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 reappraisa...

Although there is extensive theoretical and empirical evidence linking men's alcohol abuse and marital violence, no previous studies have assessed the substance use characteristics of women arrested for domestic violence. We recruited 35 women who were arrested for domestic violence and court-referred to batterer intervention programs. We administered multiple measures of substance use and abus...

This study developed a marital typology based on a nonrandom, national sample of 415 African-American couples who took the Enriching Relationship Issues, Communication and Happiness (ENRICH) marital assessment inventory. Five types of African-American marriages were identified through cluster analysis using the positive couple agreement (PCA) scores in 10 relationship domains. Relationships bet...

The investigation of marital conflict has reached a crossroads. Over 25 years of research on marital conflict behavior yields a relatively clear picture of its topography, but its relevance for changing the marital relationship remains controversial. We can continue to amass observations in a relatively atheoretical manner and hope that patterns capable of guiding clinical activity will emerge,...

This study investigated partner attachment and interpersonal characteristics in 134 nonclinical couples in long-term marriages. Irrespective of gender, spouses with greater anxiety over abandonment or discomfort with closeness endorsed dysfunctional relationship beliefs to a greater extent. On the anxiety over abandonment dimension, husbands with higher scores were rated less aggressive, less c...

In 1980, 30 married couples had engaged in a low-conflict and a high-conflict conversational interaction while continuous physiological data were obtained. In a separate session each spouse had provided a continuous self-report of affect while viewing the videotape of the interaction. In 1983, 19 of these couples were re-located to determine the change in relationship satisfaction that had occu...

BACKGROUND Depressed patients are often characterised by marital distress, but few studies investigate the effects of marital therapy on depressed mood and relationship dysfunction. METHOD Twenty-seven depressed patients experiencing marital distress were randomly assigned to either individual behavioural-cognitive therapy or marital therapy. The individual treatment condition focused on depr...

Sexual satisfaction, marital quality, and marital instability have been studied over the life course of couples in many previous studies, but less in relation to each other. On the basis of the longitudinal data from 283 married couples, the authors used autoregressive models in this study to examine the causal sequences among these 3 constructs for husbands and wives separately. Results of cro...

Introduction: Considering the importance of the family institution and that marital satisfaction plays the most important role in sustainability of marital life, this study aimed to investigate the mediating role of irrational beliefs in the relationship between family relationship quality and marital satisfaction. Material and Methods: It was a correlation exploratory research. The statistical...

INTRODUCTION One of the most important factors in marital satisfaction is the satisfaction of a healthy sexual relationship between spouses. During pregnancy marital satisfaction may decrease due to sexual problems. Sexual counseling to pregnant women may reduce the complications of these problems at this time. This study aimed to investigate the effects of sexual counseling on marital satisfac...