This project aims to develop a context-sensitive, dynamic interpersonal framework for understanding how partners regulate each other’s emotional distress — either buffering or amplifying it — and how these processes influence individual well-being. By integrating insights from relationship science and emotion science, this project will uncover the conditions under which partners foster emotional resilience or trigger maladaptive emotional cycles: when and why do close relationships foster resilience or lead to distress? As such, this project advances scientific understanding of one of the most important relationships in our lives, but also has the potential to inform more effective interventions — such as improving couples therapy frameworks to target early markers of emotional spirals or developing real-time support strategies for distressed partners.