Better together: Coexperienced positive emotions and cortisol secretion in the daily lives of older couples.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
An emerging body of research suggests that shared positive emotions predict health and longevity over and above individually experienced positive emotions. However, the extent to which relationship partners coexperience positive emotions in daily life remains poorly understood. Moreover, while laboratory research shows important distal effects of shared positive emotions on health and longevity, the extent to which positive emotions may "get under the skin," shaping proximal biomarkers in everyday life, is unclear. In response, the present research harmonized data from three intensive measurement studies to investigate coexperienced positive emotions in couples' daily lives and the links with momentary cortisol secretion in 321 older adult couples aged 56-89 years. Results showed that on occasions when relationship partners were together, both partners reported positive emotions higher than their usual at approximately 38% of occasions. Adjusting for age, sex, assay version, partner's mean positive emotions, diurnal cortisol rhythm, medication, behaviors that may influence cortisol secretion, and person-mean centered positive emotions, coexperienced positive emotions were associated with lower concurrent cortisol secretion. Findings did not differ across age, sex, or relationship satisfaction. Furthermore, coexperienced positive emotions were associated with lower cortisol at the subsequent assessment but not vice versa, suggesting potentially enduring physiological impacts of coexperienced positive emotions beyond the present moment. Together, findings show that coexperienced positive emotions are associated with lower momentary cortisol secretion over and beyond individually experienced positive emotions, emphasizing the importance of fostering shared positive emotions in close relationships to promote physiological responding in older adulthood. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".