Predicting Marital Happiness and Stability from Newlywed Interactions

Abstract

A study with 130 newlywed couples was designed to explore marital interaction processes that are predictive of divorce or marital stability, processes that further discriminate between happily and unhappily married stable couples. We explore seven types of process models: (a) anger as a dangerous emotion, (b) active listening, (c) negative affect reciprocity, (d) negative start-up by wife, (e) de-escalation, (f) positive affect models, and (g) physiological soothing of male. Support was not found for models of anger as a dangerous emotion, active listening, or negative affect reciprocity. Support was found for models of husband's rejecting his wife's influence, negative start-up by wife, a lack of de-escalation of low intensity negative wife affect by husband, or a lack of de-escalation of high intensity husband negative affect by wife, and a lack of physiological soothing of male, all predicting divorce. Support was found for a contingent positive affect model and for balance models (i.e., ratio models) of positive-to-negative affect predicting satisfaction among stable couples. Divorce and stability were predicted with 83% accuracy and satisfaction with 80% accuracy. Key Words: divorce, gender, interaction, newlyweds, physiology. Recently some of our best scholars (e.g., Jacobson & Addis, 1993) have contended that marital therapy has relapse rates so high that entire enterprise may be in a state of crisis. Consistent with these conclusions, recent Consumer Reports study of psychotherapy (Seligman, 1995) also reported that marital therapy received lowest marks from psychotherapy consumers. Marital therapy may be at an impasse because it is not based on a process model derived from prospective longitudinal studies of what real couples do that predicts if their marriages will wind up happy and stable, unhappy and stable, or end in divorce. Differential longitudinal prediction of marital satisfaction and stability may be an essential step that has been omitted in designing marital therapy. Building a process model of marriage using this prediction approach could turn out to be superior to building an intervention by imagining what target populations in trouble may need or by imagining it according to some theoretical position. What has happened in field of marital therapy is that a psychotherapy of marriage has been constructed by extending methods of psychotherapy to design of marital interventions, instead of building a marital therapy from way people normally go about process of staying happily married. However, we should point out that this is an assumption. This could be called the single theory assumption, which claims that functioning, dysfunctioning, and repair of marital relationships can be explained using one theory. Alternatively, it might be case that any process, such as active listening, might be a great intervention, even if people don't naturally do it. Thus, to use an analogy, it might be case that more than one set of orthopedic knowledge is necessary in marriage, one about normally developing of marriage and another about how to repair broken bones in therapy. We do not think that this will be case. We attempt to build such a process model of marriage. What processes ought to be included for investigation in building a process model? It may be inadequate to simply describe what is dysfunctional when a marriage is ailing. It may be necessary to describe what is functional when a marriage is working well. This may not be redundant information. DYSFUNCTIONAL MODELS OF MARITAL PROCESSES Two Models of Negative Affect: Anger as a Destructive Emotion Versus Four Horsemen The first set of processes concerns what might be called the specificity of negativity hypothesis. It addresses question of whether all negative affects are equally corrosive in marriages. …