PDF(916 KB)
The Association between Observed Interaction Profile and Relationship Satisfaction among Husbands and Wife: Implication to Marital Intervention after COVID-19 Epidemic
Ju Xiaoyan, Li Xiaomin, Lan Jing, Fang Xiaoyi
Journal of Psychological Science ›› 2020, Vol. 43 ›› Issue (4) : 977-983.
PDF(916 KB)
PDF(916 KB)
The Association between Observed Interaction Profile and Relationship Satisfaction among Husbands and Wife: Implication to Marital Intervention after COVID-19 Epidemic
The COVID-19 epidemic affects individuals, families, and entire communities. Most research on post-disasters psychological re-construction has focused on individuals' mental health outcomes, little attention focuses on relationship intervention. The purpose of this study is to explore the different interactive profiles among newlywed husband and wife and the association between these profiles and relationship satisfaction. Thus, evidence-based suggestions can be provided for marital intervention after the COVID-19 epidemic. The identified 106 newly-weds community couples were invited to the university lab to participate in this study. Husbands and wives were asked to separately complete self-report measures. And then, partners were reunited for four 10-min videotaped discussions: two problem-solving interactions and two social support interactions. The Chinese version Iowa Family Interaction Rating Scale coding system was used to encode the couples' videotapes. The Intra-class Correlation Coefficients reflecting inter-rater reliability were adequate in each interaction.
Latent class analysis consistently revealed 3 profiles of husbands and wives' interactive behaviors across contexts: warmly supportive profile, low Hostile profile, and hostile-withdrawn profile. However, as in the problem-solving context, husbands are more likely to show traditionally undemonstrative profile than wives, wives are more likely to show volatile profile and reasonable profile than husbands. As in social support context, husbands also shows traditionally undemonstrative profile other than wife, and wife shows reasonable profile other than husbands. These finding indicated that husbands and wives were consistent in demonstrating of negativity (such as Low Hostile and Hostile-withdrawn) but different in demonstrating of positivity (such as traditionally undemonstrative profile in husbands, volatile profile and reasonable profile in wives)
Warmly supportive class reported significantly highest levels of marital satisfaction and hostile withdrawn class reported the lowest levels of marital satisfaction consistently cross spouses and contexts. Wives' low hostility was associated with significant low marital satisfaction of husbands. However, husbands' low hostility was not associated with wives' marital satisfaction. Although wives who were in volatile class and reasonable class have not demonstrated typical warmly emotional expression, their husbands reported the highest marital satisfaction in the group.
On the whole, wives show more emotional intensity than their husbands in both contexts, and husbands are more unexpressive and more warmly supportive in problem-solving and social support contexts for each. Furthermore, husbands' and wives' interactive styles have different meanings to their partners' marital satisfaction in certain ways.
We speculated three suggestions to couple relationship intervention after the COVID-19 epidemic: (a) Couple education and couple therapy need to be differentiated based on different interactive types of a couple, (b) Couple intervention need to focus on training of "problem-solving" skill, (c) Clinicians need to take consider of sex difference in an interactive model of husbands and wives and motivated husbands involvement in the intervention..
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