In this video, Katherine “KC” Haydon, assistant professor of psychology and education at Mount Holyoke, discusses her research into how early life experiences — with parents, peers, and prior romantic partners — affect romantic relationships in adulthood.
Relationships
A new study, published in the Journal of Marriage and Family reveals that married couples experience few advantages for psychological well-being, health, or social ties compared to unmarried couples who live together. While both marriage and cohabitation provide benefits over being single, these reduce over time following a honeymoon period.
“Marriage has long been an important social institution, but in recent decades western societies have experienced increases in cohabitation, before or instead of marriage, and increases in children born outside of marriage,” said Dr Kelly Musick, Associate Professor of policy analysis and management at Cornell University’s College of Human Ecology. “These changes have blurred the boundaries of marriage, leading to questions about what difference marriage makes in comparison to alternatives.”
Previous research has sought to prove a link between marriage and well-being, but many studies compared marriage to being single, or compared marriages and cohabitations at a single point in time. This study compares marriage to cohabitation while using a fixed-effects approach that focuses on what changes when single men and women move into marriage or cohabitation and the extent to which any effects of marriage and cohabitation persist over time. [continue reading…]
In the racy television hit show, Sex and the City, Carrie, one of the main characters tells her best girlfriends that “Men who are too good looking are never good in bed because they never had to be.” This is just one of the many gender stereotypes that audiences were exposed to in this show. The show challenged many stereotypes about sex and gender and refrained from the gender caricatures that typify so much television fare. Now, a new review article written by University of Michigan psychology professor Terri Conley and her team of graduate students – Amy Moors, Jes Matsick, Ali Ziegler and Brandon Valentine – examines how such gender stereotypes fueled the sexual revolution started by women in the 60s, now carried on proudly by Carrie and her gang.
The review article, published in the latest issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, challenges the assumptions and myths that people have about sex and the roles that men and women have in the bedroom. According to the authors, “the take home message of our review article is that people should not take gender differences in sexuality at face value.” [continue reading…]
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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.
