"You okay, honey?": Marital quality and mental health as correlates to couples' compassion.

Compassion is an inherently interpersonal emotion that motivates caretaking behavior. Yet, couples' expressions of compassion have been largely overlooked by researchers. We capitalized on a unique archive of naturalistic recordings to assess the frequency with which married couples ( = 30) verbally expressed compassion to one another in daily life and tested associations with partners' ratings of marital quality, depression, and neuroticism.

Contextual variation in language input to children: A naturalistic approach.

Children learn what words mean from hearing words used across a variety of contexts. Understanding how different contextual distributions relate to the words young children say is critical because context robustly affects basic learning and memory processes. This study examined children's everyday experiences using naturalistic video recordings to examine two contextual factors-where words are spoken and who speaks the words-through analyzing the nouns in language input and children's own language productions.

Increases in positive emotions as precursors to therapeutic change.

Increases in positive emotions may not only be indicators of progress in therapy but also precursors to that improvement. Conducted in a psychology training clinic, this naturalistic, repeated-measures study tracked changes over the course of therapy in 34 clients' emotional experience and two of the primary targets of clinical interventions, symptom distress and relationship functioning. During treatment, positive emotions increased, negative emotions decreased, and improvements were seen in therapeutic outcomes.

Everyday emotions: Naturalistic observation of specific positive emotions in daily family life.

With technological advances rapidly expanding our ability to collect continuous streams of passive recordings, new techniques for processing and analyzing data of this type are needed. This article presents a feasible, reliable, and valid language-based methodology for scanning large quantities of naturalistic recordings to study specific positive emotions in families. Detailing a keyword approach to identifying and coding verbal expressions of compassion, gratitude, pride, and amusement in video transcripts, this study demonstrates one way of locating phenomena, such as emotion, that arise across many different situations in family life.

Relationship closeness buffers the effects of perceived stress on transcriptomic indicators of cellular stress and biological aging marker p16.

Chronic stress can accelerate biological aging, offering one mechanism through which stress may increase age-related disease risk. Chronic activation of the sympathoadrenal system increases cellular energy production, resulting in cell stress that can initiate cellular senescence, a permanent state of cell growth arrest. Our previous research linked psychosocial stress with increased expression of senescence marker p16; however, less is known about the role of protective psychosocial factors in biological aging.

Daily Mood Reactivity to Stress during Childhood Predicts Internalizing Problems Three Years Later.

The mental health toll of common school problems that many children encounter every day is not well understood. This study examined individual differences in mood reactivity to naturally occurring school problems using daily diaries, and assessed their prospective associations with youth mental health, three years later. At baseline, 47 children ages 8 to 13 years described common problems at school and mood on a daily basis, for 8 weeks.

Chronic stress exposure and daily stress appraisals relate to biological aging marker p16.

Previous research has linked exposure to adverse social conditions with DNA damage and accelerated telomere shortening, raising the possibility that chronic stress may impact biological aging pathways, ultimately increasing risk for age-related diseases. Less clear, however, is whether these stress-related effects extend to additional hallmarks of biological aging, including cellular senescence, a stable state of cell cycle arrest. The present study aimed to investigate associations between psychosocial stress and two markers of cellular aging-leukocyte telomere length (LTL) and cellular senescence signal p16.

Stability of diurnal cortisol measures across days, weeks, and years across middle childhood and early adolescence: Exploring the role of age, pubertal development, and sex.

Effective regulation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis (HPA-axis) has been linked to numerous health outcomes. Within-person variation in diurnal measures of HPA-axis regulation assessed over days, months, and years can range between 50-73% of total variation. In this study of 59 youth (ages 8-13), we quantified the stability of the cortisol awakening response (CAR), the diurnal slope, and tonic cortisol concentrations at waking and bedtime across 8 days (2 sets of 4 consecutive days separated by 3 weeks), 3 weeks, and 3 years.

Interparental conflict and child HPA-axis responses to acute stress: Insights using intensive repeated measures.

Interparental conflict is a common source of psychosocial stress in the lives of children. The purpose of this study was to examine the association between recent interparental conflict and one component of the physiological stress response system, the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA)-axis. Parents of 42 children (ages 8-13 years) completed daily diaries of interparental conflict for 8 weeks.

Daily links between school problems and youth perceptions of interactions with parents: A diary study of school-to-home spillover.

This study examined how academic and peer problems at school are linked to family interactions at home on the same day, using eight consecutive weeks of daily diary data collected from early adolescents (60% female; age = 11.28, = 1.50), mothers and fathers in 47 families.

Children's diurnal cortisol responses to negative events at school and home.

This study examined the within-and between-person associations between daily negative events - peer problems, academic problems and interparental conflict - and diurnal cortisol in school-age children. Salivary cortisol levels were assessed four times per day (at wakeup, 30min later, just before dinner and at bedtime) on eight days in 47 youths ages 8-13 years old (60% female; M age=11.28, SD=1.

Negative and Positive Emotion Responses to Daily School Problems: Links to Internalizing and Externalizing Symptoms.

Examining emotion reactivity and recovery following minor problems in daily life can deepen our understanding of how stress affects child mental health. This study assessed children's immediate and delayed emotion responses to daily problems at school, and examined their correlations with psychological symptoms. On 5 consecutive weekdays, 83 fifth graders (M = 10.

Family environments and leukocyte transcriptome indicators of a proinflammatory phenotype in children and parents.

High conflict and low warmth in families may contribute to immune cells developing a tendency to respond to threats with exaggerated inflammation that is insensitive to inhibitory signaling. We tested associations between family environments and expression of genes bearing response elements for transcription factors that regulate inflammation: nuclear factor kappa B (NF-κB) and glucocorticoid receptor. The overall sample (47 families) completed interviews, questionnaires, and 8-week daily diary assessments of conflict and warmth, which were used to create composite family conflict and warmth scores.

I just want to be left alone: Daily overload and marital behavior.

Stressful, busy days have been linked with increases in angry and withdrawn marital behavior. The process by which stressors in 1 domain, such as work, affect an individual’s behavior in another domain, such as the marital relationship, is known as . Using 56 days of daily diary reports in a diverse sample of 47 wives and 39 husbands, this study examined associations between daily experiences of overload and 3 marital behaviors: overt expressions of anger, disregard of the spouse’s needs (“disregard”), and reductions in affection and disclosure (“distancing”).

Who gives to whom? Testing the support gap hypothesis with naturalistic observations of couple interactions.

We examined sex differences in explicitly supportive behavior exchanges between husbands and wives using naturalistic video-recordings of everyday couple interactions inside the home. Thirty dual-earner, middle class, heterosexual couples with school-age children were recorded in their homes over 4 days. Specific instances of face-to-face explicit couple support in the video-recordings were identified, and the support role assumed by each partner (recipient vs.

Change in parent-child conflict and the HPA-axis: Where should we be looking and for how long?

Objective: Salivary cortisol is increasingly used as a longitudinal indicator of change in neuroendocrine regulation and as a predictor of health outcomes in youth. The purpose of this study was to describe which indices of HPA-axis functioning are sensitive to changes in parent-child conflict over a three week period and to explore the time course under which these changes can be measured.

Methods: Youth (n=47; ages 8-13) completed daily diaries of their conflict with parents for 56 days.

Measurement reactivity and fatigue effects in daily diary research with families.

Methodological challenges associated with measurement reactivity and fatigue were addressed using diary data collected from mothers (n = 47), fathers (n = 39), and children (n = 47; 8-13 years) across 56 consecutive days. Demonstrating the feasibility of extended diary studies with families, on-time compliance rates were upward of 90% for all family members, with only minor within-person declines in weekday compliance over time. Multilevel models revealed slight decreases in mother and father daily reports of parent-child conflict and warmth across days, suggesting possible measurement reactivity.

Emotions and family interactions in childhood: Associations with leukocyte telomere length emotions, family interactions, and telomere length.

Conceptualizations of links between stress and cellular aging in childhood suggest that accumulating stress predicts shorter leukocyte telomere length (LTL). At the same time, several models suggest that emotional reactivity to stressors may play a key role in predicting cellular aging. Using intensive repeated measures, we tested whether exposure or emotional "reactivity" to conflict and warmth in the family were related to LTL.

Children's expressions of positive emotion are sustained by smiling, touching, and playing with parents and siblings: A naturalistic observational study of family life.

Research on family socialization of positive emotion has primarily focused on the infant and toddler stages of development, and relied on observations of parent-child interactions in highly structured laboratory environments. Little is known about how children's spontaneous expressions of positive emotion are maintained in the uncontrolled settings of daily life, particularly within the family and during the school-age years. This naturalistic observational study examines 3 family behaviors-mutual display of positive emotion, touch, and joint leisure-that surround 8- to 12-year-old children's spontaneous expressions of positive emotion, and tests whether these behaviors help to sustain children's expressions.

Short-Term Resilience Processes in the Family.

The authors review naturalistic studies of short-term processes that appear to promote resilience in children in the context of everyday family life and argue that warm and supportive family interactions foster resilience through their cumulative impact on children's emotional and physiological stress response systems. In the short-term, these family interactions promote the experience and expression of positive emotion and healthy patterns of diurnal cortisol. Over time, these internal resources - a propensity to experience positive emotion and a well-functioning hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis system -enhance a child's capacity to avoid, or limit, the deleterious effects of adversity.

Psychological well-being and job stress predict marital support interactions: A naturalistic observational study of dual-earner couples in their homes.

Video recordings of couples in their everyday lives at home were used to study how supportive interactions relate to psychological well-being and experiences of job stress. Thirty dual-earner, middle-class, heterosexual couples with school-age children were videotaped in their homes over 4 days and completed self-report measures of depressive symptoms, trait neuroticism, and job stress. After isolating the specific instances of marital support in the video recordings, the support role assumed by each partner (recipient vs.

Daily self-disclosure and sleep in couples.

Objective: An emerging literature provides evidence for the association between romantic relationship quality and sleep, an important factor in health and well-being. However, we still know very little about the specific relationship processes that affect sleep behavior. Therefore, the goal of this study was to examine how self-disclosure, an important relational process linked to intimacy, relationship satisfaction, and health, is associated with sleep behavior.

A naturalistic observational study of children's expressions of anger in the family context.

Traditional approaches to the study of children's expressions of anger rely on tightly controlled study environments to test hypotheses about outcomes and correlates of expression characteristics. An unexplored area in the study of emotion expression is a naturalistic examination of school-age children's spontaneously occurring expressions of emotion in their real, uncontrolled family contexts. This observational study describes the naturally occurring characteristics and contexts of 8- to 12-year-old children's anger expressions with family members.

Positive and negative emotion in the daily life of dual-earner couples with children.

What is the emotional valence of family life and what factors contribute to this valence? Research indicates that most people are mildly happy but also that the years devoted to raising children are associated with diminished happiness and well-being, particularly for mothers. Public discourse is increasingly concerned that parenthood does not make us happy, but little empirical work has actually studied the emotional valence of family life. We addressed this gap in the literature with an intensive examination of the emotional valence of dual-earner family life.

Job stress and family social behavior: the moderating role of neuroticism.

We investigated the role of neuroticism in the associations between job stress and working adults' social behavior during the first hour after work with their spouse and school-age children. Thirty dual-earner families were videotaped in their homes on two weekday afternoons and evenings. An observational coding system was developed to assess behavioral involvement and negative emotion expression.