Conflict Escalation in Intimate Relationships: An Event-Based Structural Model

Abstract

Research on intimate partner violence has traditionally focused on discrete aggressive acts and their frequency, with less attention to how appraisal, emotion, and response readiness are organized within specific conflict episodes. This study advances an event-based structural model of conflict escalation in intimate relationships by examining how appraisal processes, negative emotional activation, escalation tendency, and behavioral responding cohere within standardized conflict events. Using a vignette-based survey of 2,702 adults in long-term intimate relationships, participants responded to scenarios involving potentially offensive partner demands. Path analyses tested associations among appraisal components, anger and fear activation, escalation tendency, behavioral responses, and expectations of partner escalation. To explicitly evaluate the robustness of the proposed structural configuration, behavioral responding was modeled in two alternative ways: as differentiated decision and response style components and as a unified ordinal severity index, with the full structural model estimated under both specifications. Appraisal components were positively associated with negative emotional activation, particularly anger, which in turn was linked to escalation tendency and to more confrontational behavioral indicators, whereas fear was not associated with escalation tendency. This differentiation between anger and fear indicates that not all negative emotional activation within conflict events carries the same escalation potential. The overall pattern of associations remained substantively consistent across both behavioral representations. Gender differences emerged in levels of several components, with women reporting higher perceived hurt, anger, and escalation tendency, and men reporting higher compliance. By conceptualizing escalation as a structurally embedded response orientation within conflict events, the study clarifies how event-specific appraisal and emotion relate to both readiness and behavioral expression in intimate partner conflict and highlights anger-focused, rather than globally emotion-focused, targets for de-escalation efforts.

Keywords

intimate partner violence conflict escalation social information processing cognitive appraisal emotional activation structural model vignette methodology

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