The early years of marriage are a time of significant personal and relational changes as partners adjust to their new roles, but the specific ways that spouses' personalities may change in early marriage and how these changes are associated with spouses' marital satisfaction trajectories have been overlooked. Using 3 waves of data collected over…

Marriages are often characterized by their positive and negative features in terms of whether they elicit feelings of satisfaction and happiness or conflict and negativity. Although research has examined the development of marital happiness, less is known about the development of negativity among married couples. We examined how marital tension…

Guided by concepts from a relational developmental perspective, this study examined intra- and interpersonal associations between self-esteem and depressive symptoms in a sample of 1,407 couples surveyed annually across 6 years in the Panel Analysis of Intimate Relations and Family Dynamics (pairfam) study. Autoregressive cross-lagged model…

We examined the effects of self-esteem development on the development of relationship satisfaction in 2 samples of couples. Study 1 used data from both partners of 885 couples assessed 5 times over 12 years, and Study 2 used data from both partners of 6,116 couples assessed 3 times over 15 years. The pattern of results was similar across the 2…

Links between social relationships and emotional well-being in old age are well documented, but little is known about daily life fluctuations in momentary affective experiences of the oldest-old while interacting with specific social partners. We examined associations between the presence of different types of social partners and moment-to-moment…

Development does not take place in isolation and is often interrelated with close others such as marital partners. To examine interrelations in spousal happiness across midlife and old age, we used 35-year longitudinal data from both members of 178 married couples in the Seattle Longitudinal Study. Latent growth curve models revealed sizeable…

This study used longitudinal data to examine the effects of spousal illness on depressive symptoms among middle-aged and older married individuals and the extent to which the adverse effects of illness in a spouse were mitigated by 2 psychological resources, mastery and self-esteem. Using 1,704 married participants who were 51 years of age on…

Research has documented associations between family functioning and offspring psychosocial adjustment, but questions remain regarding whether these associations are partly due to confounding genetic factors and other environmental factors. The current study used a genetically informed approach, the Children of Twins design, to explore the…

Although there are frequent calls for the study of effects of children on families and mutual influence processes within families, little empirical progress has been made. We address these questions at the level of microprocesses during marital conflict, including children's influence on marital conflict and parents' influence on each other.…

This study examined dyadic interrelations between episodic memory and depressive symptom trajectories of change in old and advanced old age. The authors applied dynamic models to 10-year incomplete longitudinal data of initially 1,599 married couples from the study of Asset and Health Dynamics Among the Oldest Old (M[subscript age] = 75 years at…

To better understand the origins of autonomic reactivity during marital interactions, this study examined the psychophysiological profiles of prototypically secure (vs. insecure) and deactivating (vs. hyperactivating) adults while they talked about areas of disagreement with their (pre)marital partners. Adults who idealized their caregivers…

Drew from 47 parents' reports over a 15-day period to compare characteristics of marital conflict when children (8-16 years) were present versus absent. Found that mothers described 669 incidents of conflict and fathers described 551 incidents. About two-thirds of marital conflicts occurred in children's absence. Child-present conflicts were more…

Predictors of increases in marital distress in the first 3 years of marriage were identified for 310 couples. Predictors for wives were low income, living with stepchildren, many rewards, few costs, and high emotional investment. Predictors for husbands were few months of living together. For both husbands and wives, few years of education and not…

A longitudinal study investigated variations in the coping patterns of 52 married men who experienced infertility problems in their first marriage. Styles of coping considered were initial substitutes, subsequent parenting resolutions, and final marital outcomes and the impact of these variations on the men's subsequent success in achieving…

Estimated parameters of the trajectory of change in marital quality over first 10 years of marriage. Found that both spouses started trajectories of change at fairly high levels of marital quality, with quality declining rapidly in the early years, stabilizing, and then declining again. Individual-differences variables predicted initial status of…