Let the Positivity Effect Liven Up Your Relationship

When you fall in love with someone, chances are that you like this person, too. Close relationships are built on a foundation of feelings you can express and the ineffable ones you can’t put into words. However, it may be precisely those hidden feelings that make the difference between a good relationship and a great one.

The Role of Partner Attitudes in Relationships

It’s known in social psychology that attitudes can (but don’t always) predict behavior. A classic example of this phenomenon is having the attitude that you want to save money but then impulsively racking up online purchases in a frenzied spending spree. Part of the issue is that the attitudes that people express (“explicit”) may not be the attitudes that, deep down, they actually hold (“implicit”).

The way around this problem is for researchers in social psychology to probe implicit attitudes through associational word-pairing tests rather than having them directly rate their attitudes on self-report tests. These implicit tests take a fair amount of engineering, as in Harvard's Project Implicit online test. If a person's explicit ratings turn out to be wildly different from the word pair data, this might suggest that the self-report results can't be trusted.

Translating this to the attitudes you might hold toward your partner, if these are truly positive, the inner and outer should align closely, if not perfectly. However, there's very little research to test this out.

Testing the Positivity Effect on Partners

Ball State University’s Rasheedah Adisa and Andrew Luttell (2026) decided they could tap into these unexpressed partner positivity ratings with a simple twist on the usual self-report attitude scales. All they would have to do is ask people to rate how positively they felt toward their partner and then, in a separate item, rate the certainty of these feelings. You can get a sense of how this worked from these sample items:

Overall feelings: Please rate your partner based on your overall feelings (all -4 to +4):

• Negative to positive
• Dislike to like
• Unfavorable to favorable

Certainty: How certain are you of your attitudes toward your partner (ratings of 1 to 5)?

Using an online sample of 488 adults (average age 43; average relationship length 15 years), the Ball State researchers fit partner attitudes and certainty into a predictive model that, four months later, was tested as impacting such outcomes as relationship satisfaction, life satisfaction, and mental health/well-being, measured in terms of depression, anxiety, fatigue, sleep disturbances, and overall social functioning.

The findings showed that on average, participants held moderately positive attitudes toward their partner (mean= 3.01) and had high levels of relationship certainty (4.35). In the key test of the model, the findings further showed that people with greater certainty about their feelings were more satisfied with their relationship and were higher in life satisfaction, lower in depression and anxiety, and more likely to sleep better. What's more, changes in relationship certainty, even over this short time interval, predicted changes in relationship attitude, suggesting that certainty slippage can serve as “the first sign of trouble” (p. 2299). Once you start to have inner doubts, it's likely that they will eventually rear their ugly head into your expressed liking of your partner.

Adding more intrigue to the results, certainty ratings seemed to get stronger over the course of the relationships among the couples in the sample. The authors took this to mean that certainty can grow as the relationship’s length endures and the members of a couple gain confidence that they’ve made the right choice. Positivity becomes more than an expressed rating, permeating your deepest feelings once you and your partner continue to inhabit the same space.

Using the Positivity Effect to Your Advantage

Because the certainty rating is one that you can actually make with a single question, there's no need for a complicated experimental apparatus to check it out for yourself. However, there are some factors to keep in mind before relying too heavily on your feelings of certainty at any given moment.

One model of relationship satisfaction emphasizes the fact that people show considerable variability in the day-to-day feelings they have about their partners. You may mutter under your breath how much you hate your partner on a day that your partner is being particularly stubborn or argumentative. The next day, the sun comes back out, and you could feel more in love than ever. What should remain constant is the certainty you feel toward your partner. This is the positivity effect that can get you through these temporary glitches.

Relationships Essential Reads

Why Do We Hurt the People We Love Most?

Why Do I Shut Down During Conflict?

To sum up, thinking of relationship satisfaction in terms of attitudes rather than plain feelings of love or even commitment can have its value. Bringing certainty into the formula can ensure that the positive outweighs the negative in your search for true relationship fulfillment.