Examined four models of ways premarital cohabitation may affect marital quality using interview data from a national probability sample of 2,033 married persons. Found cohabitation was negatively related to marital interaction and positively related to marital disagreement, proneness to divorce, and the probability of divorce in nonminority…

Describes study comparing views of husbands and wives toward day-to-day communication practices. Initial data analysis yielded 24 items contributing to 7 factors. Wives tended to report less communication or rate communication lower than husbands, but both husbands and wives were generally satisfied with communication in marriages. (Author/CRR)

Describes investigation examining individual, relative, and interactive influences of parental divorce and interparental conflict on adolescent functioning. Results demonstrate that multiple areas of functioning in multiple years were predicted by parental divorce, current interparental conflict, and interaction of both variables. (CRR)

Investigated differences among both uncomplicated and depressed reactions to conjugal bereavement and major depression unrelated to widowhood. Both uncomplicated and depressed bereaved evidenced less intense depressive mood, and less dysfunctional pattern of depressotypic cognition, than did nonbereaved psychiatric depressed. Concluded that…

Collected data from 451 2-parent families to test model regarding direct and indirect effects of socialization and spousal attitudes upon supportive parenting and harsh discipline of husbands and wives. As hypothesized, quality of parenting received as child, satisfaction with parent-child relationship, education, and various parenting beliefs…

Examined structure of submarine officer career to describe extent to which wives' attitudes and behavior conform and extent to which wives are satisfied with their role. Findings from 81 Navy wives showed that wives with traditional attitudes were more involved in and more satisfied with Navy life. Less traditional wives evaluated their…

Describes Prevention and Relationship Enhancement Program (PREP), empirically based intervention program to prevent marital distress and divorce. Presents results of longitudinal studies indicating PREP's short and long-term effectiveness. Discusses clinical implications, current dissemination efforts in United States and Europe, and future…

Examined verbal/symbolic aggression between partners in 5,232 U.S. couples. Found that men and women engaged in about equal amounts of verbal/symbolic aggression against their partners. Probability of frequent verbal/symbolic aggression against partner tended to decrease with age and number of children in family and to increase with occurrence of…

Couples in which one spouse had terminal cancer reported expressions of love, marriage problems, and commitment to each other after diagnosis of cancer and before diagnosis. Cancer group reported expressing more love to each other after diagnosis and more love than comparison group of healthy subjects. Cancer couples were less committed to each…

Examined childbearing behavior of approximately 733 black and 2,986 white cohabiting and married women at 2 stages in marital life course. Found that, for both first unions and first postmarital unions, rate of childbearing within cohabitation more closely approximated rate of childbearing within legal marriage among black women than white women.…

Examined effects of several socioeconomic variables on global marital satisfaction, reciprocity, and evaluation of spouse's role performance in 150 black spouses. On the whole, subjective indices such as perceived economic adequacy were more closely related to all aspects of marital quality than were objective measures of income, education, or…

Discusses outcome and process research on couple therapy and integrates articles in journal's special section on couples and couples therapy into the discussion. Discussion of strengths and weaknesses of various designs concludes that within-model comparisons have been more productive in producing knowledge than between-model comparisons. Includes…

Used daily experience survey to distinguish patterns of stress among 21 elderly individuals providing home care to spouse or parent with Alzheimer's disease and comparison group of 20 elderly noncaregivers. Found that life circumstances influenced stress perception in daily life. Caregivers and noncaregivers differed in types of experiences they…

Bereaved husbands and wives (n=33) whose child had died completed Grief Experience Inventory at three times over one-year period. Found significant differences between grief levels of spouses' responses and/or differences over time in 10 of 12 variables: denial, despair, guilt, loss of control, rumination, depersonalization, somatization, death…

Examined effects of being forewarned of husband's death on psychological adjustment of older widows (n=300). Results indicated forewarning of spouse's death and couple's discussion of wife's future financial circumstances were related to higher levels of positive affect in widowhood but did not relate to negative affect. (Author/ABL)