Treatment Response in Couple Therapy: Relationship Adjustment and Individual Functioning Change Processes

This study, a naturalistic investigation of the process of change in relationship adjustment and individual functioning during conjoint therapy, examined the first 8 sessions of a multisystemic model of couple therapy, integrative problem-centered metaframeworks (Breunlin, Pinsof, Russell, & Lebow, 2011; Pinsof, Breunlin, Russell, & Lebow, 2011). The sample consisted of 125 heterosexual couples who reported on their relationship adjustment and individual functioning before every session using the Systemic Therapy Inventory of Change (Pinsof et al., 2009; Pinsof, Zinbarg, et al., in press). Data were analyzed using dyadic latent growth curve and cross-lagged models. For both men and women, relationship adjustment and individual functioning showed nonlinear change, increasing during Sessions 1–4 and stabilizing during Sessions 5–8. At pretreatment, women reported lower levels of relationship adjustment than men; no gender differences existed in initial levels of individual functioning or in the change trajectories of relationship adjustment or individual functioning. Higher relationship adjustment predicted positive change in individual functioning for men (but not for women). In contrast, there were no cross-lagged effects of individual functioning on relationship adjustment for men or women. The results demonstrate the importance of examining the processes by which relational and individual pathology respond to couple-based interventions

Agency and adaptive development in the transition from university to work: a longitudinal study

(How) can individuals bring about adaptive changes in their development themselves? Building on the action-phase model (Heckhausen, 1999) a 4-wave longitudinal study was conducted to investigate agency and adaptation in the transition from university to work. The sample consisted of 523 university graduates from four selected fields of study with favorable vs. unfavorable employment opportunities. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 15 participants one year after graduation. Findings from latent growth curve modeling showed that individuals changed indeed after graduation and that individual agency predicted the direction of these changes. Specific motivational orientations (i.e., learning goals, goal self-concordance) predicted adaptive goal engagement, which in turn predicted subjective and psychological well-being as well as selected aspects of work adaptation. Most findings generalized across favorable vs. unfavorable employment contexts. The results are discussed referring to different theoretical frameworks, highlighting points of convergence with the qualitative findings and considering potential applications

Emotion regulation predicts marital satisfaction: more than a wives' tale.

Emotion regulation is generally thought to be a critical ingredient for successful interpersonal relationships. Ironically, few studies have investigated the link between how well spouses regulate emotion and how satisfied they are with their marriages. We utilized data from a 13-year, 3-wave longitudinal study of middle-aged (40-50 years old) and older (60-70 years old) long-term married couples, focusing on the associations between downregulation of negative emotion (measured during discussions of an area of marital conflict at Wave 1) and marital satisfaction (measured at all 3 waves). Downregulation of negative emotion was assessed by determining how quickly spouses reduced signs of negative emotion (in emotional experience, emotional behavior, and physiological arousal) after negative emotion events. Data were analyzed using actor-partner interdependence modeling. Findings showed that (a) greater downregulation of wives' negative experience and behavior predicted greater marital satisfaction for wives and husbands concurrently and (b) greater downregulation of wives' negative behavior predicted increases in wives' marital satisfaction longitudinally. Wives' use of constructive communication (measured between Waves 1 and 2) mediated the longitudinal associations. These results show the benefits of wives' downregulation of negative emotion during conflict for marital satisfaction and point to wives' constructive communication as a mediating pathway

Feelings in words: Emotion word use and cardiovascular reactivity in marital interactions

Putting feelings into words is often thought to be beneficial. Few studies, however, have examined associations between natural emotion word use and cardiovascular reactivity. This laboratory-based study examined emotion word use (i.e., from computerized text analysis) and cardiovascular reactivity (i.e., interbeat interval changes from baseline) across two interaction contexts (i.e., conflict and positive conversations) in 49 mixed-sex married couples (age: M = 43.11, SD = 9.20) from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds. We focused on both frequency (i.e., relative proportion of emotion words) and diversity (i.e., relative proportion of unique emotion words) of emotion words. Data were collected between 2015 and 2017 and analyzed treating both partners and conversations as repeated measures, resulting in 196 observations overall (four per dyad). Findings showed that (a) when spouses used more negative emotion words (especially anger), they showed higher cardiovascular reactivity. This finding was robust when controlling for covariates; generalized across gender, interaction contexts, and socioeconomic status. Moreover, (b) when spouses used a more diverse negative emotion vocabulary, they showed higher cardiovascular reactivity, but this was not robust when controlling for negative emotion word frequency. Associations between (c) positive emotion word use and cardiovascular reactivity were not statistically significant. Verbalizing negative emotions thus seems to go along with higher cardiovascular reactivity, at least in the short term. Replication is needed across other relationship types, genders, and sexual orientations. These findings highlight emotion word use as an indicator of cardiovascular reactivity, which has implications for the identification of potential health risks that emerge during marital interactions

Emotional and behavioral symptoms in neurodegenerative disease: a model for studying the neural bases of psychopathology.

Disruptions in emotional, cognitive, and social behavior are common in neurodegenerative disease and in many forms of psychopathology. Because neurodegenerative diseases have patterns of brain atrophy that are much clearer than those of psychiatric disorders, they may provide a window into the neural bases of common emotional and behavioral symptoms. We discuss five common symptoms that occur in both neurodegenerative disease and psychopathology (i.e., anxiety, dysphoric mood, apathy, disinhibition, and euphoric mood) and their associated neural circuitry. We focus on two neurodegenerative diseases (i.e., Alzheimer's disease and frontotemporal dementia) that are common and well characterized in terms of emotion, cognition, and social behavior and in patterns of associated atrophy. Neurodegenerative diseases provide a powerful model system for studying the neural correlates of psychopathological symptoms; this is supported by evidence indicating convergence with psychiatric syndromes (e.g., symptoms of disinhibition associated with dysfunction in orbitofrontal cortex in both frontotemporal dementia and bipolar disorder). We conclude that neurodegenerative diseases can play an important role in future approaches to the assessment, prevention, and treatment of mental illness

Age-related changes in emotional behavior: Evidence from a 13-year longitudinal study of long-term married couples.

We examined age-related changes in emotional behavior in a sample of middle-aged and older long-term married couples over a 13-year period. Data were collected at 3 waves, each occurring 5 to 6 years apart. For the present study, only couples who participated in all 3 waves were examined (n = 87). Couples were either in the middle-aged group (40-50 years old, married at least 15 years) or the older group (60-70 years old, married at least 35 years). At each wave, couples engaged in 15-min unrehearsed conversations about an area of disagreement in their marriage. Emotional behaviors during the conversation were objectively coded using the Specific Affect Coding System. Latent growth curve analyses revealed that, for both husbands and wives, negative emotional behavior (primarily belligerence, defensiveness, fear/tension, and whining) decreased and positive emotional behavior (primarily humor, enthusiasm, and validation) increased with age. Findings generalized across middle-aged and older cohorts and levels of marital satisfaction. These findings support theories that suggest that positive emotion increases and negative emotion decreases with age, expanding upon previous findings by examining objectively coded emotional behaviors longitudinally in an interpersonal context. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved)

Decoding Affect in Dyadic Conversations: Leveraging Semantic Similarity through Sentence Embedding

Recent advancements in Natural Language Processing (NLP) have highlighted the potential of sentence embeddings in measuring semantic similarity. Yet, its application in analyzing real-world dyadic interactions and predicting the affect of conversational participants remains largely uncharted. To bridge this gap, the present study utilizes verbal conversations within 50 married couples talking about conflicts and pleasant activities. Transformer-based model all-MiniLM-L6-v2 was employed to obtain the embeddings of the utterances from each speaker. The overall similarity of the conversation was then quantified by the average cosine similarity between the embeddings of adjacent utterances. Results showed that semantic similarity had a positive association with wives' affect during conflict (but not pleasant) conversations. Moreover, this association was not observed with husbands' affect regardless of conversation types. Two validation checks further provided support for the validity of the similarity measure and showed that the observed patterns were not mere artifacts of data. The present study underscores the potency of sentence embeddings in understanding the association between interpersonal dynamics and individual affect, paving the way for innovative applications in affective and relationship sciences

Responding to the emotions of others: Age differences in facial expressions and age-specific associations with relational connectedness.

Responding prosocially to the emotion of others may become increasingly important in late life, especially as partners and friends encounter a growing number of losses, challenges, and declines. Facial expressions are important avenues for communicating empathy and concern, and for signaling that help is forthcoming when needed. In a study of young, middle-aged, and older adults, we measured emotional responses (facial expressions, subjective experience, and physiological activation) to a sad, distressing film clip and a happy, uplifting film clip. Results revealed that, relative to younger adults, older adults showed more sadness and confusion/concern facial expressions during the distressing film clip. Moreover, for older adults only, more sadness and fewer disgust facial expressions during the distressing film clip were associated with higher levels of relational connectedness. These findings remained stable when accounting for subjective emotional experience, physiological activation, and trait empathy in response to the film clip. When examining the uplifting film clip, older adults showed more happiness facial expressions relative to younger adults at trend levels. More facial expressions of happiness were associated with higher levels of relational connectedness, but unlike the effect of sadness expressions, this was not moderated by age. These findings underscore an important adaptive social function of facial expressions-particularly in response to the distress of others-in late life. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved)