Benevolent Cognitions as a Strategy of Relationship Maintenance: “Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff”.... But It Is Not All Small Stuff James K. McNulty and Erin M. O’Mara University of Tennessee Benjamin R. Karney University of California, Los Angeles To maintain intimate relationships in the face of negative experiences, many recommend cognitive strategies that minimize the implications of those experiences for global evaluations of the relationship. But are such strategies always adaptive? Suggesting otherwise, 2 longitudinal studies spanning the 1st 4 years of 251 new marriages revealed that the effects of benevolent cognitions on relationship develop- ment depended on the initial levels of negativity in the relationship. Cross-sectionally, the tendency to make positive attributions or otherwise disengage global evaluations of the relationship from negative experiences was associated with higher levels of satisfaction in marriages characterized by more frequent negative behavior and more severe problems. Longitudinally, in contrast, such strategies only demon- strated benefits to healthier marriages, whereas they predicted steeper declines in satisfaction among spouses in more troubled marriages by allowing marital problems to worsen over time. These findings highlight the limits of purely cognitive theories of relationship maintenance and suggest that widely recommended strategies for improving relationships may harm vulnerable couples by weakening their motivations to address their problems directly. Keywords: attributions, marriage, longitudinal, positive illusions, enhancement Even partners in satisfying relationships occasionally have neg- ative experiences of each other. Over the course of long-term relationships in particular, partners will at times misunderstand each other, get irritated, or disagree. Coping with these moments is one of the many challenges that couples must overcome if they are to remain satisfied with their relationships over time. What is the optimal strategy for managing negative experiences in an intimate relationship? Researchers and practitioners agree that one effective way for partners to cope with such events is through benevolent cognitions, that is, interpreting negative events in ways that allow each partner to maintain positive views of the relationship and of each other (Neff & Karney, 2005b). For ex- ample, several decades of research on marital attributions have shown that spouses who tend to excuse each other’s negative behaviors enjoy higher and more stable marital satisfaction than spouses who tend to blame each other for those behaviors (for a review, see Bradbury & Fincham, 1990). Drawing on such find- ings, marital therapists expanded the scope of traditional behav- ioral marital therapies to target not only spouses’ overt actions but also their cognitive and emotional reactions (e.g., Baucom & Lester, 1986). The idea that there are adaptive ways of thinking about problems has even permeated popular culture, as illustrated by the maxim: “Don’t sweat the small stuff.” But what happens when it is not all “small stuff?” Are benev- olent cognitions adaptive even for couples facing severe or intrac- table problems? The overarching goal of the studies described here was to address these questions by examining whether associations between benevolent cognitions and marital development are mod- erated by the frequency of couples’ negative behaviors and the severity of their marital problems. To this end, the remainder of this introduction is organized into four sections. The first proposes that various benevolent cognitions provide short-term relief from negative experiences within relationships by minimizing the im- plications of those experiences for immediate evaluations of the relationship. The second reviews research on the long-term impli- cations of such cognitions, noting that previous research has been inconsistent in suggesting whether benevolent cognitions harm or protect relationships over time. The third attempts to reconcile those inconsistencies by suggesting that the long-term implications of benevolent cognitions for relationships may depend on the types of problems couples face. Benevolent cognitions may benefit relationships in which partners experience mostly mild or infre- quent problems but may ultimately harm relationships in which partners face severe or frequent problems that require more active responses because such thinking may allow those problems to worsen over time. The final section provides an overview of two longitudinal studies of married couples that directly examine whether the severity of self-reported relationship problems and the frequency of observed negative behavior moderate the effects of James K. McNulty and Erin M. O’Mara, Department of Psychology, University of Tennessee; Benjamin R. Karney, Department of Psychology, University of California, Los Angeles. Preparation of this article was supported by a Research Development Award from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Florida awarded to Benjamin Karney, Institute of Mental Health Grant MH59712 awarded to Benjamin Karney, and an award by the Fetzer Institute awarded to Benjamin Karney. We thank Chris Adams, Jessica Baker, Krista Bernard, Mark DaSilva, Nancy Frye, Katherine Leong, Sacha Lindekens, Giovanni Montrone, Kimberly Mosler, Lisa Neff, Rachel Nitzburg, Joanna Sadowski, Jennifer Schurman, Jennifer Smith, Kara Sweeney, and Mark Trujillo for their assistance in data collection, observational coding, and data entry. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to James K. McNulty, Department of Psychology, University of Tennessee, 1404 Circle Drive, Knoxville, TN 37996. E-mail: jmcnulty@utk.edu Journal of Personality and Social Psychology Copyright 2008 by the American Psychological Association 2008, Vol. 94, No. 4, 631– 646 0022-3514/08/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/0022-3514.94.4.631 631