Instituting marriage
A Brief Intervention to Promote Conflict Reappraisal Preserves Marital Quality Over Time
Eli Finkel et al.
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Marital quality is a major contributor to happiness and health. Unfortunately, marital quality normatively declines over time. We tested whether a novel 21-minute intervention designed to foster the reappraisal of marital conflicts could preserve marital quality in a sample of 120 couples enrolled in an intensive 2-year study. Half of the couples were randomly assigned to receive the reappraisal intervention in Year 2 (following no intervention in Year 1); half were not. Both groups exhibited declines in marital quality over Year 1. This decline continued in Year 2 among couples in the control condition, but was eliminated among couples in the reappraisal condition. This effect of the reappraisal intervention on marital quality over time was mediated through reductions in conflict-related distress over time. This study illustrates the potential of brief, theory-based, social-psychological interventions to preserve the quality of intimate relationships over time.
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In Sickness and in Wealth: Psychological and Sexual Costs of Income Comparison in Marriage
Lamar Pierce, Michael Dahl & Jimmi Nielsen
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, forthcoming
Abstract:
As the percentage of wives outearning their husbands grows, the traditional social norm of the male breadwinner is challenged. The upward income comparison of the husband may cause psychological distress that affects partners' mental and physical health in ways that affect decisions on marriage, divorce, and careers. This article studies this impact through sexual and mental health problems. Using wage and prescription medication data from Denmark, we implement a regression discontinuity design to show that men outearned by their wives are more likely to use erectile dysfunction medication than their male breadwinner counterparts, even when this inequality is small. Breadwinner wives suffer increased insomnia/anxiety medication usage, with similar effects for men. We find no effects for unmarried couples or for men who earned less than their fiancée prior to marriage. Our results suggest that social norms play important roles in dictating how individuals respond to upward social comparisons.
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Egalitarianism, Housework, and Sexual Frequency in Marriage
Sabino Kornrich, Julie Brines & Katrina Leupp
American Sociological Review, February 2013, Pages 26-50
Abstract:
Changes in the nature of marriage have spurred a debate about the consequences of shifts to more egalitarian relationships, and media interest in the debate has crystallized around claims that men who participate in housework get more sex. However, little systematic or representative research supports the claim that women, in essence, exchange sex for men's participation in housework. Although research and theory support the expectation that egalitarian marriages are higher quality, other studies underscore the ongoing importance of traditional gender behavior and gender display in marriage. Using data from Wave II of the National Survey of Families and Households, this study investigates the links between men's participation in core (traditionally female) and non-core (traditionally male) household tasks and sexual frequency. Results show that both husbands and wives in couples with more traditional housework arrangements report higher sexual frequency, suggesting the importance of gender display rather than marital exchange for sex between heterosexual married partners.
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Using complementary methods to test whether marriage limits men's antisocial behavior
Sara Jaffee, Caitlin McPherran Lombardi & Rebekah Levine Coley
Development and Psychopathology, February 2013, Pages 65-77
Abstract:
Married men engage in significantly less antisocial behavior than unmarried men, but it is not clear whether this reflects a causal relationship. Instead, the relationship could reflect selection into marriage whereby the men who are most likely to marry (men in steady employment with high levels of education) are the least likely to engage in antisocial behavior. The relationship could also be the result of reverse causation, whereby high levels of antisocial behavior are a deterrent to marriage rather than the reverse. Both of these alternative processes are consistent with the possibility that some men have a genetically based proclivity to become married, known as an active genotype-environment correlation. Using four complementary methods, we tested the hypothesis that marriage limits men's antisocial behavior. These approaches have different strengths and weaknesses and collectively help to rule out alternative explanations, including active genotype-environment correlations, for a causal association between marriage and men's antisocial behavior. Data were drawn from the in-home interview sample of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, a large, longitudinal survey study of a nationally representative sample of adolescents in the United States. Lagged negative binomial and logistic regression and propensity score matching models (n = 2,250), fixed-effects models of within-individual change (n = 3,061), and random-effects models of sibling differences (n = 618) all showed that married men engaged in significantly less antisocial behavior than unmarried men. Our findings replicate results from other quasiexperimental studies of marriage and men's antisocial behavior and extend the results to a nationally representative sample of young adults in the United States.
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Nevena Kulic
Journal of Socio-Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
There is a growing tendency to see cohabitation as an equivalent alternative to marriage, and this article investigates how different these two unions are for a woman's financial satisfaction and income sharing in Denmark, France and Great Britain. The analysis suggests that a woman's financial satisfaction decreases with cohabitation as opposed to marriage due perhaps to the lack of income pooling of cohabiters. The paper however finds substantial heterogeneity among married couples; the difference between marriage and cohabitation is not only a result of the legal protection obtained by the marriage contract but is better explained by the level of relationship investment in marriage in terms of its duration. The systematic comparison of the three institutional frameworks points out that Denmark, as the country where marriage and cohabitation are most equated by law, is surprisingly the country where the relative difference between marriage and cohabitation for a woman's financial satisfaction is the greatest. No relative variation in results is observed between Great Britain and France.
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Relationship Churning, Physical Violence, and Verbal Abuse in Young Adult Relationships
Sarah Halpern-Meekin et al.
Journal of Marriage and Family, February 2013, Pages 2-12
Abstract:
Young adults' romantic relationships are often unstable, commonly including breakup-reconcile patterns. From the developmental perspective of emerging adulthood exploration, such relationship "churning" is expected; however, minor conflicts are more common in churning relationships. Using data from the Toledo Adolescent Relationships Study (N = 792), the authors tested whether relationship churning is associated with more serious conflict, such as physical violence and verbal abuse. Couples who were stably broken up (breakup only-no reconciliation) were similar to those who were stably together in their conflict experiences. In contrast, churners (i.e., those involved in on/off relationships) were twice as likely as those who were stably together or stably broken up to report physical violence and half again as likely to report the presence of verbal abuse in their relationships; this association between churning and conflict held net of a host of demographic, personal, and relationship characteristics. These findings have implications for our better understanding of unhealthy relationship behaviors.
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Intimate Partner Violence in Interracial and Monoracial Couples
Brittny Martin et al.
Family Relations, February 2013, Pages 202-211
Abstract:
This study, using a nationally representative sample, investigated intimate partner violence (IPV) in interracial and monoracial relationships. Regression analyses indicated that interracial couples demonstrated a higher level of mutual IPV than monoracial White couples but a level similar to monoracial Black couples. There were significant gender differences in IPV, with women reporting lower levels of victimization than men. Regarding relationship status, cohabiting couples demonstrated the highest levels of IPV, and dating couples reported the lowest levels. Regarding interactions among couple racial composition, relationship status, and respondents' gender, an interaction between racial composition and relationship status was found. Implications for practitioners and directions for future research are discussed.
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Does working with spouses make teams more productive? A field experiment in India using NREGA
Alistair Munro, Arjan Verschoor & Amaresh Dubey
Economics Letters, March 2013, Pages 506-508
Abstract:
In Uttar Pradesh, teams of four are engaged to dig soil under the NREGA programme. In one treatment spouses work together; in the other treatment they work in separate teams. Working with spouses is associated with significantly higher output.
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(Not) Bringing Up Baby: The Effects of Jealousy on the Desire to Have and Invest in Children
Sarah Hill & Danielle DelPriore
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, February 2013, Pages 206-218
Abstract:
The present research uses insights from evolutionary psychology and social cognition to explore the relationship between jealousy - both experimentally activated and chronically accessible - on men's and women's desire to start a family and invest in children. In our first two studies, we found that chronically jealous men and women responded to primed infidelity threat by exhibiting a diminished interest in infants (Study 1) and reporting less happiness upon receiving pregnancy news (Study 2) relative to controls. Study 3 extended these results by examining the effects of jealousy on desired parental investment. Consistent with the proposed theoretical framework, chronically jealous men, but not women, respond to infidelity threat by decreasing their desired level of parental investment relative to controls. Together, these results provide novel empirical support for the hypothesis that jealousy functions to attenuate the reproductive costs associated with partner infidelity.
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Divorce Law Reforms and Divorce Rates in the USA: An Interactive Fixed-Effects Approach
Dukpa Kim & Tatsushi Oka
Journal of Applied Econometrics, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper estimates the effects of unilateral divorce laws on divorce rates in the USA from a panel of state-level divorce rates. We use the interactive fixed-effects model to address the issue of endogeneity due to the association between cross-state unobserved heterogeneity and divorce law reforms. We document that earlier studies in the literature do not fully control for unobserved heterogeneity and result in mixed empirical evidence on the effects of divorce law reforms. While reconciling these conflicting results, our results suggest that divorce law reforms have temporal positive effects on divorce rates, thus confirming the 2006 findings of Wolfers. Via simulation experiments, we assess the degree to which faulty inclusion or faulty exclusion of interactive fixed effects affects the policy effect estimators. Our results suggest that faulty inclusion only results in efficiency loss whereas faulty exclusion causes bias.
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Gordon Anderson & Teng Wah Leo
Journal of Comparative Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper introduces an index that facilitates the testing of differing matching theories based on the degree of overlap between a theoretically generated matching joint density and its empirical counterpart. The index is asymptotically Normal, consequently permitting inference. To demonstrate its use, the paper examines the effect the One Child Policy had on matching patterns in the marriage market in China. To distinguish between confounding policies of the period, a static general equilibrium model is introduced. It predicts that constraining marital output in the child quantity dimension may raise the marginal benefit of positive assortative matching and investment in child quality, thereby increasing the intensity with which they are pursued and concomitantly reducing the marriage rate. Upon verifying that the policy was binding via a Poisson model, using the matching index, significant support for increases in positive assortative matching and reductions in negative assortative matching were found.
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Partnership longevity and personality congruence in couples
Beatrice Rammstedt et al.
Personality and Individual Differences, forthcoming
Abstract:
Evidence of assortative mating according to personality was reported in a previous SOEP-based study (Rammstedt & Schupp, 2008). Based on population representative data of almost 7000 couples, high levels of congruence between spouses were found, which increased with marriage duration. Almost 5000 of these couples were tracked over a five-year period with personality assessed at the beginning and end of this time, which allowed us to investigate the relationship between personality congruence and marriage duration longitudinally. Using this data, we investigated (a) whether personality congruence is predictive for partnership longevity and whether congruence therefore differs between subsequently stable and unstable couples, (b) if stable couples become more congruent, and (c) if separated couples become less congruent with regard to their personality over time. The results provide initial evidence of personality congruence as a predictor for partnership longevity: the more congruent couples are in the personality domain of Openness, the more stable their partnership. In addition, we found no indications of an increase in personality congruence over time within the stable couples; within the separated couples, however, a strong decrease in congruence was detectable.
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Marital Quality, Gender, and Markers of Inflammation in the MIDUS Cohort
Carrie Donoho, Eileen Crimmins & Teresa Seeman
Journal of Marriage and Family, February 2013, Pages 127-141
Abstract:
Marital quality is an important factor for understanding the relationship between marriage and health. Low-quality relationships may not have the same health benefits as high-quality relationships. To understand the association between marital quality and health, we examined associations between two indicators of marital quality (marital support and marital strain) and two biomarkers of inflammation (interleukin-6 and C-reactive protein) among men and women in long-term marriages using data from the Survey of Midlife in the United States (N = 542). Lower levels of spousal support were associated with higher levels of inflammation among women but not men. Higher levels of spousal strain were weakly and inconsistently associated with higher levels of inflammation among women and men; the effects were diminished with the addition of psychosocial and behavioral covariates. These findings suggest marital quality is an important predictor of inflammation, especially among women.
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Ilene Siegler et al.
Annals of Behavioral Medicine, forthcoming
Background: Marital status is associated with survival.
Purpose: The aims of this study are to evaluate marital history and timing on mortality during midlife, test the role of pre-marital personality, and quantify the role of health risk behaviors.
Methods: Cox proportional hazard models were run with varying classifications of marital history and sets of covariates.
Results: In fully adjusted models compared to the currently married, lifetime marital history predicts premature mortality with never married at 2.33 times risk of death and ever married at 1.64 risk of death. Midlife marital history shows that not having a partner during midlife (hazard ratio (HR) = 3.10 formerly married; HR = 2.59 remaining single) has the highest risk of death. Controlling for personality and health risk behaviors reduces but does not eliminate the impact of marital status.
Conclusion: Consistency of marital status during midlife suggests that lack of a partner is associated with midlife mortality.
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Marital Satisfaction and Physical Health: Evidence for an Orchid Effect
Susan South & Robert Krueger
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Marital distress and conflict are linked to poor physical health. Here, we used behavior genetic modeling to determine the etiology of this association. Biometric moderation models were used to estimate gene-by-environment interaction in the presence of gene-environment correlation between marital satisfaction and self-reported health. Using a sample of 347 married twin pairs from the Midlife in the United States study, we found that genetic influences on the variation in self-reported health were greatest at both high (h2 = .30) and low (h2 = .38) levels of marital satisfaction, with the lowest levels of heritability estimated for participants at the average level of marital satisfaction (h2 = .10). These findings are evidence of the orchid effect: the idea that genetic influences on a phenotype such as physical health are enhanced in nonnormative - both unusually positive and unusually negative - environmental contexts.
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The poorer cancer survival among the unmarried in Norway: Is much explained by comorbidities?
Øystein Kravdal
Social Science & Medicine, March 2013, Pages 42-52
Abstract:
Studies from Norway and other countries have shown that the unmarried have poorer cancer survival than the married, given age, tumor site and stage at diagnosis. The objective of this investigation was to assess the importance of comorbidities for this difference, using disease indicators derived from the Norwegian Prescription Database (NoPD) and information on cancer and sociodemographic characteristics from various other registers, all of which cover the entire Norwegian population. Discrete-time hazard models for cancer mortality up to 2007 were estimated for all 22925 men and 21694 women diagnosed with 13 common types of cancer in 2005-7. There were 4898 cancer deaths among men and 4187 among women. Controlling for sociodemographic factors and tumor characteristics, the odds of dying from cancer among never-married men relative to the married was 1.56 (CI 1.41-1.74). The corresponding estimates for widowed and divorced were 1.16 (CI 1.05-1.28) and 1.27 (CI 1.15-1.40). For women, the odds ratios for these three groups were 1.47 (CI 1.29-1.67), 1.10 (CI 1.01-1.20) and 1.14 (CI 1.02-1.27). Several of the 24 indicators of diseases in the year before diagnosis were associated with cancer survival, but their inclusion reduced the excess mortality of the unmarried by only 1-5 percentage points, or about 10% as an overall relative figure. Similar results were found when the four most common cancers were analysed separately, though there were some differences between them in the role played by the comorbidities. It is possible that important comorbidities are inadequately captured by the included indicators, and perhaps especially for the unmarried. Such concerns aside, the results suggest that the marital status differences in cancer survival to little extent are due to comorbidities (and the few disease risk factors that are also captured), but rather to various other "host factors" or to treatment or care.
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On the benefits of valuing being friends for nonmarital romantic partners
Laura VanderDrift, Juan Wilson & Christopher Agnew
Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, February 2013, Pages 115-131
Abstract:
Romantic relationships are, at their core, friendships. As such, it may be the case that valuing that aspect of the relationship fortifies the romantic relationship against negative outcomes and serves as a buffer against dissolution. We explored the role of valuing friendship within romantic relationships in two two-wave studies examining whether investing in the friendship aspect of the relationship (Study 1; N = 190) and placing importance on affiliative need fulfillment (Study 2; N = 184) were associated with positive concurrent outcomes and positive outcomes over time. Results revealed that valuing the friendship aspect of a romance is a strong positive predictor of concurrent romantic relationship qualities (i.e., love, sexual gratification, and romantic commitment), is associated with increases in these qualities over time and is negatively associated with romantic dissolution. Furthermore, evidence suggests that these benefits come from valuing friendship specifically, rather than any other aspect of the relationship (e.g., the sexual aspect).
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Attachment Anxiety Is Linked to Alterations in Cortisol Production and Cellular Immunity
Lisa Jaremka et al.
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Although evidence suggests that attachment anxiety may increase risk for health problems, the mechanisms underlying these effects are not well understood. In the current study, married couples (N = 85) provided saliva samples over 3 days and blood samples on two occasions. Participants with higher attachment anxiety produced more cortisol and had fewer numbers of CD3+ T cells, CD45+ T cells, CD3+CD4+ helper T cells, and CD3+CD8+ cytotoxic T cells than participants with lower attachment anxiety. Higher cortisol levels were also related to fewer numbers of CD3+, CD45+, CD3+CD4+, and CD3+CD8+ cells, which is consistent with research showing that cortisol alters the cellular immune response. These data suggest that attachment anxiety may have physiological costs, and they provide a glimpse into the pathways through which social relationships affect health. The current study also extends attachment theory in an important new direction by demonstrating the utility of a psychoneuroimmunological approach to the study of attachment anxiety, stress, and health.