Couple Interaction and Health Behaviors

The cognitive intervention has partners come up with reasons why their partners do things they don't like, until they come up with benign attributions for those behaviors.

The behavioral intervention has partners develop an if-then plan for dealing with conflict and negativity, using strategies to downregulate their own negative emotions.

"The Interpretation Bias intervention has partners look at morphed facial expressions and determine whether the face is happy or angry. Positive feedback is given for rating the faces as happy and negative feedback is given for rating the faces as angry."

The Evaluative Conditioning intervention presents partners with pictures of ambiguous adult faces (conditioned stimuli) and pairs them with positive word descriptors (unconditioned stimuli; e.g., generous; loving).