Conflict, Marital

Implications of Conflict

Conflict between spouses is among the most frequently investigated topics in marital research, and this research focus is understandable given its implications for mental, physical, and family health. Marital conflict has been linked to the onset of depressive symptoms, anxiety disorders, eating disorders, episodic drinking, binge drinking, out-of-home drinking, and male alcoholism. Although married individuals are healthier on average than the unmarried, marital conflict is associated with poorer health and with specific illnesses such as cancer, cardiac disease, and chronic pain perhaps because hostile behaviors during conflict are related to alterations in immu-nological, endocrine, and cardiovascular functioning. Physical aggression occurs in about 30 percent of married couples in the United States, leading to significant physical injury in about 10 percent of [Page 299]couples. Marriage is also the most common interpersonal context for homicide, with more women being murdered by their partners than by anyone else. Finally, marital conflict is associated with important family outcomes, including poor parenting, poor adjustment of children, increased likelihood of parent-child conflict, and conflict between siblings. Marital conflicts that are frequent, intense, physical, unresolved, and child-related have a particularly negative influence on children.

Behavior during Conflict

Much of the research on marital conflict has been motivated by the goal of helping couples to deal effectively with conflict. This research has focused on the observation of discussions in the laboratory where couples are asked to try and resolve a problem in the relationship. Typically, couples also complete an inventory assessing marital quality (e.g., Dyadic Adjustment Scale, DAS) and those scoring below the cutoff for marital distress (DAS score <97) are compared to nondistressed couples. Using these methods, researchers have provided detailed information about how marital distressed and nondistressed couples behave during conflict.

During conflict, distressed couples make more negative statements and fewer positive statements than nondistressed couples. They also are more likely to respond with negative behavior (e.g., put downs, whining) when their partner behaves negatively. Indeed, this negative reciprocity, as it is called, is more consistent across different types of situations than is the amount of negative behavior, making it the most reliable overt signature of marital distress. Negative behavior is both more frequent and more frequently reciprocated in couples who engage in physical aggression than in other couples. Nonverbal behavior (e.g., posture, gaze aversion, voice tone), often used as an index of emotion, reflects marital satisfaction better than verbal behavior and, unlike verbal behavior, does not change when spouses are asked to try to fake good and bad-distressed marriages in the laboratory.

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