Communication, Dyadic/Marital

Marital researchers have long tried to understand what makes a successful marriage and what distinguishes successful marriages from unsuccessful marriages. Whereas early research on marriage privileged personality traits, demographic factors, and individual psychological processes as predictors of marital success, more recent research has focused on the influence of interpersonal communication on marital outcomes. The interest in the communication between spouses is related to the assumption that dyadic interaction patterns play a central role in shaping successful and satisfying marital relationships. Moreover, an extensive empirical body of evidence has consistently documented an association between a couple's communication and the quality of their marriage. Such evidence has pointed to certain interaction patterns, characterized by responsive positive affect, as being associated with marital success, satisfaction, and adjustment, and to other behavioral patterns, reflecting controlling negative affect, as being associated with marital distress and even dissolution.