Refining acceptance and commitment therapy in daily life (ACT-DL) for clinical care: Optimization and mixed-methods evaluation of usability and implementation feasibility.

Understanding why a partner acts the way they do is central to how couples think, feel, and behave toward one another. When a partner behaves in ways that feel hurtful or frustrating, the explanations that come to mind, whether the behavior reflects something enduring about who the partner is or something temporary about the situation, shape how the aggrieved partner feels, responds, and ultimately evaluates the relationship. These relationship attributions, the inferences partners draw about the causes and intentions behind each other’s behavior, have been widely studied in psychological science and are consistently linked to relationship satisfaction, conflict behavior, and long-term stability (; ; ). Two forms of attribution are especially relevant in close relationships. concern the perceived source of a partner’s negative behavior, specifically whether it is seen as reflecting something stable and dispositional about the partner, such as their character or personality, or something situational and temporary, such as stress or circumstance. go further, capturing judgments about accountability, whether the partner acted intentionally, with selfish motives, and deserves blame for the behavior (). Partners in satisfying relationships tend to make causal attributions that explain negative partner behaviors in situational or temporary terms (e.g., “He was short with me because he had a stressful day”), and responsibility attributions that excuse their partner, seeing negative behaviors as unintentional and understandable rather than blameworthy (e.g., “He didn’t mean to criticize me, it wasn’t intentional”). In contrast, distressed couples exhibit the opposite pattern. They are more likely to make causal attributions that explain negative partner behaviors in terms of enduring dispositional flaws (e.g., “He was short with me because that’s just the kind of person he is”), and responsibility attributions that assign intent and blame (e.g., “He criticized me on purpose to hurt me”). This pattern, in which distressed partners explain negative behaviors as reflecting stable, intentional, and blameworthy characteristics of the partner, has been consistently linked to lower relationship satisfaction, greater conflict, and poorer long-term outcomes (; ; ).