Seminar Series

Intimate relationships can be home to both our highest highs and our lowest lows. In this talk, Claudia Haase will present findings from our research program on emotion in couples across the life span. Grounded in affective, relationship, and life-span developmental frameworks and using multi-modal measures of emotional functioning (e.g., autonomic physiology, behaviors, language, and subjective emotional experience assessments), Haase et al study couples as they talk about areas of disagreement, topics of mutual enjoyment, and events of the day. First, she will present findings on how emotions in couples predict well-being, health, and longevity across time. Second, she will discuss how couples’ emotions may change with age, highlighting empirical findings and an emerging conceptual framework. Finally, she will present some findings that suggest that emotions in couples become particularly important and consequential when economic resources are limited.  

Claudia Haase, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor and Associate Dean of Well-Being at Northwestern University’s School of Education and Social Policy. She obtained her PhD in psychology from Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Germany. Claudia studies pathways towards happy and healthy development across the life span with a focus on emotions in individuals and couples. Her research combines insights and paradigms from affective, life-span developmental, and relationship science. Her work uses multiple methods (e.g., autonomic physiology, behavioral observations, subjective emotional experience assessments, linguistic markers, neuroimaging), age-diverse samples (e.g., from adolescence to late life), diverse study designs (e.g., experimental, longitudinal), and single-subjects and dyadic approaches (e.g., in couples, parent-child, and friendship dyads). Her research has been funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Institute on Aging, the Retirement Research Foundation, and a NARSAD Young Investigator Award from the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation.