New research to be published Oct. 13 confirms The Beatles’ lyrical hypothesis and finds that “the kind of thing that money just can’t buy” is a happy and stable marriage

Scholars at Brigham Young University studied 1,734 married couples across the United States. Each couple completed a relationship evaluation, part of which asked how much they value “having money and lots of things.”

The researchers’ statistical analysis showed that couples who say money is not important to them score about 10 to 15 percent better on marriage stability and other measures of relationship quality than couples where one or both are materialistic.

“Couples where both spouses are materialistic were worse off on nearly every measure we looked at,” said Jason Carroll, a BYU professor of family life and lead author of the study. “There is a pervasive pattern in the data of eroding communication, poor conflict resolution and low responsiveness to each other.”

The findings will be published Oct. 13 in the Journal of Couple & Relationship Therapy.

For one in five couples in the study, both partners admitted a strong love of money. Though these couples were better off financially, money was often a bigger source of conflict for them.

“How these couples perceive their finances seems to be more important to their marital health than their actual financial situation,” Carroll said.

And despite their shared materialism, materialistic couples’ relationships were in poorer shape than couples who were mismatched and had just one materialist in the marriage.

The study’s overall findings were somewhat surprising to Carroll because materialism was only measured by self-evaluations.

“Sometimes people can deceive themselves about how important their relationships are to them,” Carroll said. “It’s helpful to step back and look at where you focus your time.”

Source:Brigham Young University (2011, October 13). Can’t buy me love: Study shows materialistic couples have more money and more problems.

There is an old adage that goes “A daughter is a daughter all of her life, but a son is a son ’til he takes him a wife.” Deborah M. Merrill, associate professor of sociology at Clark University explores whether or not this saying accurately describes marriage and intergenerational relationships today in her new book, “When Your Children Marry: How Marriage Changes Relationships with Adult Children”

“When Your Children Marry” examines how marriage changes relationships between adult children and their parents and how this differs for sons versus daughters. The text examines both the quality of parent–adult child relationships following marriage and the process by which those relationships change.

The book is based on interviews with 25 mothers who had at least one married son and one married daughter as well as 25 adult children (eight men and 17 women) who had at some point been married for at least two years. Because the book is based on interviews rather than quantitative data, it uses colorful real-life scenarios and first-person quotes to support a finding rather than relying simply upon statistics.

“Marriage is greedier toward men than women with respect to intergenerational relationships.”

Merrill’s book is unique in that it accounts for the perspectives of both mothers and adult children—rather than putting the focus on just one of these groups—to provide a more complete picture of today’s intergenerational relationships.

Curious? Continue reading

 

Source: Clark University in Massachusetts

The potentially lasting implications of day-to-day couple conflict on physical and mental well-being are revealed in a study published today in the journal Personal Relationships.

Until now research has concentrated on the immediate effects of romantic conflict, typically in controlled laboratory settings. In one of the first studies to look at the longer term, Professor Angela Hicks investigated the physiological and emotional changes taking place in couples the day after conflict occurred, specifically taking into account the differing styles of emotional attachment between participating partners.

“We are interested in understanding links between romantic relationships and long term emotional and physical well-being”, said Professor Hicks. “Our findings provide a powerful demonstration of how daily interpersonal dealings affect mood and physiology across time.”

Hicks’ study involved a sample of 39 participants in established co-habiting relationships, who were tested for the association between conflict (assessed with end-of-day diaries) and sleep disturbance, next-morning reports of negative affect on mood, and cortisol awakening response. Prior to testing, the emotional attachment styles of all participants were measured according to how anxious they were in their relationship, and to what degree they avoided emotional attachment.

The study found that all participants across the sample as a whole experienced sleep disruption after conflict, bearing out the adage “don’t go to bed angry”. There was however the greatest degree of sleep disruption amongst individuals who were highly anxious in their relationship. The lowest degree of sleep disruption was found amongst individuals who strongly avoided emotional attachment. [continue reading…]