect is associated with couples’ daily sexual well-being.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
may be fundamental to coregulating emotions and promotes intimacy; thus, higher empathic accuracy might promote couples' sexual well-being. In the first test of this hypothesis, an inclusive sample of 141 cohabiting couples completed daily online measures of negative affect, perceived partner negative affect, sexual satisfaction, sexual desire, and sexual distress for 28 days. We tested how daily variations in congruence/incongruence between perceived partner negative affect and a partner's (the "target's") reported negative affect were associated with each partner's sexual well-being, controlling for relationship satisfaction, using multilevel Dyadic Response Surface Analysis. For targets, sexual satisfaction was lower on days when partners were more inaccurate at perceiving their negative affect, and desire was not associated with inaccuracy but was higher on days when partners were accurate at perceiving extreme (low or high) negative affect versus midrange levels. When perceiving partners were more inaccurate, their own sexual distress was higher and, unexpectedly, their desire was higher. Finally, when perceivers overestimated (vs. underestimated) negative affect, they reported higher sexual distress and higher desire. Couples' sexual well-being may benefit from noticing daily changes in one another's negative affect. However, there may be drawbacks for perceiving partners' desire. Future work testing mechanisms such as responsiveness and intimacy would contribute to developing evidence-based approaches to support couples' emotional coregulation and sexual well-being. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".