Later Relationship Stages / Ch. 13 Flashcards
Gloria
divorce rate
- about 40%
- Pandemic effected the divorce rate because court houses were closed
why are relationships hard
- require a lot of effort, practice and good luck
4 studies on marital satisfaction
- happies married without children, first dip in satisfaction is around preschool age (under 5), briefly increaes with school children age 5-12, LEAST happy with teenagers 12-16, happy again with empty nest
- raising teenager is stressfuk
Relationships and Stress
- most people unprepared for impact of stressful events on relationships
- couples who deal with stress early on may be more practiced at it “inoculation” effect
Karney and Bradbury - longitudinal
- meta analysis of 115 longitudinal studies were assessing marital stability
- top 5 predictors of stability
WIVES
!) marital satisfaction
2) sexual satisfaction
3) neuroticism (-)
4) premarital pregnancy (-) increase divorce, evolutionary idea: potentially miss out on resources
5) parental divorce
HUSBANDS
1) sexual satisfaction
2) parental divorce (-)
3) marital satisfaction
4) neuroticism (-)
5) income level = more income, less divorce
parental divorce
- parental divorcehas consistently negative interpersonal effects
- during childhood and continue to adulthood - mental health effects
- parental divorce predicts marital quality
- children of divorced parents have significantly higher divorce rates than children’s whose parents never divorce
- intergenerational tranmission
parental divorce and marital quality (amato)
intergenrational transmission
Why does intergenerational transmission occur
1) parental divorce causes marital discord
2) statistics are misleading - false correlation
Causal explanation of intergenerational transmisison
if parental divorce actually does cause marital problems then it could be:
- it straints parent-child relationship quality/ kids don’t develop skills
- children expereince negative affect
- emotional insecurity results in bad life choices
- interferes with educatiional attainment and results in low SES
- observational learning
spurious explanation of intergenerational transmission
third variables
- parents education
- parents income
- parents negative affect
- parents poor life choices
Amato and Booth - longituidinal study
- parents married at time of assessment in 190; children of couples in assessment married at time of assessment in 1987
- does parent’s marital quality predict children’s marital quality? yes
- more accurately, parent marital discrop predicted children’s marital discord - more likely parents are to have problems, you are
amato - what seems to mediate the relationship between parental marital discord and marital discord in children
- observational learning
- what sig predicted were parents who were: jealousm domineering, easily angered, critical, moody, uncommunicative
Baxter - college student breakup strategies
- asked how you would break up with a partner
- directeness (direct v indirect)
- concerns (self v others)
dimensions of breakup strateiges
Self/direct
open confrontation:
- openly express desire to break up
- explain reason for breaking up
- honeslty convey wishes to other person
Dimensions of breakup strategies
Direct/other
Positve tone
- try to prevent partner from having hard feelings
- try to avoid ending on sour note
- convey liking but avoid physical displays
relationship breakup strategies
Indirect/other
Withdrawal/Avoidance (ghost)
- avoid contact as much as possible
- avoid scheduling future meetings
- discourage other person from sharing with you
- maintain superficial conversation
relationship break up strategies
indirect/self
manipulation
- ask a third party to end the relationship
- intentionally leak decision to break up
- become unpleasent to perso so they break up with you first
- pick an argument as excuse to break up
- wait it out until things were conenient to break up
baxter - break up strategey study results
76% of students reported using more indirecr strategies to break up
- mostly withdrawal-avoidance (88%)
- manipulation less common
24% of students reported using direct strategies
- mostly open confrontation, with no opportunity for discussion (73%)
- others are direct with room for discussion (27%)
How do we feel when we break up? eastwick
- asked on a scale from 1-7, how upset would you be if you ended your relationship with your partner
- 69 ps answered this q over a 9 month period
- answered how upset they would be two, four, eight and twelve weeks after a potential break up
- on average, ps thought they would be 4/7 upset if they were to end it now, decreases over time
- partners who did break up were less distressed then they thought they would be
how do we feel when we break up - affective forecasting bias - eastwick
- ppl not very good at predicting their emotions in response to future events
- affective forecasting bias: preidct enotions of affect is biased
- people overestimate distress of a breakup
- the effect was espically strong for ps who: were strongly in love while maing forecasts, and for those who had low CLalt
divorce and well being
- divorce is associated with negative physical and mental health
- higher mortality rates among divorced individuals if not remarried
- breakup predicts diverse forms of emotional distress - including depression
- failing relationship predict imparied life satisfaction, which doesn’t fully recover over time
divorce and life satisfaction
- on average, 8-10 years before divorce, married couples were quite happy
- this decreases until year prior to divorce, (lowest life satisfaction)
- life satisfaction never fully recovers after divorce, but it does increase after divorce
exes
- women tend to evaluate exes more negatively than men
- and also adjust better
ex and contact
- the more contact one has with an ex, the more distress about separation they feel
what helps with exes
- finding new parnter
- rebound
- men adjust worse in general
- women adjust quickly
- rebound relationships are just as likely to be successful as any other relationship
how to make relationships good?
- engage in constructive conflict
- provide (invisible) social support
- dont cheat or be jealous
- have secure attachment
how can we make relationships better
- capitalize on good news
making relationships better and doing new things
- how can we keep excitment alive
- novelty and arousal normally decline
- can recapture arousal by sharing new, self expanding activites together
- allows us to become closer and increase relationship quality
novelty and arousing study
doing new things study - aron
- randomly assigned to either
- novel rask - pillow carrying (ps crawled on hands and knees carrying a pillow between them, cant use arms, hands or teeth, told they would get a prize if they could do it under 1 min)
- mundane task - partnter 1 rolls ball to center of room, partner 2 retrieves it
DV - relationship quality
Results
- no activity - reationship quality decline
- mundane task - relationship quality decline, but still better than mundane task
- novel task - increase relationship quality
wh y does doing new things increase relationship satisfaction
- fun, new and exciting things make couples feel better about their relationship
- classical conditioning
- misattribution of arousal
- cooperation enhances interdependence
- perception of rleationship as exciting
doing secert things study
- groups of 4 unacquainted students, formed mix sex pairs to play a card game
- one pair received instructions to play footsie while playing cards
‘Try to work out nonverbal communication using your feet” - manipulated secercy:
- secert condition - dont let other parir know what you are doing
- not secert condition - its acceptable for you to let the other pair know what you’re doing
FINDINGS
- physical contact was effective at building attraction if it was a secert
- secrecy and excitment of private things in public experience arousal and increased attraction, intimacy and positivity togehter
good relationships
- do new things, excitedly and share them with partners
- avoid doing harmful things; practice makes perfect, short term pain - long term gain
- pay attention to the environment, try to anticipate stressors, try to avoid biases in judging partner
average length of marriage in the USA
- just over 18 yrs
- fewer than half of adult women in USA are married - all time low
- 23% of american cidlren (1 of 4 ppl) live in a single parent home, most run by mother
older adults and divorce
- people over 50 are less likely to divorce than younger adults but their rate of divorce has doubled over the last 25yrs
women in the workforce and marriage
- spouses report more conlfict between work and family than they used to
- the more hours a wige works during the week, the lower the quality of her marriage tends to be
higher divorce rates - women working
- since women earn more money than they used to, divorce rates are higher when women are financially independent of men
positive correlation - women $ and divorce
- the more money a women makes, the more likely it is that she will someday be divorced
low income and divorce
- couples with money troubles are less content with their marriages
- couples with rather low incomes are twice as likely to divorce as are couples with higher incomes
gender roles over the years
- women happier that men are sharing part of the chores
- men are less content that they are doing more work
- but this new equality is associated with higher marital quality
cohabitation and divorce
- couples who cohabit encounter an increased risk of divorce later on
- cohabitation is positively associated with the probability of divorce
- cohabit before being engaged! bad
Levinger’s Barrier Model
- 3 elements that influence the breakup of relationships
1) attraction - attraction is enhanced by the rewards a relationship offers, and it is diminished by its costs
2) the alternatives one possesses; this refers to other partners, but also any alternatives to the current relationship; such as being single or achieving work success
3) the barries around the relationship that make it hard to leave - legal and social pressures to remain married
- religious and moral constraints
- financial costs of being divorced and maintaining two households
- unhappy couples might want to break up but sty togehter becuase it would cost too much to leave
- he argued many barriers to divorce are psycholgical rather than mateiral
barriers that discouraged divorce
- worry of children suffering
- threat of losing children
- religious norms
- dependence of spouse
- fear of financial ruin
- parental divorce
- low education
Vulnerability Stress Adaptation Model - Karney and Bradbury
- some people enter marriage with enduring vulnerabilites that increase their risk of divorce (eg, poor education, maldaptive personlity traits, bad social skills…)
- the characteristics influence the adaptive processes with which people respond to stress
- amost every marriage must face occasional stressful events
- when stressful events occur, a couple must cope and adapt but depending on their vulerabilites some people are better able to do that than others are
- failure to cope can make stressors worse, and poor coping may cause marital quality to delince
stress spillover
- any frustrations and difficulties we expereince individually at work/school can cause stress spillover, in which we bring surly moods home and interact irascibly with our innocent partners
Pair Project - Processes of Adaptation in Intimate Relationshios
the project focused on the manner i which spouses adapted to their lives together (or failed to do so)
- after only 13 years, 35% of the couples had divorced and another 20% weren’t happy
- only 45% of the couples could be said to be happily married, and even they were less satisfied and less loving than they had been when they wed
PAIR project - why marriages go awry
- one possibility: spouses who are destined to be discontent being their marriages being less in love and more at odds with eachother than those whose marriages ultimately succeed
Enduring dynamics model - divorce/marriage (PAIR)
- this model suggests that spouses bring to their marriages problems, incompatibilites, and enduring vulenerabilites that surface during their courtship
- marriages tat are headed for divorce are weaker than others from the very beginning
emergent distress model - (PAIR)
- problematic behavior that ultimately destroys a coule begins after they marry
- as time goes on, tey fall into a rut of increasing conflict and negativity that didn’t exist when marriage began
- this suggests that the diffiuclties that ruin some marriages usally develop later
disillusionment model - (PAIR)
- couples typcially begin their marriages with rosy, romanticized views of their relationship that are unrealistically positive
- as time goes by and spouses stop trying so hard, reality kicks in
- ## best predictor of which couples would actually divorce
PAIR project 2 conclusions
1) the size and speed of changes in romance best predict which couples will divorce
2) the probelms couples bring to their marriage determine how quick;y a divorce will occur
Results from early years of marriage project (EYM project0
- the social conditions that couples encounter may affect marital outcomes
- 16 yrs after project began, 46% of the couples had already divorced - couples race made a difference
- kust over a third of the white couples had divorced
- more than half of the black couples had dissolved their marriages
Why were black couples more prone to divorce? - they had cohabited for a longer period of time and more likely to have children before getting married
- they had lower incomes, and more likely to come from broken homes
- econmoic hardshups can put any couples at risk for divorce no matter how much they respect and value marriage
3 general types of influecnes on our martial outcomes
- cultural context
- personal context
- relational context
Marital Instability over the life course project
- when those who divorced were asked what caused their divorces, the most frewuent reported reasons all involved some characteristic of their marital relationship
- women complained of infidelity, substance use, or abuse more often than men
- men were more likely to complain of poor communciation or to announce they didn’t know what went wrong
- younger marriages, more likely to grow apart
specific predictors of divorce
-SES, lower status jobs, less education, lower income are more likly to divorce
women with good educations are much less likely to divorce
- race
- sex ratios
- social mobility
- no fault legislation - laws that make divorce easier
- working women
- age at marriage - marry after 25, more likely to stay together
- prior marriage - 2nd,3rd and 4th marriages are more likely to end in divorce
- parental divorce
- religion
- teenage sex
- premarital cohabition
- premarital ambivakence - mxed feelings and uncertainty during courtship about where relationship is heading
relationship rules
- describe standards that are expected of us in relationships, and if they are broken partner may leave us
Autonomy - allow partner to have friends and intrests outside of relationship - DONT BE TOO POSSESSIVE
Similarity - share similar attidues, values and intrests - DONT BE TOO DIFF
Supporitveness - enhance partner self worth and self esteem - dont be thoughtless/inconsiderate
Openess - self disclose, - dont be closed lipped
Fidelity - DONT CHEAT
togetherness - share time together - dont spend too much time elsewhere
Equity - be fair - dont exploit partner
Magic - be romantic not ordianry
breaking up with partner - gradual vs sudden onset of ones discontent
- only about 1/4 of the time was there some critical incident that suddenly changed a partner’s feelings about his or her relationship
- more often, people gradually grew dissatisfied
breaking up - an indiviudal vs shared desire to end the relationship
- 2/3 of time only 1 partner wanted relationship to end
breaking up - rapid vs protracted nature of one’s exit
- people made several disguised efforts to end relationship before they succeedded
breaking up - the presence or absence of repair attempts
- most of the time, no formal effort to repair relationship was made
attachment style x break up
- peope high in avoidance dislike drama and are likely to employ indirect strategies that reduce changes of an emotional confrontation.
- if people high in avoidance do it straightforwardly, they are more likely to do it at a distance, with a text, email or message
relational cleansing
- change or hide relationship status on profiles
- unfriend exes, or block them
- edit photos on their walls
Duck - 5 general stages occur during the dissolution of most relationships
1) personal phase, partner grows dissatisfied
2) dyadic phase, unhappy partner reveals their discontent
3) social phase near end - publicize the distress, explaining their side
4) as relationship ends, grave-dressing phase. Mourning decreasing, the partners being to get over their loss - relational cleansing
5) finally a resurrection phase, the ex partners re enter social life as singles
churning in relationships
- that occurs when partners break up but then reconclie and get back togehter
- churning is usually disadvantageous - it is associated with stress, uncertanity and chronically lower satisfaction even when a relationship continues
