Good relationships employ pre-emptive repair.Janice Driver and Amber Tabares in our laboratory studied how couples repair negativity. They designed a repair coding system for this task. Their papers are still being written. They discovered that couples whose relationships are happy are doing a great deal to avoid having the conflict discussion become negative in the first place. They referred to this as "pre-emptive repair." Unhappy couples do not do these things. An example of one of their codes is "tooting our own horn," by which they meant that early in the conflict discussion among happy couples one partner will congratulate the couple on how well they have coped with issues in the past.