Keyword: Response interruption

Daigen, V., & Holmes, J. G. (2000). Don't interrupt! A good rule for marriage?. Personal Relationships, 7(2), 185-201. doi:10.1111/j.1475-6811.2000.tb00011.x  

Abstract: In a study investigating the relationship between conversational interrupting and marital satisfaction, 78 married or cohabiting 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, and disagreement interruptions negatively correlated, with both the couple's affective response to the conversation and their concurrent marital satisfaction. Tangentialization (mocking) interruptions were not correlated with concurrent satisfaction, but husbands' tangentializations were correlated with a decline in couples' marital satisfaction over the 2 years following the conversation. Results are shown to be consistent with several features of marital interaction observed by researchers and clinicians, including the tendency of wives to pursue and of husbands to withdraw. It is hypothesized that tangentialization interruptions may be a specific withdrawal strategy. Overall, the results represent a challenge to the assumption that all interruptions have the same interpersonal meaning (e.g., dominance). (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)