Remembering in Couples

Hand-holding is a powerful form of social support with well-documented effects on the attenuation of physical pain. Emerging evidence suggests that hand-holding may also alleviate social pain; however, the temporal dynamics of this effect remain poorly understood. Prior behavioral research indicates that hand-holding does not immediately reduce the subjective experience of social pain, but may instead exert its influence over time. The present study seeks to replicate and extend these findings across three primary aims: (1) to confirm that holding a romantic partner's hand during the recall of socially painful memories does not reduce the immediate experience of pain; (2) to demonstrate that reductions in pain ratings for socially painful memories emerge over time (i.e., days following the initial experience); and (3) to examine whether observed behavioral changes are accompanied by corresponding changes in neural activity within regions associated with memory processing and pain. Sixty participants currently in long-term, monogamous relationships will be recruited for this study. Using a within-subject experimental paradigm, participants will recall socially painful autobiographical memories while either holding their romantic partner's hand or squeezing a hand-held ball. Social pain ratings associated with each memory will be collected at three time points throughout the study: 1. Baseline, 2. During partner hand-holding (or ball holding as control), and 3. One week later. Neural data will be acquired via functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) for all three time-points. Our central hypothesis is that memories updated during hand-holding (relative to the squeeze-ball control condition) will be rated as significantly less painful at a one-week follow-up assessment, compared to pre-intervention baseline ratings. Consistent with prior work, we do not anticipate that hand-holding will reduce the immediate experience of social pain. Rather, we propose that hand-holding may facilitate adaptive memory reconsolidation — a process by which the memories can be updated over time following the introduction of new information. Evidence for this mechanism is expected to manifest both behaviorally, as decreases in pain ratings from pre-intervention to follow-up, and neurally, as changes in activation patterns within memory- and pain-related brain regions across these same time points.