Sleep Efficiency and Naturalistically-Observed Social Behavior Following Marital Separation: The Critical Role of Contact with an Ex-partner.

Marital disruption is associated with increased risk for a range of poor health outcomes, including disturbed sleep. This report examines trajectories of actigraphy-assessed sleep efficiency following marital separation as well as the extent to which daily social behaviors and individual differences in attachment explain variability in these trajectories over time. One hundred twenty-two recently-separated adults ( = 122) were followed longitudinally for three assessment periods over five months.

Contact with an Ex-partner is Associated with Psychological Distress after Marital Separation.

This study examined the association between naturalistically-observed in-person contact with one's ex-partner and separation-related psychological distress (SRPD). 122 recently-separated adults were assessed using the Electronically Activated Recorder (Mehl, 2017) on three occasions across five months. The association between in-person contact with one's ex-partner, as a between-person variable, and concurrent SRPD was not reliably different from zero, nor was the time-varying effect of in-person contact.

Best practices for Electronically Activated Recorder (EAR) research: A practical guide to coding and processing EAR data.

Since its introduction in 2001, the Electronically Activated Recorder (EAR) method has become an established and broadly used tool for the naturalistic observation of daily social behavior in clinical, health, personality, and social science research. Previous treatments of the method have focused primarily on its measurement approach (relative to other ecological assessment methods), research design considerations (e.g.

Dispositional mindfulness in daily life: A naturalistic observation study.

Mindfulness has seen an extraordinary rise as a scientific construct, yet surprisingly little is known about how it manifests behaviorally in daily life. The present study identifies assumptions regarding how mindfulness relates to behavior and contrasts them against actual behavioral manifestations of trait mindfulness in daily life. Study 1 (N = 427) shows that mindfulness is assumed to relate to emotional positivity, quality social interactions, prosocial orientation and attention to sensory perceptions.

"Eavesdropping on Happiness" Revisited: A Pooled, Multisample Replication of the Association Between Life Satisfaction and Observed Daily Conversation Quantity and Quality.

In the present study, we aimed to replicate and extend findings by Mehl, Vazire, Holleran, and Clark (2010) that individuals with higher well-being tend to spend less time alone and more time interacting with others (e.g., greater conversation quantity) and engage in less small talk and more substantive conversations (e.

Objectively Measured Social Integration Is Associated With an Immune Risk Phenotype Following Marital Separation.

Background: Close relationships play an integral role in human development, and robust evidence links marital separation and divorce to poor health outcomes. Social integration may play a key role in this association. In many ways, the study of marital separation and divorce provides an ideal model system for a more complete understanding of the association between life stress and physical health.

Depression, negative emotionality, and self-referential language: A multi-lab, multi-measure, and multi-language-task research synthesis.

Depressive symptomatology is manifested in greater first-person singular pronoun use (i.e., I-talk), but when and for whom this effect is most apparent, and the extent to which it is specific to depression or part of a broader association between negative emotionality and I-talk, remains unclear.

Neural Reactivity to Emotional Faces May Mediate the Relationship Between Childhood Empathy and Adolescent Prosocial Behavior.

Reactivity to others' emotions not only can result in empathic concern (EC), an important motivator of prosocial behavior, but can also result in personal distress (PD), which may hinder prosocial behavior. Examining neural substrates of emotional reactivity may elucidate how EC and PD differentially influence prosocial behavior. Participants (N = 57) provided measures of EC, PD, prosocial behavior, and neural responses to emotional expressions at ages 10 and 13.

Social responses to expressive suppression: The role of personality judgments.

Why do people who suppress their emotion-expressive behavior have difficulty forming close, supportive relationships? Previous studies have found that suppression disrupts the dynamics of social interactions and existing relationships. We evaluated a complementary hypothesis: that suppression functions as a behavioral cue leading others to form negative personality impressions of suppressors, even at zero-acquaintance. In 2 studies, participants reported personality judgments and other impressions of targets who either suppressed or expressed their emotion-expressive behavior in response to amusing or sad film clips.