Don't interrupt! A good rule for marriage?

In a study investigating the relationship between conversational interrupti ng and marital satisfaction, 78 couples were videotaped while discussing a conflictual issue. Coders counted total interruptions and also categorized each interruption by its function: agreement, disagreement, clarification, or tangentialization. Agreement interruptions were positively correlated, a nd disagreement interruptions negatively correlated, with both the couple's affective response to the conversation and their concurrent marital satisf action. Tangentialization (mocking) interruptions were not correlated with concurrent satisfaction, but husbands' tangentializations were correlated w ith a decline in couples' marital satisfaction over the 2 years following t he conversation. Results are shown to be consistent with several features o f marital interaction observed by researchers and clinicians, including the tendency of wives to pursue and of husbands to withdraw. It is hypothesize d that tangentialization interruptions may be a specific withdrawal strateg y. Overall, the results represent a challenge to the assumption that all in terruptions have the same interpersonal meaning (e.g., dominance).