Ever walked into a room and instantly sensed your partner was upset, even before a word was said?
That intuitive guess is part of what psychologists call empathic accuracy: your ability to correctly figure out what emotion your partner is feeling.
It sounds like the secret sauce for a happy relationship, helping you respond to a partner’s needs effectively.
But a new study suggests the picture is more complicated than just getting the right answer. Your emotional radar might be deliberately biased—sometimes to your relationship’s benefit.
Key Points
- Partners are surprisingly good at noticing when each other’s relationship-related emotions (both positive and negative) rise and fall day-to-day.
- People tend to underestimate their partner’s positive feelings (joy, feeling loved) and overestimate some negative ones (contempt, fear, guilt).
- Verbalizing emotions often helps partners track feelings like love, anger, sadness, and guilt more accurately.
- Simply feeling or being perceived as feeling a stronger emotion (not the accuracy of the guess) is often what links to feeling understood and cared for by your partner.
- For anger and sadness, your partner overestimating your emotion slightly was linked to you feeling more understood and validated.
Unpacking the Daily Emotional Backpack
Researchers at the American Psychological Association set out to explore this daily emotional dance.
Instead of relying on a single moment in a lab, they used a 35-day dyadic daily diary study involving 327 couples.
Each day, partners reported on their own emotions and their best guess about their partner’s feelings, specifically those related to the relationship, such as joy, anger, and guilt.
The study looked at two main components of empathic accuracy:
- Mean-Level Bias (Directional Bias): Whether you generally overestimate or underestimate an emotion.
- Tracking Accuracy: How well you track the day-to-day fluctuations—the ups and downs—of your partner’s actual feelings.
The Subtle, Yet Helpful, Negativity Bias
The results show couples’ perceptions of each other’s emotions are a mix of accuracy and bias.
On one hand, most partners are adept at tracking changes in their partner’s feelings.
Whether it was joy or sadness, partners were moderately to strongly accurate in noticing when an emotion was higher or lower than the day before.
On the other hand, a noticeable negativity bias emerged. Partners tended to significantly underestimate positive emotions like joy and feeling loved.
Conversely, they slightly overestimated negative ones like contempt, fear, and guilt.
This bias is viewed by some through the lens of Error Management Theory, which suggests a slight negativity bias may be an adaptive safeguard.
In a relationship, overestimating a threat (like a partner’s subtle fear) might prompt you to be more cautious and responsive, reducing the chances of a “costly mistake” like complacency.
When Talking Helps (and When It Doesn’t)
Do you need to be a skilled orator to be understood? Sometimes, yes.
When a person engaged in social sharing (verbally expressing their feelings to their partner), tracking accuracy generally improved.
Talking about love, anger, sadness, and guilt provided clearer signals, helping the partner track the feeling’s intensity more accurately.
However, the opposite was true for contempt. High self-reported social sharing was actually linked to weaker tracking accuracy for this toxic emotion.
Since contempt—marked by feelings of superiority—is inherently distancing, a partner might express it in a way that is withdrawn or masked, making it hard to track even when they think they’re “sharing”.
The Power of Being Seen (Or Just Felt)
The study also investigated a critical question: Does empathic accuracy (correctly gauging the emotion) predict whether the partner feels understood and cared for (Perceived Partner Responsiveness or PPR)?
The surprising answer: The data did not support the idea that pure accuracy is the key. Instead, the intensity of the felt or perceived emotion was more strongly linked to PPR.
- For Positive Emotions (Joy and Love): Targets felt higher PPR when both partners agreed on higher levels of the emotion. Crucially, they reported higher PPR when the partner underestimated these positive emotions compared to when they overestimated them.
- For Negative Emotions (Anger and Sadness): Targets felt higher PPR when the perceiver overestimated these negative emotions. Overestimating a partner’s anger or sadness may be perceived as a partner genuinely caring and responding to the distress, rather than being complacent.
Why It Matters: Beyond Just Being Right
The takeaway is that good relationships aren’t just about emotional mind-reading; they’re about emotional engagement.
For Clinicians: Interventions should move beyond teaching couples to simply “get the right answer”.
Instead, focus on helping them understand how their relationship-related emotions influence their partner’s responsiveness, fostering a co-regulation of emotional experiences.
Encourage mindfulness about the bias of assumed similarity—the tendency to project one’s own feelings onto a partner—and how their own emotional state colors their perception.
The goal is not perfect accuracy, but effective emotional navigation.
For the Everyday Reader: Don’t stress about being 100% accurate. What matters most is that your partner feels the intensity of your connection.
If you’re feeling positive, share it to reinforce the positive feedback loop. If you’re feeling angry or sad, a partner’s slightly over-cautious response might make you feel more seen than a perfectly accurate, yet muted, one.
A slight negativity bias in perception—underestimating the good, mildly overestimating the bad—isn’t necessarily a failure; it might be a subtle protective mechanism.
Reference
Kotiuga, J., Daspe, M.-È., Dawson, S. J., Bergeron, S., & Vaillancourt-Morel, M.-P. (2025). Empathic accuracy in couples: A daily diary study of relationship-related emotions. Emotion, 25(7), 1690–1703. https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0001532
