Emotions in Marital Conflict Interactions: Empathic Accuracy, Assumed Similarity, and the Moderating Context of Depressive Symptoms

To examine affectivity in marital interaction, 267 couples participated in laboratory-based marital conflicts and afterward rated their own and their spouses' emotions of positivity, anger, sadness, and fear. Actor-Partner Interdependence Models (Cook & Kenny, 2005) estimated empathic accuracy and assumed similarity effects, with symptoms of depression tested as a moderator. Depressive symptoms moderated spouses' ratings of their partners' negative emotions such that assumed similarity was higher and empathic accuracy was lower in the context of elevated depressive symptoms. The results suggest that depression may influence spouses' judgments of how closely linked partner emotions are (i.e., assumed similarity) and spouses' abilities to accurately perceive their partners' negative emotions (i.e., empathic accuracy), potentially contributing to the established marital dysfunction-psychological distress cycle.     

Fitting Cox Models with Doubly Censored Data Using Spline‐Based Sieve Marginal Likelihood

In some applications, the failure time of interest is the time from an originating event to a failure event while both event times are interval censored. We propose fitting Cox proportional hazards models to this type of data using a spline‐based sieve maximum marginal likelihood, where the time to the originating event is integrated out in the empirical likelihood function of the failure time of interest. This greatly reduces the complexity of the objective function compared with the fully semiparametric likelihood. The dependence of the time of interest on time to the originating event is induced by including the latter as a covariate in the proportional hazards model for the failure time of interest. The use of splines results in a higher rate of convergence of the estimator of the baseline hazard function compared with the usual non‐parametric estimator. The computation of the estimator is facilitated by a multiple imputation approach. Asymptotic theory is established and a simulation study is conducted to assess its finite sample performance. It is also applied to analyzing a real data set on AIDS incubation time.     

Marital Conflict and Children's Emotional Security in the Context of Parental Depression

Evidence has emerged for emotional security as an explanatory variable linking marital conflict to children's adjustment. Further evidence suggests parental psychopathology is a key factor in child development. To advance understanding of the pathways by which these family risk factors impact children's development, the mediational role of emotional security for children with parents who have potentially clinical levels of depression compared to children whose parents have lower levels of symptomatology was examined (i.e., moderated mediation). Participants included 297 families assessed annually for 3 years. Paternal depression moderated pathways, such that marital conflict was associated with greater child emotional insecurity 2 years later in the context of paternal depression. Testing alternative pathways, emotional insecurity mediated relations between maternal depression and externalizing problems.     

Longitudinal Associations Between Husbands' and Wives' Depressive Symptoms

Although concordance between husbands' and wives' mental health problems is often reported, questions remain about the nature of these relations. Extending research in this area, this study examined dynamic-longitudinal pathways among husbands' and wives' depressive symptoms and marital satisfaction as a moderator of associations. Participants were 296 heterosexual couples. Husbands and wives reported on their depressive symptoms and marital satisfaction. Results from dynamic bivariate latent difference score analyses indicated unidirectional longitudinal coupling such that higher levels of husbands' depressive symptoms predicted subsequent elevations in wives' depressive symptoms over time. This relation was stronger among couples reporting marital distress as compared to couples reporting higher marital satisfaction. The findings underscore the importance of considering one's spouses' depressive symptoms in treatment efforts.