Life Satisfaction Crossover Among Couples

Abstract

There is lettle research available on the ways relations between marital partners affect each other’s well-being and quality of life. What is known, however, suggests that happiness or unhappiness is contagious among couples. For example, happy people have traits, such as compassion and trustworthiness that promote happiness in others (Veenhoven, 1988). Unhappy people have traits such as egocentricity and disagreeableness that lead to unhappiness for their associates (Gotlib, 1992; Segrin and Dillard, 1992). Emotional sustenance works to generate well-being of both married men and married women. Although women receive less emotional sustenance compared with men, they benefit more than men from the marriage’s emotional make-up (Williams, 1988). Thus, it may be inferred that spousal relations contribute quite importantly to subjectively experienced quality of life. The concept of crossover applies to interpersonal relations and the mutual consequences of the flow of feeling states between individuals. Among couples, crossover occurs when one spouse’s personal disposition affects his or her spouse’s dispositions in similar ways (Sears and Galambos, 1992). Furthermore, crossover effects are conditional on work satisfaction or dissatisfaction experienced by working spouses (Hammer et al., 2005). Crossover effects between spouses have been found in research on expatriate cross-cultural adjustment (Takeuchi et al., 2002) and marital dissatisfaction (Westman et al., 2004). More specifically, life satisfaction crossover—the interpersonal contagion of happiness or unhappiness between marital partners—remains a neglected area of study. In the present research, we investigate the within-household crossover in life satisfaction among dual career parents. This kind of crossover effect has not been directly examined in previous research, and requires theoretical scrutiny. Crossover of happiness between spouses may be explained by the extended self theory (Belk, 1988, 1989; Morgan, 1993; Sivadas and Venkatesh, 1995). Based on this theory, one spouse may to some degree be psychologically incorporated as part of the other spouse’s self. Extended self implies (1) personal and social aspects (i.e., the degree the spouse is a definition of the self), (2) symbolic and functional aspects (i.e., one spouse enables the other spouse to be and do what is desired), and (3) control and Life Satisfaction Crossover Among Couples