Thus, the period following this transition may be a critical time for determining the health and longevity of the marital relationship. Second, most of the literature on parenthood has traditionally focused on the psychological state of the mother. Some marriages are very stable even when couples express low levels of satisfaction and experience much discord (e.g., Rands, Levinger, & Mellinger, 1981). But, unlike marital satisfaction that changes in a predictable direction, research has found that attachment security to a spouse may increase over time (Davila, Karney & Bradbury, 1999; Hazan & Hutt, 1990), decrease under adverse circumstances (Cozzarelli, Karafa, Collins, & Tagler, 2003; Davila & Cobb, 2003), or change in an unpredictable direction (Baldwin & Fehr, 1995; Davila, Burge & Hammen, 1997; Scharfe & Bartholomew, 1994). Locke HJ, Wallace KM. Stability and change in adult attachment styles: Associations with personal vulnerabilities, life events, and global construals of self and others. Belsky J, Pensky E. Marital change across the transition to parenthood. Although ideally one would follow a single sample over the entire period, this possibility is often unrealistic when the question of interest requires data that span many years. Covenant Which statement about sex partners for men and women aged 20-24 is accurate? Spillover effects of marital conflict: In search of parenting and coparenting mechanisms. Suppose that two independent variables are included as predictor variables in a multiple regression analysis. To test Hypothesis 1, we combined data from the two cohorts to create a 15-year continuum of marriage starting just before the birth of the first child which was, on average about 4 years after marriage (see Figure 1 for times of measurement and overlap between the cohorts). Although our findings revealed a long-term effect of attachment security on marital satisfaction, and a relationship between marital satisfaction and marital dissolution, we did not find a significant effect of attachment security on marital dissolution. Levinger G, Senn DJ, Jorgensen BW. Rollins BC, Feldman H. Marital satisfaction over the family life-cycle. According to this researcher, largely because marriage boosts life satisfaction. Lots of women look forward to motherhood getting to know a tiny baby . To date, the many contextual variables mentioned earlier, like the presence of children, mate value discrepancies, and likelihood of infidelity, in conjunction with particular personality characteristics of the marriage partners, most notably neuroticism and emotional stability, have been identified as contributors to the general decrease in marital satisfaction over time. c. men are more sensitive than women to problems in the marriage. Vaillant CO, Vaillant GE. In addition, marital strife, an indicator of dissatisfaction, has been shown to factor into the well-functioning differences between children who come from divorced homes and children who do not. We measured gender, age, duration of marriage, religiosity, number of children, economic status, education and individualism/collectivism. Moreover, in the Davila and colleagues (1999) study there was an inverse relationship between marital satisfaction and attachment security such that couples became more secure but less satisfied over the early years of marriage. We conducted principal components analyses of both the husbands' and wives' responses. In the current study we took advantage of these procedures to examine change in marriage over a longer period of time with more frequent assessments than any other studies have covered thus far, starting from the first childs birth and extending into adolescence. Nonetheless, attachment security does appear to have long-term consequences for each partners level of marital satisfaction when their children are preschoolers, because it may prevent the slide in marital satisfaction over the next 10 years from reaching the level of distress typical of couples who enter marital therapy (e.g., Johnson, 2004). This variance suggests that although marital satisfaction declines on average, there are meaningful differences between couples in how satisfied they tend to be in their marriages, and in their subsequent rate of decline in marital satisfaction. In general, marital satisfaction tends to decline during middle age _______ marriages are less easily dissolved than conventional marriages. Third, we tested whether marital satisfaction and attachment security were significant and meaningful predictors of relationship dissolution in the second sample. The current study examines the influence of attachment security, measured only in the second sample, on the level of marital satisfaction and on changes in marital satisfaction over a period of 10 years starting from the couples first childs transition to kindergarten. We examined whether attachment security would relate to marital survival in a model paralleling that described for marital satisfaction above. Neuroticism, marital interaction, and the trajectory of marital satisfaction. . Transition to parenthood. Of these couples 59 (62%) had complete data on all time points. Cowan CP, Cowan PA, Heming G. Two variations of a preventive intervention for couples: Effects on parents and children during the transition to elementary school. Working models of attachment: A theory-based prototype approach. Moreover, many of these studies examined primarily college student samples (see Bartholomew, 1994 and Noller & Feeney, 1994 for a full critique). Possible scores range from 2 to 158, with higher scores indicating greater marital satisfaction. Nevertheless, the current findings differed from Karney and Bradburys (1997) by indicating that only husbands initial level of marital satisfaction was a significant predictor of marital stability. Marital satisfaction was once believed to follow a U-shaped trajectory over time, such that couples began their marriages satisfied, this satisfaction somewhat waned over the years, but resurfaced to newlywed levels after many years together. Scree plots showed a large first component and a much smaller second component. The current study represents one of the few attempts to examine the influence of attachment security on marital dissolution. Table 2 shows means and standard deviations for all substantive variables for each gender in each cohort at each time point of measurement. The marriage clinic: A scientifically based marital therapy. Because the course of marriage often extends beyond the professional life of most researchers (Spanier & Lewis, 1980), the accelerated longitudinal design used in the current research may enable researchers to obtain a fuller picture of marital life that until now was not seen as a realistic possibility. Attachment styles among young adults: A test of a four-category model. Patterns of interaction between spouses can affect how satisfied they are with their marriage. Bartholomew K, Horowitz LM. Bowlby conceptualized attachment theory (1973) as a psycho-evolutionary system that guides social behavior from the cradle to the grave (Bowlby 1979, p. 129) and functions to maintain an optimal level of proximity to a significant other. This study examines two overlapping longitudinal samples of U.S. couples with children, covering a period of 15 years after the first childs birth. Similarly, a study on the transition to parenthood found that husbands caregiving served as a significant buffer against new mothers depression and relationship dissatisfaction (Feeney, Alexander, Noller, & Hohaus, 2003). We created two variables that represented (a) divorce status, and (b) time of divorce. We described characteristics of the participants at the first time point in Table 1. Berant E, Mikulincer M, Florian V. Attachment style and mental health: A one-year follow-up study of mothers of infants with congenital heart disease. Thus, it is probably not similarity in attachment profiles that is contributing to marital satisfaction, but the stress inoculating properties of attachment security. Fuller TL, Fincham FD. The studies described here were funded by RO1-NIMH RO1-31109 to the last two authors. According to Bowlby (1988), the attachment system functions as an inner resource during encounters with stressful events, in which seeking proximity to others, or relying on internalized representations of attachment figures may alleviate distress. In Level 1 of this model, we modeled husbands scores on the marital satisfaction scale at each time point as a function of an intercept factor and a linear slope representing time centered as in the previous analyses (childs age minus 5.5), and measurement error: At Level 2, we modeled both the intercept and slope as a function of the husbands own attachment security, the partners (i.e., wifes) attachment security, and a random effect: We specified an otherwise identical model with wives marital satisfaction as the Level-1 dependent variable. The timing of divorce: Predicting when a couple will divorce over a 14-year period. Crowell JA, Treboux D, Brockmeyer S. Parental divorce and adult childrens attachment representations and marital status. Thus, for purposes of the present investigation, we combined Cohorts 1 and 2 to form one dataset covering the span of pregnancy through the time the oldest child was 14.5 years old. The inclusion of a subject-level predictor, such as attachment security could potentially explain this variation (as addressed in hypothesis 2). The fact that husbands initial levels of marital satisfaction, and not later measures of marital satisfaction, were significant predictors of divorce in the current sample, has important implications for intervention. Means and Standard Deviations of Study Variables. Scharfe E, Bartholomew K. Reliability and stability of adult attachment patterns. The random effects showed significant variation in both the intercepts and the linear slopes for husbands (u0 = 226.51, p .01; u1 = 1.34, p .05) and wives (u0 = 352.10, p .01; u1 = 1.58, p .05). This stress-buffering explanation receives further support from a recent study indicating that similarity in personality has a negative effect on long-term marital satisfaction (Shiota & Levenson, 2007). Research has shown an interrelationship between the quality of communication in regard to sexuality, sexual satisfaction and marital well-being (Cupach & Comstock, 1990). In general, the research on marital satisfaction shows that a. men spend more time thinking about the status of their marriage than women do. Correlations among indices of marital satisfaction over time ranged from 0.25 to 0.62 for Cohort 1 husbands, 0.35 to 0.73 for Cohort 2 husbands, 0.45 to 0.66 for Cohort 1 wives, 0.53 to 0.80 for Cohort 2 wives, 0.20 to 0.71 between Cohort 1 husbands and wives, and 0.37 to 0.70 between Cohort 2 husbands and wives. Because a spouses infidelity has the potential to inflict these emotional costs, marital satisfaction appears to be negatively related to the likelihood that a spouse will be unfaithful. Shaver PR, Hazan C. Adult romantic attachment: Theory and evidence. One possible reason for the failure of early measures of attachment security to predict marital stability is that attachment security is not constant and, according to some research, changes over time. Davila J, Cobb R. Predicting change in self-reported and interviewer-assessed adult attachment: Tests of the individual difference and life stress models of attachment change. These couples were also part of a larger study, the Schoolchildren and Their Families Project (SAF), which focused on the family factors in childrens transition to school (see Cowan, Cowan, Ablow, Johnson, & Measelle, 2005).
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