Does it make you angry and frustrated that your ex has “more power” in the situation than you do?  If it does, you need to read this — to the very end.

According to a new study recently published online in the National Communication Association’s journal, Communication Monographs, people’s thoughts during a conflict situation reflect and shape their own relationship satisfaction and can even affect how happy their partner is.

People who spend more time thinking about how angry and frustrated they are, or thinking about how much power they have or their ex has, are more likely to think with their emotions (have emotional thoughts) which affect how they act, react and respond during conflict, which in turn affects the relationship.

Anita Vangelisti, Ph.D., professor of communication at the University of Texas at Austin and her colleagues studied 71 young unmarried heterosexual couples in Texas, who had been together an average of three years. Each person was encouraged to privately express his or her thoughts aloud to a researcher while in a separate room from the other partner and while communicating about a topic of conflict with the partner via a computer chat program. The chat program showed the person’s typed messages in one section and the partner’s replies and messages in another section, but did not display the person’s vocalized thoughts, which were tape recorded.

The researchers found that during a discussion involving conflict with a romantic partner, when one person thinks about making excuses or denying his or her role in the conflict, the other partner was likelier to be unhappy in the relationship than those whose partner did not “stonewall.”

People in unhappy relationships were more likely to be inflexible in their thinking and more interested in changing the subject of discussion. They also thought more about how repetitive the discussion felt. When both people in the relationship were dissatisfied, they were more likely to think about the power they had or their partner had in the relationship. They also were more likely to focus their thoughts on disagreement or emotions, such as anger and frustration, at the same time as their partner.

“We don’t have data on what happens when partners change their thoughts, but our findings certainly do suggest that thinking about how angry and frustrated you are — or thinking about how much power is being wielded during a conflict — is not beneficial for the relationship,” Vangelisti said.

Unlike other studies, which found differences between men’s and women’s thoughts during disagreement, the current study found only one statistically significant sex-based difference in thoughts: women were more likely than men to blame their partner.

“The results … raise questions about widely accepted differences between women’s and men’s conditions,” the authors wrote.

The investigators cautioned, however, that computer-aided interactions are not the same as face-to-face conversations because they do not give participants access to each other’s expressions or tone of voice. Participants’ thoughts may therefore differ from those they might have during a face-to-face conflict, they concluded.

The article, “Couples’ Online Cognitions during Conflict: Links between What Partners Think and their Relational Satisfaction,” is currently online in Communication Monographs.