Research
I study how and why close relationships contribute to or detract from psychological well-being. I do this using a variety of research designs including experimental, cross-sectional, longitudinal, and daily diary methods. I commonly recruit romantic couples for my studies, as data from couples provides a rich resource for understanding how couples' ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving affect each other.
Felix, S.A.M., & Hooker, C. I. (2016). Dependent, but not perfectionistic, dysfunctional attitudes predict worsened mood and appraisals after emotional support from a romantic partner. Frontiers in Psychology, 7.
Prior research has indicated that receiving emotional support from a romantic partner often leads to emotional costs (e.g., negative or depressed mood), ostensibly via negative thoughts about one's self ("I'm not strong enough to do this on my own") or about one's relationship ("My partner does too much for me"). In this study, we investigated whether some people are more susceptible to these costs. Specifically, we tested wether people with more perfectionistic or dependent dysfunctional attitudes would be more likely to experience negative moods/thoughts after receiving emotional support from a romantic partner. Twenty-nine couples completed a daily online questionnaire about things that happened each day, as well as daily thoughts and feelings. We found that people with more dependency reported greater negative next-day moods and appraisals as a function of emotional support. These findings suggest that individuals with dependent, but not perfectionistic, dysfunctional attitudes are more likely to experience emotional and cognitive costs after receiving emotional support. These costs may stem from activation or exacerbation of the attitudes specific to dependency, including need for acceptance, support, and approval of others.
Felix, S. A. M, & Hooley, J. M. (under review). What’s in a PC rating? Individual versus relationship contributions to perceived criticism.
Perceived criticism (PC) is a subjective rating (on a 1-10 scale) of how critical a person thinks his closest relative (e.g., spouse, parent) is of him. Though measured by only a single self-report rating, PC reliably predicts relapse and treatment outcomes across several clinical disorders. PC also predicts clinical outcomes incrementally over other potentially confounding constructs such as symptomatology, relationship satisfaction, and objective measures of criticism. It is not yet clear why and how PC predicts these outcomes so well. This is partially due to lingering questions about exactly what PC is measuring. Though it has generally been assumed that PC is a relationship-specific construct, we hypothesized that that PC may also reflect characteristics of the individual, including clinically-relevant personality traits. Gaining a thorough understanding of the PC construct is critical to developing appropriate interventions for patients reporting high PC.
In this paper, we report results from survey responses from a large sample of MTurk workers. We show that PC reflects both individual and relationship-specific processes. In particular, we find that people perceive similar levels of criticism across many important relationships and that a person’s average PC rating is reliably associated with cognitive and affective vulnerabilities. These findings suggest that PC acts as a risk factor for poor clinical outcomes not only because it indicates a distressing relationship but also because it reveals a generally elevated risk profile, encompassing individual cognitive and affective vulnerabilities, as well as social vulnerabilities.
Felix, S. A. M., Hooley, J. M., & Hooker, C. I. (in prep). Perceived criticism: A trans-relational marker for vulnerability to distress.
In this study, we investigate to competing hypotheses about PC: 1) PC predicts mental health because it is an indicator for how much criticism a person experiences daily. 2) Alternatively, PC may predict mental health because it is describes how a person perceives and interprets social information generally. Using the same diary data from romantic couples described above, we find that global perceptions of criticism in a person's relationship predict daily social appraisals over and above daily perceived criticism, as well as other confounding variables (e.g., relationship satisfaction, depression). These findings suggest that PC ratings are great predictors of mental health outcomes because describe how a person feels in their overall social environment, much like "Real Feel" describes how hot it feels based on a varied combination of factors like temperature, humidity, wind, precipitation, etc.