The dance of smiles: Comparing smile synchrony in nondistressed and therapy-seeking couples.

Dyadic affective processes are key determinants of romantic relationship quality. One such process termed emotional synchrony (i.e.

Promoting attachment security during the transition to college: A pilot study of emotionally focused mentoring.

Attachment insecurity is a transdiagnostic marker of risk associated with interpersonal emotion dysregulation and adverse psychosocial outcomes across the lifespan. Few interventions target the enhancement of attachment security in late adolescence. Most programs focus on strengthening the adolescent-caregiver relationship; meanwhile, youth increasingly spend less time with their families and look to peer relationships as a source of connection, particularly as they transition to college.

Trauma, adversity, and biological aging: behavioral mechanisms relevant to treatment and theory.

Although stress and adversity are largely universal experiences, people exposed to greater hardship are at increased risk for negative health consequences. Recent studies identify accelerated biological aging as a mechanism that could explain how trauma and adversity gives rise to poor health, and advances in this area of study coincide with technological innovations in the measurement of biological aging, particularly epigenetic profiles consistent with accelerated aging derived from DNA methylation. In this review, we provide an overview of the current literature examining how adversity might accelerate biological aging, with a specific focus on social and health behaviors.

Loneliness and social isolation are not associated with executive functioning in a cross-sectional study of cognitively healthy older adults.

The literature on the relationship between social interaction and executive functions (EF) in older age is mixed, perhaps stemming from differences in EF measures and the conceptualization/measurement of social interaction. We investigated the relationship between social interaction and EF in 102 cognitively unimpaired older adults (ages 65-90). Participants received an EF battery to measure working memory, inhibition, shifting, and global EF.

Loneliness and depression: bidirectional mendelian randomization analyses using data from three large genome-wide association studies.

Major depression (MD) is a serious psychiatric illness afflicting nearly 5% of the world's population. A large correlational literature suggests that loneliness is a prospective risk factor for MD; correlational assocations of this nature may be confounded for a variety of reasons. This report uses Mendelian Randomization (MR) to examine potentially causal associations between loneliness and MD.

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.

The paucity of morality in everyday talk.

Given its centrality in scholarly and popular discourse, morality should be expected to figure prominently in everyday talk. We test this expectation by examining the frequency of moral content in three contexts, using three methods: (a) Participants' subjective frequency estimates (N = 581); (b) Human content analysis of unobtrusively recorded in-person interactions (N = 542 participants; n = 50,961 observations); and (c) Computational content analysis of Facebook posts (N = 3822 participants; n = 111,886 observations). In their self-reports, participants estimated that 21.

Spinning Your Wheels: Psychological Overinvolvement and Actigraphy-Assessed Sleep Efficiency Following Marital Separation.

Background: This study investigated the ways in which adults reflect on their psychological experiences amid a recent marital separation and how these patterns of thought, manifest in language, are associated with self-reported negative affect and actigraphy-assessed sleep disturbance.

Methods: In a sample of 138 recently separated adults assessed three times over five months, we examined within- and between-person associations among psychological overinvolvement (operationalized using verbal immediacy derived as a function of the language participants used to discuss their relationship history and divorce experience), continued attachment to an ex-partner, negative affect, and sleep efficiency.

Results: The association between psychological overinvolvement and negative affect operated at the within-person level, whereas the associations between psychological overinvolvement and sleep disturbance, as well as negative affect and sleep disturbance, operated at the between-person level.

Cardiovascular reactivity, stress, and personal emotional salience: Choose your tasks carefully.

Both greater cardiovascular reactivity and lesser reactivity ("blunting") to laboratory stressors are linked to poor health outcomes, including among people who have a history of traumatic experiences. In a sample of recently separated and divorced adults (N = 96), this study examined whether differences in cardiovascular reactivity might be explained by differences in the personal emotional salience of the tasks and trauma history. Participants were assessed for trauma history, current distress related to their marital dissolution, and cardiovascular reactivity during two tasks, a serial subtraction math stressor task and a divorce-recall task.

Good Theories in Need of Better Data: Combining Clinical and Social Psychological Approaches to Study the Mechanisms Linking Relationships and Health.

The study of intimate relationships and health is a fast-growing discipline with numerous well-developed theories, many of which outline specific interpersonal behaviors and psychological pathways that may give rise to good or poor health. In this article, we argue that the study of relationships and health can move toward interrogating these mechanisms with greater precision and detail, but doing so will require a shift in the nature of commonly used research methods in this area. Accordingly, we draw heavily on the science of behavior change and discuss six key methodologies that may galvanize the mechanistic study of relationships and health: dismantling studies, factorial studies, experimental therapeutics, experimental mediation research, multiple assessments, and recursive modeling.

Genetically informative analysis of the association between intimate relationship adjustment and health.

Objective: Prior research has found a positive association between the quality or adjustment of an individual's intimate relationship, such as marriage, and their physical health. However, it is possible that this association may be due, at least in part, to confounding variables (i.e.

Relationship dissolution and psychopathology.

Studies using probability samples have yielded cross-sectional and longitudinal associations between relationship dissolution and psychopathology, including depressive, anxiety, and substance use symptoms and disorders. The present review summarizes theory relevant to the association of relationship dissolution to psychopathology, discusses the time course over which postdissolution psychopathology may be most likely to manifest, and selectively reviews empirical findings regarding main and moderated associations between relationship dissolution and psychopathology. We conclude by acknowledging the need for continued study of the association between relationship dissolution and psychopathology, including research that rules out potential rival explanations (i.

A controlled trial of two mind-body interventions for grief in widows and widowers.

Following bereavement, yearning and grief rumination are repetitive cognitive processes that can lead to disordered grief. Mindfulness training (MT) has been shown to reduce maladaptive repetitive thought. The current quasi-randomized controlled trial examined the feasibility, acceptability, and preliminary efficacy of MT for bereavement-related grief.

Divorce, health, and socioeconomic status: An agenda for psychological science.

This brief review article discusses marital dissolution and health with a focus on two specific themes. First, we introduce and discuss the search for plausible causal pathways that link the end of marriage to distal health outcomes. Second, we suggest that the socioeconomic status disruptions that follow divorce represent a plausible causal pathway and emphasize the need for more psychological science in this area of study.

Social baseline theory: State of the science and new directions.

Social baseline theory (SBT) maintains that the primary human ecology is a social ecology. Because of this fact, the theory predicts that humans will find it easier and less energetically taxing to regulate emotion and act when in proximity to familiar and predictable others. This article reviews new empirical and theoretical work related to SBT and highlights areas of needed research.

Hispanic Ethnic Density May Be Protective for Older Black/African American and Non-Hispanic White Populations for Some Health Conditions: An Exploration of Support and Neighborhood Mechanisms.

Background And Purpose: Hispanic ethnic density (HED) is associated with salubrious health outcomes for Hispanics, yet recent research suggests it may also be protective for other groups. The purpose of this study was to test whether HED was protective for other racial-ethnic groups. We tested whether social support or neighborhood social integration mediated the association between high HED and depressive symptoms (CES-D) and physical morbidity 5 years later.

Deep multiple instance learning for foreground speech localization in ambient audio from wearable devices.

Over the recent years, machine learning techniques have been employed to produce state-of-the-art results in several audio related tasks. The success of these approaches has been largely due to access to large amounts of open-source datasets and enhancement of computational resources. However, a shortcoming of these methods is that they often fail to generalize well to tasks from real life scenarios, due to domain mismatch.

Intimate Relationships and Depression: Searching for Causation in the Sea of Association.

This article provides a critical review of existing research on intimate (marriage or marriage-like) relationship distress and risk for depression. Using the meta-framework of research triangulation, we seek to synthesize research evidence across several different methodologies and study designs and to draw the most reliable conclusion regarding a potential causal association between relationship distress and depression. Focusing on existing correlational (i.

Does the Hispanic Mortality Advantage Vary by Marital Status Among Postmenopausal Women in the Women's Health Initiative?

Background: Literature assessing the effect of marital status on mortality has underrepresented, or altogether omitted Hispanics and the potential moderating effect of Hispanic ethnicity on these relationships. Given cultural and network dynamics, marital advantages in older Hispanic women may be greater than other groups given their family-focused, collectivist orientation.

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to understand whether older Hispanic women exhibited a more pronounced marital advantage as compared with non-Hispanic Whites.

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.

Social Distancing as a Health Behavior: County-Level Movement in the United States During the COVID-19 Pandemic Is Associated with Conventional Health Behaviors.

Background: Social distancing-when people limit close contact with others outside their household-is a primary intervention available to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. The importance of social distancing is unlikely to change until effective treatments or vaccines become widely available. However, relatively little is known about how best to promote social distancing.

Marital Status, Close Relationships, and All-Cause Mortality: Results From a 10-Year Study of Nationally Representative Older Adults.

Objective: Becoming widowed is associated with an increased risk of early mortality. Drawing on theoretical literature related to social support and health, the present study evaluated whether the quantity of close relationships might differentially moderate the relationship between marital status (widowed versus married) and mortality risk 10 years later.

Method: Data were obtained from the National Social Life Health and Aging Project.

Beyond the "self" in self-regulation: Family interaction modulates situational self-control by adolescent drug users.

Prevailing views of adolescent self-regulation (ASR) as a relatively stable disposition or skill that an individual possesses in various degrees stand in contrast to a complementary, situational perspective from family systems theory casting ASR as intertwined with ongoing family processes and malleable depending on interpersonal interactions. Using observational data from a large, ethnically diverse sample of substance-using adolescents ( = 458), the current study examines the social context of ASR across 3 increasingly conflictual family interaction tasks. Coders rated ASR and 3 concurrent family interaction patterns: enmeshment, conflict avoidance, and negative affect.

DNA Methylation Across the Serotonin Transporter Gene Following Marital Separation: A Pilot Study.

Background: Marital separation and divorce are stressful life transitions associated with increased risk for a range of poor mental and physical health outcomes. A key task for research in this area is to identify individual differences that may index risk for these adverse outcomes.

Purpose: To examine the association between DNA methylation across the serotonin transporter gene (SLC6A4) and self-reported emotional distress following marital separation.