Editorial: Individual versus Dyadic Processes: Health and Relationship Outcomes

Abstract

Building strong relationships is a fundamental human need, and finding an intimate partner is evolutionary important for survival and procreation (Buss and Schmitt, 1993). Once established, intimate relationships entail interpersonal support processes that are fundamental to growth, development and coping with life's adversities (Feeney and Collins, 2015). Intimate partners have a strong mutual influence over on each other's health and stress experiences (Randall and Bodenmann, 2017; Sbarra and Coan, 2018). The number and quality of intimate relationships are associated with many health outcomes including immunological and endocrine responses (Hostinar et al., 2014), cardiovascular disease and cancer (Farrell and Stanton, 2019) as well as length of life (Holt-Lunstad et al., 2017). At the same time, discord in intimate relationships is involved in the onset, severity, and progression of a wide range of diseases, as well as in the severity, progression, treatment, and recovery from mental health disorders (Dunkel Schetter, 2017). Research consistently indicate that individual processes and conditions may also affect health. Most often studied, the big five personality traits interact to predict sexual health (Allen and Walter, 2018) or mental treatment outcomes (Bucher et al., 2019). Considering illness as an individual cognition, Singer and his colleagues (Singer et al., 2010) found that one-third of the cancer patients in acute care hospitals is suffering from mental health disorders, depression being the most common psychiatric condition (Singer et al., 2010). Moreover, individual processes and conditions may also affect relationship outcomes. For example, self-reported and partner-perceived reported personality traits (Weidmann et al., 2016), attachment insecurity (Candel and Turliuc, 2019), emotional regulation (Bloch et al., 2014) or emotional intelligence (Malouff et al., 2014) were found to play important roles in predicting relationship satisfaction. Finally, various dyadic processes are important predictors of relationships outcomes. Yoo et al. (2014) found that sexual satisfaction significantly predicted emotional intimacy, and that both variables mediated the association between spouse's communication and their own relationship satisfaction, for both husbands and wives. Relationship stress is a mediator between external stress and marital communication or marital quality (Ledermann et al., 2010). Further, marital communication mediates the association of relationship stress with marital quality. Also, dyadic coping strongly predicts relationship satisfaction regardless of gender, its aggregated positive forms being a stronger predictor of relationship satisfaction than the aggregated negative ones (Falconier et al., 2015). Systematically analysing both individual and dyadic processes, Joel and her colleagues (Joel et al., 2020) used machine learning techniques to predict relationship quality across 43 dyadic longitudinal datasets of 11,196 romantic couples (Joel et al., 2020). Their findings indicate that the top individual-difference predictors of relationship quality were life satisfaction, negative affect, depression, attachment avoidance, and attachment anxiety, and the top relationship-specific predictors of relationship quality were perceived-partner commitment, appreciation, sexual satisfaction, perceived-partner satisfaction, and conflict (Joel et al., 2020).