夫妻依恋风格、婚姻归因与婚姻质量的关系

本研究采用主—客体互倚模型(actor-partner interdependence model,APIM)的方法深入探讨夫妻的依恋风格、婚姻归因与自身及配偶感知到的婚姻质量之间的关系。以方便取样的方式在北京地区选取155对夫妻,采用Brennan等(1998)编制的亲密关系经历量表(ECR),Stander编制的婚姻归因量表(MAQ)和Spanier编制的婚姻质量问卷(DAS),要求夫妻双方分别报告其依恋风格、婚姻归因方式和感知到的婚姻质量。通过配对t检验、相关分析和结构方程模型分析发现:(1)夫妻对婚姻质量的总体知觉较为一致,但丈夫的婚姻满意度显著高于妻子;(2)夫妻双方在回避依恋和焦虑依恋两个分量表上不存在显著差异,但在婚姻归因上,妻子比丈夫表现出了更多的消极归因;(3)妻子的消极依恋显著地负向预测自身感知到的婚姻质量,而丈夫的消极依恋对自身感知到的婚姻质量没有显著影响;(4)在控制了丈夫、妻子的依恋风格、归因方式对其自身婚姻质量的主体效应之后,丈夫的依恋风格不能显著预测妻子感受到的婚姻质量,但其归因方式可以显著地预测妻子感受到的婚姻质量;然而妻子的归因方式并不能显著预测丈夫的婚姻质量。     

Married Women’s Situational Use of Last Names: An Empirical Study

Situational last name use was examined in a sample of 600 married women who responded to a mail survey. The sample was selected from the faculty and staff of a state university in the Midwest with over-sampling of women whose last name differed from their husband’s last name. Overall, 12% of married women reported situational last name use. Women from all last name choices (e.g., changed to husband’s, kept birth surname) reported situational surname use, but the most common occurrence of this practice was among hyphenators. Situational users were most likely to use their husband’s last name in family situations and their birth surname in professional situations. Factors that increase situational last name use included full-time employment, higher levels of educational attainment, and an older age at marriage. Situational last name use by married women can be seen as a manifestation of ambiguity over identity with family and non-family roles.     

What Do We Know About Gay and Lesbian Couples?

Abstract— Research on gay and lesbian couples is highlighted with regard to household labor, conflict, satisfaction, perceived social support, stability, and the variables that predict relationship quality. Relative to partners from married heterosexual couples, partners from gay and lesbian couples tend to assign household labor more fairly, resolve conflict more constructively, experience similar levels of satisfaction, and perceive less support from family members but more support from friends. The limited data available indicate that gay and lesbian couples may be less stable than married heterosexual couples. The factors that predict relationship quality tend to be the same for gay, lesbian, and heterosexual married couples. Overall, research paints a positive picture of gay and lesbian couples and indicates that they tend to be more similar to than different from heterosexual couples.     

Varying Levels and Types of Engagement in an Online Relationship Enhancement Program for Couples Following Breast Cancer

Engagement in online interventions, defined as the extent to which participants are involved in and attentive to the contents of the intervention, has been shown to predict treatment outcome. However, participant engagement and program completion are often quite low. Aiming to provide insights that could help improve engagement, this study explores engagement in an online intervention for young couples with breast cancer, Couplelinks, by describing the development of a method to assess engagement, presenting a framework for understanding varying engagement levels, and discussing strategies used by Couplelinks facilitators to work with participants of differing engagement levels. The measure of engagement developed for this study was a composite consisting of indices of average completion time, accountability, and attitude. Utilizing this composite measure, the following distinct “couple types,” with varying levels of engagement, were discerned: (a) “keen” couples, (b) “compliant” couples, (c) “apologetic” couples, and (d) “straggling” couples. Facilitators’ approaches to working with each type of couple and suggestions for potential therapeutic applications are discussed. The finding that couples vary in terms of engagement level, and not solely based on facilitator skill and/or involvement, supports the need to better understand the concept of engagement in order to make online interventions more effective.     

Do You Know What I Feel? Partners' Predictions and Judgments of Each Other's Emotional Reactions to Emotion-Eliciting Situations

The goal of the present study was to investigate empathic accuracy in couples, specifically the partners' ability to predict each other's emotional reactions to social situations. For this, 36 French Canadian couples aged from 18 to 34 years predicted their own reactions as well as their partner's reactions to a series of emotional situations. They then role-played these emotional situations while being videotaped. At a later time, the taped role-play segments were rated by the role-play actors themselves, by their partners, and by 5 individuals who did not know the actors. Results revealed high levels of empathic accuracy when we compared the partners' predictions of each other's reactions. However, when these predictions were compared with the participants' self-evaluations of their role-plays or with evaluations by individuals who did not know the actors, partners showed a positive bias in that they predicted more appropriate and fewer inappropriate reactions to the social situations for their partners than were self-rated by the partners themselves or rated by individuals who did not know the actors. Finally, the existence of couple-specific private meaning systems could not be confirmed in the present context as the evaluations of emotional expressions by unknown others, the actors' partners, and the actors themselves were largely congruent.     

Couples, Existential Psychotherapy, and Myocardial Infarction: A Ten Year Evaluation Study

Existential psychotherapy with couples after the occurrence of a myocardial infarction can be a useful, effective, and productive service approach in combination with medical services and cardiac rehabilitation services. In this article the existential treatment dynamics of holding, telling, mastering, and honoring with couples after a heart attack are described and illustrated. In addition, data from a 10-year before-after field evaluation study is reported, which supports the usefulness of the treatment approach.     

Does covenant marriage predict latent trajectory groups of newlywed couples?

Covenant marriage is a legally distinct marriage license available in Arizona, Louisiana, and Arkansas in the United States. This study revisited one of the largest longitudinal dyadic studies on covenant versus standard newlywed couples. Using this dataset of 677 different-sex couples, we explored whether being in a covenant marriage could predict how marital satisfaction developed over the first five marital years. We applied the Growth Mixture Modeling (GMM) method to identify groups that differed in their initial marital satisfaction and trajectory. The results revealed three different trajectory groups—one group showing high and stable marital satisfaction, which we named High Stable, and two groups showing declines in marital satisfaction, one being medium and the other one being low in satisfaction at the beginning of the marriage, and we named them Medium Declining and Low Declining respectively. Spouses with lower initial marital satisfaction experienced a faster decline and suffered the highest divorce rate. Actor-Partner Interdependence Model (APIM) analysis revealed that one's group membership was predicted by their partner's membership, suggesting a mutual influence on marital development. Being in a covenant marriage was able to predict husbands' membership as covenant husbands were found to be more likely in the high stable group.