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Research Group
Projects
- Exploring pathways to greater commitment and relationship quality for unmarried partners about to become parents
- Love, anger, and food: A biopyschosocial investigation of obesity
- How representations of the parents' marriage predict expectations of parenthood during the transition to parenthood as well as conflict strategies between marital partners
- The congruence of emotion channels within and between people during emotion regulation
- Predictions of health and marital quality from sources such as support, strain, financial instability, and insight into the past
- Predicting emotional experience from autonomic physiology using machine learning methods
- Cultural moderation of the physiological correlates of emotional responding
Exploring pathways to greater commitment and relationship quality for unmarried partners about to become parents
Healthy marriages and stable commitments are important for both spouses and children. Positively functioning marriages and stable commitments have significant impact on the health and well-being of spouses in terms of psychological well-being, physical health, and low mortality. Thus, concern exists about unmarried, cohabiting partners, and especially about unmarried, cohabiting, expectant parents. And although concern is warranted for unmarried cohabitors who will be, or who are parents, cohabitation, by itself, does not necessarily predict completely negative outcomes, nor is it a monolithic phenomenon. Instead, I argue that cohabitation is better viewed as it relates to commitment, in order to understand cohabitors' own reasons for their living arrangements, and to explore what predicts committed versus uncommitted cohabitation and relational and child outcomes. Indeed, when commitment, or plans to marry, is part of the study, a different pattern of results emerges. Research has found that individual or couple expectations about marriage to one another are the strongest predictors of whether couples will marry soon after their child's birth. Unfortunately, such studies that assess cohabitation and commitment for expectant parents are rare and the identification of theoretical processes and constructs has not been explored at all.
• In the theoretical model, I propose that representations of early experiences, including both experiences of parent-child relationships and of the parents' marriage, as well as transformations of motivation, that is how much an individual is willing to sacrifice for his or her partner, are important pathways in understanding commitment and relationship quality.
• To test these ideas, we will be collecting data that include interviews with expectant parents about their early family experiences, videotapes of them interacting with one another, and asking them a series of questions about their commitment to each other, their commitment to parenthood, and what their relationship is like now.
• We will be exploring new areas of research as well. In conjunction with Emily Butler , we will interview people about their emotional experiences with eating as they were growing up in their family of origin as well as with their current romantic partner.
Such questions will help us address how partners navigate the transition to parenthood, if they remain partners over time, and what changes need to occur for partners to transition from cohabiting to marital partners. (For more information, please contact Melissa Curran).
Our close relationships can provide either a supportive context fostering health or become chronic stressors that undermine our wellbeing. Despite this, relationships have been largely ignored by efforts to understand the obesity epidemic sweeping through the industrialized world. Currently about 67% of American adults are overweight or obese, putting them at increased risk of health problems such as diabetes, heart disease, and stroke. Although genetics and socioeconomic factors are important, obesity is a complex problem also involving emotions, self-regulation, and relationships. The lack of research on relationships is particularly notable given that they provide the social framework for much of our eating and there is evidence that weight changes may be correlated within married couples (Murphy et al., 1982) . A more complete understanding, one that is adequate to inform successful treatment interventions, will require research that integrates multiple levels of analysis -- including relationships. To achieve this, this project draws upon biopsychosocial systems theory and a multi-method approach to study eating and emotions in the context of married couples. Obese, normal weight, and mixed-weight couples (i.e. one partner is obese and the other is normal weight) are being compared to test the hypothesis that in couples where both partners are obese eating will provide shared enjoyment, and function as a relationship bonding process, but that in mixed-weight couples eating will be a source of discord and relationship conflict. To invstigate this, we are collecting data from an extensive survey, qualitative in-depth interviews, and laboratory measurement of emotional experience, physiology (e.g. blood pressure), expressive behavior (e.g. expressions of love or anger), and eating during affectionate and conflictual couple interactions. The results of this research will inform theories about the roles of emotion and close relationships in excessive eating, and will provide the basis for treatment development. (For more information, please contact Emily Butler)
How representations of the parents' marriage predict expectations of parenthood during the transition to parenthood as well as conflict strategies between marital partners
To some extent, positive and negative aspects of the parental marriage are transmitted intergenerationally. For example, we know that recollections of an unhappy parental marriage are linked positively with marital instability and disagreements in the current marriage. But not all individuals repeat the relational patterns of their parents. We know from attachment theory that the intergenerational transmission of negative parent-child relationship patterns can be broken, such that individuals can “earn security.” Just as infant-caregiver interaction patterns can be internalized as representations of attachment, it seems likely that children's observations of the parents' marriage may be internalized as mental representations of marital relationships. Also, just as adults who are able to openly access and interpret childhood memories are able to break the cycle of poor parenting, so too might adults who can insightfully access and interpret childhood memories of the parental marriage be able to break the cycle of disharmonious marital interactions. Using an interview designed to assess adults' representations of the parents' marriage, and a coding scheme to reflect both what individuals recall about their parents' marriage and how they talk about these experiences, we are exploring two new areas: expectations about parenthood and conflict strategies between partners.
• In the first project, we are testing how husbands' and wives' representations of the parents' marriage, expectations about parenthood, both assessed prenatally, and gender, are predictive of coparenting as observed in triadic family interactions of the wife, husband, and two-year-old child.
• In the second project, we are testing how husbands' and wives' representations of the parents' marriage, assessed prenatally, and growth curve trajectories of marital quality including conflict, ambivalence, and maintenance, predict both wives' and husbands' reports of conflict strategies used when their child is seven years of age.
The inclusion of representational models of the parents' marriage, along with expectations of parenthood and gender, and growth curves of marital quality, will allow us to understand better how individuals relate with and perceive their partner during the first two to seven years of parenthood. (For more information, please contact Melissa Curran).
The congruence of emotion channels within and between people during emotion regulation
Emotions are multifaceted processes involving changes in subjective experience, cognitive appraisals, expressive behavior, and physiology. Although these changes are assumed to be coordinated within a person (e.g. when a person “becomes angry” it involves a congruent increase in anger experience, hostile thoughts, aggressive behavior, and blood pressure), it is unclear what effect a person's attempts to regulate emotion has on this congruence. In addition, during an emotional social interaction, there exists the possibility of congruence of emotional channels across interaction partners, as well as within the individual. Indeed, such cross-person congruence may be at the core of empathy. Again, however, the impact of emotion regulation is unknown. I am interested in whether some forms of emotion regulation disrupt within-person and between-person emotional congruence more than others. To investigate this question I conduct multi-method experimental studies of emotion regulation during social interactions in which participants discuss some emotional topic while attempting to control their emotions in various ways. Emotional experience, behavior, and physiology are measured continuously throughout allowing us to investigate both within-person and between-person congruence under various emotion regulatory conditions. (For more information, please contact Emily Butler)
Predictions of health and marital quality from sources such as support, strain, financial instability, and insight into the past.
During midlife, physical health, mental health, and marital quality may change for some, but not all. To understand this variability, I have used the Midlife in the United States (MIDUS) survey, which was administered via random digit dialing to a national sample of 7189 non-institutionalized English-speaking adults between the ages of 25 to 74. Data on health, marital quality, support, strain, parental responsiveness, finances, and other variables are available. I have explored, or am in the process of exploring, the following models using this dataset:
• How advice seeking predicts health and marital quality, and is moderated by support and strain from others, as well as financial instability.
• How lack of parental responsiveness during childhood can be moderated by support from others, such as friends, or the spouse or committed partner, and how such support can predict how individuals reflect upon and evaluate their current experiences, termed as insight, impacting their current and later mental and physical health.
Surprisingly, little research had been done on health issues of individuals at midlife. Although more research is starting to trickle in about midlife given the availability of datasaets such as the MIDUS, questions such as the ones posed above allow for the examination of attachment-related issues (support from others, self-defined insight) on a sample of midlife adults using a nationally representative sample. (For more information, please contact Melissa Curran).
Predicting emotional experience from autonomic physiology using machine learning methods
The relation between autonomic and experiential aspects of emotion is one of the oldest questions in psychophysiology (James, 1884). Answers are complicated by the large number of relevant physiological parameters, the masking of emotional signal with metabolic noise, and the existence of time lags between physiology and experience. Machine learning methods offer powerful new tools for investigating these complex relationships. In collaboration with Kobus Barnard and Ekaterina Spriggs from the University of Arizona computer science department we are exploring the use of Multi-Modal Mixture Models (MMMM) and Support Vector Machines (SVM) for the task of predicting continuous self-reported emotional experience from a set of variables representing various physiological systems (e.g. skin conductance, heart rate, pre-ejection period, respiration rate, blood pressure). This project is a truly cross-disciplinary collaboration, bringing together experimental psychophysiology with contemporary computer science to undertake the exciting challenge of having a computer automatically predict emotional experience from physiology. Advances in this domain would be relevant to human-computer interaction and automatic emotion detection, and would provide insight into the fundamental connections between subjective experience and physiology. (For more information, please contact Emily Butler)
Cultural moderation of the physiological correlates of emotional responding
Emotional social interactions can elicit strong sympathetic physiological responses. Existing evidence suggests that average levels of this activation do not differ across cultural groups. It is possible, however, that the factors that acerbate or ameliorate these responses may be different. Specifically, anthropological accounts suggest that Western European cultures value and are practiced at open emotion expression, while in contrast, Asian cultures value and are practiced at emotion inhibition. If this were true it would follow that open emotion expression may elicit stronger sympathetic responses for Asian Americans (AA), while attempts to inhibit emotion may do so for European Americans (EA). To test these hypotheses we are analyzing the data from 2 experimental studies of women's emotional responding in social situations. Study 1 used an emotion-sharing paradigm in which participants discussed an upsetting film. Study 2 used a laboratory anger-provocation paradigm. Participants included approximately equal numbers of EA and AA young women. In both studies emotional experience, expression, and physiology were measured continuously and participants completed a self-report of culture-specific emotion control values. We expect to find that that culture can alter the relationships amongst the various components of emotion (e.g. expression and physiology) even in the absence of overall group differences. (For more information, please contact Emily Butler)