Stress can affect how people behave in a relationship, but how does it impact the best way individuals see their significant others? Stressful life experiences may make someone more attuned to their partner’s negative behaviors, researchers have found.

For his or her latest study, published Monday within the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science, the researchers checked out the impact stress can have on a pair’s relationship, specifically on how it could affect how people perceive their partners.

“Stressful life circumstances can destabilize the couples’ relationships by increasing tensions and hindering positive exchanges between partners,” they wrote. “Yet, stress could also be linked not only to what individuals do of their relationship but in addition to what they see, as stress can shift individuals’ attentional focus toward negative stimuli.”

The researchers checked out 79 newlywed heterosexual couples, the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) noted in a news release. They focused on newlyweds since the “honeymoon” phase is commonly when couples are still more focused on the positive features of one another.

The couples detailed the stressful events of their lives in a questionnaire. They then accomplished a survey every night for 10 days, documenting each their and their partners’ behaviors.

Interestingly, the researchers found that those that experienced more stressful life events recently were actually “especially attuned to day-to-day fluctuations of their partner’s negative behaviors, but not their partner’s positive behaviors.”

In other words, those that were stressed were more more likely to see their partner’s negative behaviors than positive ones. These include noticing behaviors equivalent to showing anger, being impatient or breaking a promise, in accordance with SPSP.

It’s price noting that this was not a results of a day of stress, but of amassed “stressful life circumstances,” SPSP noted. Though they weren’t less more likely to notice the positive behaviors, the concept stressful life experiences could make people more easily aware of their partners’ negative behaviors shows the form of impact stress can have on a relationship.

“If stress focuses individuals’ attention toward their partner’s more inconsiderate behaviors, that is more likely to take a toll on the connection,” the study’s lead creator, Lisa Neff of the University of Texas at Austin, said within the SPSP news release.

With the outcomes of the study, couples could also be more aware of just how stress can affect their perceptions of their partners, thus giving them a probability to make adjustments that might reduce the impact on their relationships. That said, Neff noted the necessity to look into the subject further, for example, to see if the effect is “even stronger” once the honeymoon phase has passed.

“(T)he undeniable fact that we found these effects in a sample of newlyweds speaks to how impactful the consequences of stress may be,” Neff said.

The study is titled “When Rose-Coloured Glasses Turn Cloudy: Stressful Life Circumstances and Perceptions of Partner Behavior in Newlywed Marriage.”