Personality, Emotional Adjustment, and Cardiovascular Risk: Marriage as a Mechanism

Abstract

A variety of aspects of personality and emotional adjustment predict the development and course of coronary heart disease (CHD), as do indications of marital quality (e.g., satisfaction, conflict, strain, disruption). Importantly, the personality traits and aspects of emotional adjustment that predict CHD are also related to marital quality. In such instances of correlated risk factors, traditional epidemiological and clinical research typically either ignores the potentially overlapping effects or examines independent associations through statistical controls, approaches that can misrepresent the key components and mechanisms of psychosocial effects on CHD. The interpersonal perspective in personality and clinical psychology provides an alternative and integrative approach, through its structural and process models of interpersonal behavior. We present this perspective on psychosocial risk and review research on its application to the integration of personality, emotional adjustment, and marital processes as closely interrelated influences on health and disease.

Marital Quality and Health

“…Research on the role of personality, marriage, and health has primarily focused on hostility and neuroticism (Smith, Baron, & Grove, 2013). Beyond modifying the association between marital quality and health, personality may directly impact psychological and behavioral processes, or modify the association between such processes and biological processes.…”

Prediction of marital adjustment based on attachment styles and deterministic thinking of couples among students

“…Marriage is the emotional and legal commitment that is assumed by persons in adulthood [1]. Choosing spouse and entering into marriage is a turning point in the growth and character development.…”

Trait hostility is associated with systemic inflammation in married couples: An actor–partner analysis

“…Hostility is closely related to interpersonal processes, including the quality of intimate relationships (Smith, Baron & Grove, 2014). One spouse’s trait anger and hostility predict their own marital quality, and their partner’s (Baron et al, 2007; Renshaw, Blais, & Smith, 2010), with similar effects on cardiovascular stress responses in couples (Smith & Gallo, 1999).…”

“…One spouse’s trait anger and hostility predict their own marital quality, and their partner’s (Baron et al, 2007; Renshaw, Blais, & Smith, 2010), with similar effects on cardiovascular stress responses in couples (Smith & Gallo, 1999). Chronic and recurring exposure to a hostile spouse’s aversive behavior (e.g., criticism, unwelcome control) and reduced expressions of positive behavior (e.g., support, affection) could result in a partner’s heightened physiological stress responses and lower reports of marital quality (Smith et al, 2014). Thus, hostility and anger may influence disease risk both within and between individuals in intimate relationships, with the latter association reflecting potential adverse interpersonal effects on the partner’s health and well-being.…”

“…In light of evidence that marital quality predicts physical health, perhaps in part through the mechanism of inflammation (Robles et al, 2014), examination of associations of individuals’ trait hostility with their spouses’ levels of CRP (i.e., partner effects) represents an important extension of prior research. Such partner effects would suggest a potential influence of a spouse’s typical social behavior and affective responses on their partner’s risk of CHD, by being a source of chronic stress for the partner (Smith et al, 2014). The present study replicated actor associations of trait hostility with CRP, and is the first to test these predicted partner associations in married couples.…”