The Association Between Life Satisfaction and Self‐Reported Health Status in Europe

Previous research has shown that life satisfaction (LS) and self‐reported health status are strongly related to each other. However, it is not clear whether this association holds across different nations or whether certain country‐level indicators significantly affect this association. The study was based on nationally representative samples of 32 countries from the first six rounds of the European Social Survey (N = 291 686). Results from hierarchical multilevel modelling indicated that there was a positive association between LS and self‐reported health status across countries, but this association was slightly stronger in countries where governments spent less on the health care of their residents. Self‐reported health ratings were also more strongly tied to LS judgements in countries where variability in LS ratings was larger. These results suggest that, especially in less wealthy European countries, policies should target reducing overall social inequality and the negative impact of governments' underinvestment in health care on LS. Copyright © 2015 European Association of Personality Psychology     

Affective Arousal During Blaming in Couple Therapy: Combining Analyses of Verbal Discourse and Physiological Responses in Two Case Studies

Blaming one’s partner is common in couple therapy and such moral comment often evokes affective arousal. How people attune to each other as whole embodied beings is a current focus of interest in psychotherapy research. This study contributes to the literature by looking at attunement during critical moments in therapy interaction. Responses to blaming in verbal dialogue and at the level of the autonomic nervous system (ANS) were investigated in two couple therapy cases with a client couple and two therapists. Video-recorded couple therapy sessions were analyzed using discursive psychology and a narrative approach. The use of positioning, a discourse analytic tool, was also studied. ANS responses of the participants, including the therapists, were measured as electrodermal activity. The findings demonstrate how identity blaming, i.e. positioning the other person in ways counter to their preferred identity narrative, was accompanied by increased electrodermal activity in most participants. In the two cases studied, blaming centered on the themes of loyalty, trust and parenting. It is argued that identity blaming in these thematic domains increases the arousal level of the partners, since disloyalty, unfaithfulness and irresponsible parenting threaten the stability of the relationship.