Patterns of Singlehood, Cohabitation, and Marriage in Early Adulthood in Relation to Well-being in Established Adulthood.

In a cohort followed from late adolescence until established adulthood, this study examined how singlehood, cohabitation, and marriage are related to well-being at different ages across early adulthood and into established adulthood.Participants ( = 585) from three U.S.

A Lifecourse Perspective on Singlehood.

A growing number of adults are spending more of their lifetime as single, either because they are taking longer to form unions, are re-entering singlehood after the dissolution of unions, or are avoiding union formation all together. Nevertheless, existing relationship research still generally positions singlehood as something to avoid, limiting our understanding of the rapidly evolving position of singlehood within the lifecourse as well as its implications for health and well-being. Thus, this special issue includes four articles that collectively offer theoretical and empirical inquiries of developmental and historical trends in singlehood and relationship histories, examine the antecedents and consequences of these trends, and explore how they vary based on salient sociodemographic characteristics.

Digital Health and Caregiving Resources Used by Family Caregivers of Older Adults During the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Caregiving is often associated with negative physical and mental health outcomes, and as the COVID-19 pandemic escalated, caregivers experienced more burden and provided more care with substantially less support. Digital resources may have been one way caregivers managed demands for care and needs for information. This mixed-methods study included surveys and semi-structured interviews with caregivers ( = 11) to describe experiences and use of digital health resources during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Developmental stasis, sensitivity, and disturbance: Linking concepts to analytic methods using impulsivity and alcohol use.

The goals of this article are to (a) describe and contrast conceptual characteristics of periods of developmental sensitivity, disturbance, and stasis, and (b) translate these concepts to testable analytic models with an example dataset. Although the concept of developmental sensitivity is widely known, the concepts of developmental stasis and disturbance have received less attention. We first define the concepts and their principles and then, using repeated measures data on impulsivity and alcohol use from adolescence to young adulthood, propose the dual latent change score (LCS) growth model as one analytic approach for evaluating evidence for key characteristics of these developmental concepts via examination of intraindividual time-varying associations.

Exploring the interplay of psychological and biological components of stress response and telomere length in the transition from middle age to late adulthood: A systematic review.

Ageing and chronic stress have been linked to reduced telomere length (TL) in mixed-age groups. Whether stress response components are linked to TL during the midlife-to-late adulthood transition remains unclear. Our study aimed to synthesise evidence on the relationship between psychological and biological components of stress response on TL in middle-aged and older adults.

From Organizing Medicine to Cooking With More Leafy Greens: A Dyadic, Qualitative Analysis of How Older African American Couples Take Care of Each Other's Health.

Guided by the Dyadic Theory of Illness Management, we explored spousal health management behaviors and their congruence within seventeen older African American married couples participating in a dyadic exercise intervention. Both prior to and after the intervention, spouses reported how they took care of their partner's health as well as what their partner did for them. Data were analyzed using theoretical thematic analysis, and five health management behaviors domains were identified (diet, exercise, self-care, medical compliance, relationship maintenance).

Relational concerns and change in relationship satisfaction in a relationship education program.

Lower income couples tend to report more difficulty sustaining high-quality intimate relationships. As a result, policy initiatives have been enacted to fund relationship education (RE) programs that aim to increase lower income couples' relationship satisfaction. Generally, these programs demonstrate small, albeit statistically significant improvements in mean levels of relationship functioning.

African American Couples' Experiences during an Exercise Intervention Interrupted by the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Qualitative Case Study.

Exercise intervention researchers often struggle to transition participants from supervised/laboratory-based exercise to independent exercise. Research to inform this critical juncture remains underdeveloped. This qualitative case study investigated the transition from laboratory-based to home-based training in a subset of middle-aged and older African American couples whose exercise intervention experience was interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The destabilization and destandardization of social roles across the adult life course: Considering aggregate social role instability and its variability from a historical-developmental perspective.

Existing research focused on social role destabilization (historical increases in role instability) and destandardization (historical increases in variability of role instability) has primarily focused on discrete social roles during discrete periods of development. Building on this work, we applied a macro approach to elucidate the extent to which historical trends toward destabilization and destandardization are occurring at the aggregate among a key set of social roles (union formation, education, residential independence, and employment) and across the whole of adulthood. Applying a historical-developmental approach, we also document how historical trends toward destabilization and destandardization vary by age.

Strengthening lower-income families: Lessons learned from policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Families are navigating an unstable economy due to COVID-19. Financial stressors have the potential to strain intimate relationships and exacerbate prior inequities across lower-income families. Notably, the economic impact of COVID-19 disproportionately influenced Black and Latinx families.

You Aren't as Close to my Family as You Think: Discordant Perceptions about In-laws and Risk of Divorce.

In-law relationships can act as sources of both support and stress for couples. Independent of the nature of the actual relationships with in-laws, it may be that couple similarity in perceptions of these ties determines if they undermine or facilitate marital stability. The current study sought to examine how spousal connections to in-laws and concordance about these relationships early in marriage predicted marital stability in a sample of 355 Black and White married couples followed over 16 years.

"It was just for us": qualitative evaluation of an exercise intervention for African-American couples.

Background: Promoting long-term exercise adherence should be a key focus for health and fitness professionals working to reduce obesity and cardiometabolic health disparities, and all-cause mortality in inactive African-American (AA) adults. Data have suggested that romantic partners can improve long-term exercise adherence and that this dyadic approach should be examined in exercise interventions. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to conduct a qualitative evaluation of a pilot exercise intervention conducted in older AA couples.

Better Together? A Pilot Study of Romantic Partner Influence on Exercise Adherence and Cardiometabolic Risk in African-American Couples.

Background: African-Americans (AAs) have higher rates of inactivity, obesity, and cardiometabolic risk compared to other races/ethnicities. Romantic partners can positively influence health habits, yet whether or not couples have to exercise together in order to adopt regular exercise remains unclear. This study examined whether exercising together influences exercise adherence and cardiometabolic risk in AA couples.

Engaging a Community Advisory Board to Inform an Exercise Intervention in Older African-American Couples.

This paper describes our approach to forming and engaging a community advisory board (CAB) to assist in the development of a proposed exercise intervention pilot study. The intervention aimed to examine the effects of exercise on exercise adherence, the provision of partner support and receptivity to partner health influence, and cardiometabolic risk in older African-American romantic couples. CAB invitations were extended to local community members and leaders who had a stake in the health of the target population.

Marital Quality, Loneliness, and Depressive Symptoms Later in Life: The Moderating Role of Own and Spousal Functional Limitations.

Loneliness is a mechanism through which marital quality relates to older adults' mental health. Links between marital quality, loneliness, and depressive symptoms, however, are often examined independent of older adults' functional health. The current study therefore examines whether associations between marital quality, loneliness, and depressive symptoms are contextually dependent on individuals' own (or their spouse's) functional limitations, as well as on gender.

What are the Marital Problems of Happy Couples? A Multimethod, Two-Sample Investigation.

How couples handle marital conflict may depend on what issues they are facing, as some issues may be more difficult to resolve than others. What is unclear, however, is what issues happy couples face and how these issues may be different for couples depending on their developmental stage. To explore this possibility, the current study used both self-reports and observations drawn from two separate samples of happily married couples-one early in middle adulthood (N = 57 couples; average marital duration = 9 years) and one in older adulthood (N = 64 couples; average marital duration = 42 years).

Intergenerational continuity and stability in early family formation.

This study examines intergenerational continuity (mean level similarity) and stability (maintenance of rank ordering of individuals) in age and marital status at the time of becoming a young parent using prospective data from 3 generations of 585 families. G2 participants were recruited at the age of 5 years and followed until the age of 28, by which time 227 had become parents themselves. The findings suggest that despite dramatic intergenerational discontinuities with young adults, on average, now being more likely to be unmarried and older at the time of becoming parents than in previous generations, intergenerational stability in age and marital status at the time of becoming a young parent is still substantial.

If He Is in Shape, So Is the Marriage: Perceptions of Physical Fitness and Exercise and Older Couples' Marital Functioning.

The current study explored concordance in spouses' perceptions about exercise and how these perceptions predicted observed and self-reported marital functioning using a sample of 64 older married couples. Although couples were similarly motivated to exercise, their views on their physical fitness and potential barriers to exercise were uncorrelated. Dyadic analyses suggested that spouses' exercise perceptions, particularly husbands', were associated with how spouses treated each other during a marital problem-solving task and with their concurrent and future marital satisfaction.

Beyond "Lots of Hugs and Kisses": Expressions of Parental Love From Parents and Their Young Children in Two-Parent, Financially Stable Families.

Given that parental love is essential for children's optimal development, the current study gathered examples of how parental love was demonstrated within parent-child relationships. Fifty-eight two-parent, financially stable families consisting of a mother, father, and young child (3-7 years old) from the Midwest were interviewed regarding how they demonstrated or perceived parental love. Results from an inductive thematic analysis revealed considerable variability in how parental love was demonstrated, with five themes emerging that overlapped between parents and their children: playing or doing activities together, demonstrating affection, creating structure, helping or supporting, and giving gifts or treats.

Romantic relationships and alcohol use: A long-term, developmental perspective.

This study considers the developmental origins of alcohol use in young adulthood. Despite substantial evidence linking committed romantic relationships to less problematic alcohol use in adulthood, the uniformity of these protective benefits across different romantic relationships is unclear. Further, the extent to which the establishment and maintenance of these romantic relationships is preceded by earlier adolescence alcohol use remains unknown.

The Meta Marriage: Links Between Older Couples' Relationship Narratives and Marital Satisfaction.

Drawing upon a relatively understudied population and a unique observational task, the current study sought to examine how older couples' interactional behaviors during a relationship narrative task were associated with marital satisfaction over time. Using observational data from a sample of 64 older, higher-functioning married couples, we analyzed a series of Actor-Partner Independence Models (APIM) to explore how couples' interactional behaviors during a relationship narrative task were associated with spouses' marital satisfaction both concurrently and one year later. Analyses revealed that spouses' behaviors (e.

Finer Distinctions: Variability in Satisfied Older Couples' Problem-Solving Behaviors.

This study utilized observational and self-report data from 64 maritally satisfied and stable older couples to explore if there were meaningful differences in how couples approached marital disagreements. Using a typology approach to classify couples based on their behaviors in a 15-minute problem-solving interaction, findings revealed four types of couples: (1) problem solvers (characterized by both spouses' higher problem-solving skills and warmth), (2) supporters (characterized by both spouses' notable warmth), (3) even couples (characterized by both spouses' moderate problem-solving skills and warmth), and (4) cool couples (characterized by both spouses' greater negativity and lower problem-solving skills and warmth). Despite the differences in these behaviors, all couples had relatively high marital satisfaction and functioning.