Negative relationship behavior is more important than positive: Correlates of outcomes during stressful life events.

Abstract

When people who are married or cohabiting face stressful life situations, their ability to cope may be associated with two separate dimensions of interpersonal behavior: positive and negative. These behaviors can be assessed with the Couple Resilience Inventory (CRI). It was expected that scales on this instrument would correlate with outcome variables regarding life well-being, stress, and relationship satisfaction. It was also expected that effects for negative behavior would be larger than effects for positive and that the effects might be curvilinear. Study 1 included 325 married or cohabiting people currently experiencing nonmedical major life stressors and Study 2 included 154 married or cohabiting people with current, serious medical conditions. All participants completed an online questionnaire including the CRI along with an alternate measure of couple behavior (to confirm scale validity), a measure of general coping style (to serve as a covariate), and measures of outcome variables regarding well-being, quality of life, perceived stress, and relationship satisfaction. The effects for negative behavior were larger than effects for positive in predicting most outcomes, and many effects were curvilinear. Notably, results remained significant after controlling for general coping style, and scales measuring positive and negative behavior demonstrated comparable levels of validity. (PsycINFO Database Record

The Effect of COVID-19 Stress on Sexual Compulsivity Symptom:The Mediating Role of Perceived Social Support

“…The findings revealed that the female possessed more perceived social support compared to the male group in their normal lives. In accordance with previous studies, it can be betrayed that the life events could boost more perceived social support (Chen et al 2014;Huang et al 2017;Lu et al 2017;Park et al 2018;Rivers and Sanford 2018). It can be tested that perceived social support was related to life event stress and the effect of influence may exist individuals' difference (Ye et al 2014).…”

“…Especially, China Government had adopted tremendous policies to battle the contagion, protect the public and preventing human infections in person, such as isolation of the whole people in China. As previous studies revealed that the life event stress were associated with people's psychology and behaviors (Lu et al 2017;Park et al 2018;Rivers and Sanford 2018).…”

“…Moreover, previous studies had revealed that the stressful life events influenced on individuals emotions and behaviors (Chen et al 2014;Huang et al 2017;Lu et al 2017;Park et al 2018;Rivers and Sanford 2018). In particularly, the stressful life events or negative life events were correlated with sexual behaviors for young human (Cheney et al 2015;Ghobadzadeh et al 2019;Voisin et al 2017).…”

Dyadic coping in personal projects of romantic partners: assessment and associations with relationship satisfaction

“…Moreover, positive dyadic coping was a stronger predictor of satisfaction with coping in both partners, indicating that respondents favored their positive dyadic coping experiences in the evaluation process. This association contrasts with the vast majority of empirical results about negativity bias in affective evaluation (see Rivers and Sanford 2018, for a recent study on relationship satisfaction), and deserves further investigation. One possible explanation may be that majority of the DCI itemsincluding the last block before the satisfaction items refer to supportive and cooperative behaviors, thus positive experiences were more salient in the final evaluations (c.f., Ganzach and Yaor 2019) and our results may be partly explained as an effect of the method.…”

Marriage, divorce, and the immune system.

“…Many researchers have found that conflict behaviors are stable and reliable; unhappy couples act much more negatively toward their partners, and, when their partner is hostile, they are far more likely to reciprocate than happy couples (Heyman, 2001). Compared to positive or supportive behaviors, hostile behaviors discriminate much better between happy and unhappy couples (Rivers & Sanford, 2018; Sanford, Backer-Fulghum, & Carson, 2016), and hostile behaviors are also much stronger predictors of physiology and marital distress (Kiecolt-Glaser & Newton, 2001). To permit unobtrusive endocrine sampling during the marital problem discussion, a long polyethylene tube was attached to a heparin well, allowing nurses to draw blood samples out of subjects’ sight; samples obtained before, midway, and 15 minutes after the couples’ discussion provided data on short-term endocrine reactivity (Malarkey, Kiecolt-Glaser, Pearl, & Glaser, 1994).…”