“When people say, ‘I’m committed to my relationship,’ they can mean two things,” said study co-author Benjamin Karney, a professor of psychology and co-director of the Relationship Institute at UCLA. “One thing they can mean is, ‘I really like this relationship and want it to continue.’ However, commitment is more than just that.”

A deeper level of commitment, the psychologists report, is a much better predictor of lower divorce rates and fewer problems in marriage.

“It’s easy to be committed to your relationship when it’s going well,” said senior study author Thomas Bradbury, a psychology professor who co-directs the Relationship Institute. “As a relationship changes, however, shouldn’t you say at some point something like, ‘I’m committed to this relationship, but it’s not going very well — I need to have some resolve, make some sacrifices and take the steps I need to take to keep this relationship moving forward. It’s not just that I like the relationship, which is true, but that I’m going to step up and take active steps to maintain this relationship, even if it means I’m not going to get my way in certain areas’?

“This,” Bradbury said, “is the other kind of commitment: the difference between ‘I like this relationship and I’m committed to it’ and ‘I’m committed to doing what it takes to make this relationship work.’ When you and your partner are struggling a bit, are you going to do what’s difficult when you don’t want to? At 2 a.m., are you going to feed the baby?”

The couples that were willing to make sacrifices within their relationships were more effective in solving their problems, the psychologists found. “It’s a robust finding,” Bradbury said. “The second kind of commitment predicted lower divorce rates and slower rates of deterioration in the relationship.”

Of the 172 married couples in the study, 78.5 percent were still married after 11 years, and 21.5 percent were divorced. The couples in which both people were willing to make sacrifices for the sake of the marriage were significantly more likely to have lasting and happy marriages, according to Bradbury, Karney and lead study author Dominik Schoebi, a former UCLA postdoctoral scholar who is currently at Switzerland’s University of Fribourg.

For the study, the couples — all first-time newlyweds — were given statements that gauged their level of commitment. They were asked to what extent they agreed or disagreed with statements like “I want my marriage to stay strong no matter what rough times we may encounter,” “My marriage is more important to me than almost anything else in my life,” “Giving up something for my partner is frequently not worth the trouble” and “It makes me feel good to sacrifice for my partner.” The psychologists videotaped the couples’ interactions and measured how they behaved toward each other.

The psychologists also conducted follow-ups with the couples every six months for the first four years (and again later in their marriages), The couples were asked about their relationship history, their feelings toward each other, the stress in their lives, their level of social support, and their childhood and family, among other subjects.

The research is published online in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, the premier journal in social psychology, and will be published in an upcoming print edition.

‘We’re not saying it’s easy’

So what does it mean to be committed to your marriage?

“It means do what it takes to make the relationship successful. That’s what this research is saying. That’s what commitment really means,” Karney said. “In a long-term relationship, both parties cannot always get their way.”

When a couple has a dispute, they have many choices of how to respond, the psychologists said.

“One choice,” Karney said, “is if you dig your heels in, then I can dig my heels in too. I can say, ‘You’re wrong. Listen to me!’ But if this relationship is really important to me, I’m willing to say, ‘I will compromise.’ What is my goal? Is it to win this battle? Is it to preserve the relationship? The behaviors I might engage in to win this conflict are different from those that are best for the relationship. The people who think more about protecting the relationship over the long term are more likely to think this is not that big a problem.”

“When the stakes are high, our relationships are vulnerable,” Bradbury said. “When we’re under a great deal of stress or when there is a high-stakes decision on which you disagree, those are defining moments in a relationship. What our data indicate is that committing to the relationship rather than committing to your own agenda and your own immediate needs is a far better strategy. We’re not saying it’s easy.”

How do you do this when it’s difficult?

“Find ways to compromise, or at least have the conversation that allows you and your partner to see things eye to eye,” Bradbury said. “Often, we don’t have the big conversations that we need in our relationship. The very act of communicating in difficult times can be as important as the outcome of the conversation. Everybody has the opportunity to engage in a conflict, or not, to say, ‘You’re wrong, I’m right.’ When people are in it for the long term, they are often willing to make sacrifices and view themselves as a team. They both are.”

The couples whose marriages lasted were better at this than the couples who divorced, Bradbury and Karney said.

“The people who ended their marriages would have said they were very committed to the marriage,” Bradbury said. “But they did not have the resolve to say, ‘Honey, we need to work on this; it’s going to be hard, but it’s important.’ The successful couples were able to shift their focus away from whether ‘I win’ or ‘you win’ to ‘Are we going to keep this relationship afloat?’ That is the ideal.”

In a marriage, disagreement is inevitable, but conflict is optional — a choice we make, Bradbury and Karney said. When the psychologists give workshops for couples, they encourage them to discuss a source of disagreement. Finding such a topic is rarely, if ever, a problem.

The psychologists recommend against “bank-account relationships,” in which you keep score of how often you get your way and how often you compromise.

The research was funded by the National Institute of Mental Health and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (both part of the National Institutes of Health) and the UCLA Academic Senate.

The ‘invisible forces’ in your marriage

Have you ever noticed that some couples seem to be in sync with each other while other couples are much less so, and wondered why?

In another new study that used data on the couples who were still married after 11 years, Karney, Bradbury, Schoebi and Baldwin Way, an assistant professor of psychology at Ohio State University and former UCLA psychology postdoctoral scholar, suggest that some people, on the basis of their genetic makeup, appear to be more responsive to their spouse’s emotional states.

Their study appears in the online edition of the journal Emotion, published by the American Psychological Association. It will also be published in an upcoming print edition of the journal.

Building on prior research, the psychologists hypothesize that a gene — the serotonin transporter gene 5-HTTLPR — might play a role in making us more, or less, responsive to our spouse’s emotions. Some people have one variant of the gene, and some have a second variant.

The two variants of the gene strengthen or weaken the link between your emotions and your spouse’s emotions, the psychologists report. People with one variant (called the “short form”) tend to stay angry, sad or happy longer than people with the other variant.

“The extent to which we are connected, to which my emotions become your emotions, is stronger or weaker as a function of the serotonin transporter gene 5-HTTLPR,” Bradbury said.

“In the face of a negative event, your genes control how long your reaction lasts,” Karney said. “What we are showing in this paper is that if I have one form of this gene, I’m more responsive to my partner’s emotional states, and if I have the other form, I’m less responsive.”

“I think this creaks open a door,” Bradbury said, “to a field of psychology that helps people to realize that who they are and who their partner is, is actually in their biology. Who you are and how you respond to me has a lot to do with things that are totally outside your control. My partner’s biology is invisible to me; I have no clue about it. The more I can appreciate that the connection between who I am and who my partner is may be biologically mediated leads me to be much more appreciative of invisible forces that constrain our behavior.”

While the researchers suspect the role of 5-HTTLPR is important, they say there is probably a “constellation of important genes” that plays a role in how responsive we are to emotions.

“It’s much more complex than a single gene,” Bradbury said.

This research may imply that we should be forgiving of the behavior of a loved one and not demand that a spouse change her or his behavior, the psychologists said.

“If it’s so easy for you to tell your partner to change, perhaps you should just change yourself,” Bradbury said. “Go ahead and take that on, see how that goes.”

Bradbury and Karney are writing a book tentatively titled “Love Me Slender,” scheduled for publication next year, which connects one’s relationship with one’s physical health. Decisions we make about our health when we’re in a relationship are closely connected with our partner and his or her health, they argue.

Perhaps all this research is a reminder than when choosing a relationship, choose carefully and wisely — and even then, don’t expect it to be easy.

“They don’t want to rock the boat or upset the sense of social harmony,” says Julie Exline, a Case Western Reserve psychologist and lead author of the study.

Turning down cake or cookies when others are indulging is tough for everyone, but it poses a special problem for people-pleasers, Exline says. If people-pleasers feel a sense of social pressure to eat, they will often eat more in an attempt to match what others around them are eating.

But even if people-pleasers overeat in order to keep others comfortable, they may pay an emotional price.

“Those who overeat in order to please others tend to regret their choices later. It doesn’t feel good to give in to social pressures,” Exline says.

The research findings were reported in the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology article, “People-Pleasing through Eating: Sociotropy Presents Greater Eating in Response to Perceived Social Pressure.”

This study looked at the eating habits, but, Exline says, the same behaviors that affect food consumption can surface in other areas of the individual’s life. For example, people-pleasers may feel anxious or guilty if they outperform others in areas such as academics, athletics or relationship success. People-pleasers have a strong desire to avoid posing a threat to others, so they often put a lot of energy into trying to keep others comfortable.

Exline led a two-part study of 101 college students (41 men and 60 women) who completed a questionnaire that assessed characteristics for people-pleasing, also known as “sociotropy.” Students high in people-pleasing were those who tended to put others’ needs before their own, worried about hurting others, and were sensitive to criticism, among other behaviors.

After answering these questions along with some other background measures, students were seated with a female actor who was posing as a second participant in the study. The experimenter handed a bowl of M&M candies to the actor, who took a small handful of candies (about 5) before offering the bowl to the participant. After taking the candies, participants reported how many they took and why. Researchers also assessed the number of candies taken.

High sociotropy (people-pleasing) scores were associated with taking more candy, both in this laboratory experiment and in a second study involving recall of real-life eating situations.

“People-pleasers feel more intense pressure to eat when they believe that their eating will help another person feel more comfortable,” Exline says. “Almost everyone has been in a situation in which they’ve felt this pressure, but people-pleasers seem especially sensitive to it.”

The new research, by child psychiatrists and neuroscientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, is the first to show that changes in this critical region of children’s brain anatomy are linked to a mother’s nurturing.

Their research is published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Early Edition.

“This study validates something that seems to be intuitive, which is just how important nurturing parents are to creating adaptive human beings,” says first author Joan L. Luby, MD. “I think the public health implications suggest that we should pay more attention to parents’ nurturing, and we should do what we can as a society to foster these skills because clearly nurturing has a very, very big impact on later development.”

The brain-imaging study involved children ages 7 to 10 who had participated in an earlier study of preschool depression that Luby and her colleagues began about a decade ago. That study involved children, ages 3 to 6, who had symptoms of depression, other psychiatric disorders or were mentally healthy with no known psychiatric problems.

As part of the initial study, the children were closely observed and videotaped interacting with a parent, almost always a mother, as the parent was completing a required task, and the child was asked to wait to open an attractive gift. How much or how little the parent was able to support and nurture the child in this stressful circumstance — which was designed to approximate the stresses of daily parenting — was evaluated by raters who knew nothing about the child’s health or the parent’s temperament.

“It’s very objective,” says Luby, professor of child psychiatry. “Whether a parent was considered a nurturer was not based on that parent’s own self-assessment. Rather, it was based on their behavior and the extent to which they nurtured their child under these challenging conditions.”

The study didn’t observe parents and children in their homes or repeat stressful exercises, but other studies of child development have used similar methods as valid measurements of whether parents tend to be nurturers when they interact with their children.

For the current study, the researchers conducted brain scans on 92 of the children who had had symptoms of depression or were mentally healthy when they were studied as preschoolers. The imaging revealed that children without depression who had been nurtured had a hippocampus almost 10 percent larger that children whose mothers were not as nurturing.

“For years studies have underscored the importance of an early, nurturing environment for good, healthy outcomes for children,” Luby says. “But most of those studies have looked at psychosocial factors or school performance. This study, to my knowledge, is the first that actually shows an anatomical change in the brain, which really provides validation for the very large body of early childhood development literature that had been highlighting the importance of early parenting and nurturing. Having a hippocampus that’s almost 10 percent larger just provides concrete evidence of nurturing’s powerful effect.”

Luby says the smaller volumes in depressed children might be expected because studies in adults have shown the same results. What did surprise her was that nurturing made such a big difference in mentally healthy children.

“We found a very strong relationship between maternal nurturing and the size of the hippocampus in the healthy children,” she says.

Although 95 percent of the parents whose nurturing skills were evaluated during the earlier study were biological mothers, the researchers say that the effects of nurturing on the brain are likely to be the same, for any primary caregiver — whether they are fathers, grandparents or adoptive parents.

The fact that the researchers found a larger hippocampus in the healthy children who were nurtured is striking, Luby says, because the hippocampus is such an important brain structure.

When the body faces stresses, the brain activates the autonomic nervous system, an involuntary system of nerves that controls the release of stress hormones. Those hormones help us cope with stress by increasing the heart rate and helping the body adapt. The hippocampus is the main brain structure involved in that response. It’s also key in learning and memory, and larger volumes would suggest a link to improved performance in school, among other things.

Past animal studies have indicated that a nurturing mother can influence brain development, and many studies in human children have identified improvements in school performance and healthier development in children raised in a nurturing environment. But until now, there has not been solid evidence linking a nurturing parent to changes in brain anatomy in children.

“Studies in rats have shown that maternal nurturance, specifically in the form of licking, produces changes in genes that then produce changes in receptors that increase the size of the hippocampus,” Luby says. “That phenomenon has been replicated in primates, but it hasn’t really been clear whether the same thing happens in humans. Our study suggests a clear link between nurturing and the size of the hippocampus.”

She says educators who work with families who have young children may improve school performance and child development by not only teaching parents to work on particular tasks with their children but by showing parents how to work with their children.

“Parents should be taught how to nurture and support their children. Those are very important elements in healthy development,” Luby says.

“Although church-based friendship networks seem to bolster religiosity across the board, the effect of how enmeshed people are in congregational friendships is stronger on religious behavior than on beliefs. This makes sense — church-goers may not necessarily chat about the finer points of theological beliefs, such as the existence of demons, but they do seem to talk about things like prayer requests or upcoming church events, things that more directly lead to an effect on religious behavior,” said Samuel Stroope, a doctoral candidate at Baylor. “Also, friends at church can see behavior. Beliefs are harder to monitor.”

He wrote an article that was published online in the journal Sociology of Religion and will appear in print in the summer issue. It may be viewed at: http://socrel.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2011/10/31/socrel.srr052.full.pdf+html

Stroope analyzed data from the Baylor Religion Survey, a random survey of more than 1,600 adults nationwide. The survey asked questions on topics ranging from belief in the supernatural to social and political attitudes. The survey, designed by Baylor scholars, was conducted by The Gallup Organization.

To tap people’s immersion in friendships at church, the survey asked, “What proportion of your friends attend your place of worship?” Responses included “none” (32 percent), “a few” (42 percent), “about half” (12 percent) “most” (13 percent) and “all” (2 percent). Participants also were questioned about their religious behaviors and beliefs. Stroope limited his analysis to American Christians who ever go to church. His study was the first to test the relationship between congregational friendship networks and a variety of religiosity indicators using a national sample of both.

Stroope found that the larger the proportion of friends a person has in his or her congregation, the more likely that the individual will be active in their religious behaviors. The study looked at two broad categories of religious behaviors. First, church activities were defined as activities such as choir participation, worship service attendance, Sunday school participation, going to church social events and doing church-related volunteer work. Second, devotional activities were defined as activities such as frequency of prayer, Bible reading, taking part in a Bible study and frequency of sharing faith with others.

The study uncovered variations by religious tradition. Although having more church friends was always linked to more participation in religious activities, there were differences between Catholics and Protestants but not differences among Protestant traditions such as evangelical and mainline Protestants. Stroope found that the effect of congregational friends on religious activities was weaker for Catholics than for Protestants.

“In other words, Catholic congregations received diminishing participation returns for the congregational friendships of their members in comparison to Protestant congregations,” Stroope said.

He suggested that this pattern may in part reflect the fact that the contents of Protestant and Catholic congregational social networks have different norms. For example:

• Protestant friends encourage a person to view church as a kind of social hub where a person participates in committees, social events and seeks to find intimate community. For Protestants, the focus is that Christ is present “where two or three are gathered.”
• Catholic friends encourage a person to view church life as primarily centered on elements such as the Eucharist, baptism and liturgy. A big focus is that Christ is concretely present in the Eucharist, and a person goes to Mass to meet Christ there. Turning to devotional activities, the data showed no meaningful differences between religious traditions in how church friends bolstered individuals’ devotional activities. Friendship networks in all religious traditions seem to similarly bolster the devotional behavior measured in this study.

The study also found a weaker but consistent link between church friends and various religious beliefs. People with no friends at church held fewer supernatural beliefs than people who reported that some or more of their friends attended their church. Having some as opposed to no friends at church was the important cutting point associated with affirming a significantly greater number of supernatural beliefs. Meanwhile, when it came to the view of the Bible, drawing a greater proportion of one’s friends from church was associated with increased odds of affirming that the Bible “should be taken literally, word for word on all subjects,” Stroope said.

And “regardless of where you go to church—to a Catholic, evangelical Protestant or mainline Protestant congregation—if you have more friends there, then on average you’re more likely to hold an exclusive view of heaven and believe that non-Christians are excluded from heaven,” he said. The study specifically looked at whether respondents believe that Muslims, Buddhists and non-religious persons do not go to heaven.

These results are part of a group of studies that are being presented today at a social psychology conference in San Diego, CA, on new, sometimes small, ways to make meaningful impacts on people’s lives. “This is an exciting time in the field of social psychology,” says Timothy Wilson of the University of Virginia who wrote Redirect: The Surprising New Science of Psychological Change. “Increasingly, researchers are devising theory-based interventions that have dramatic effects in the areas of education, prejudice reduction, adolescent behavior problems, health, and many others.”

The idea behind such intervention work is to change the behavior for a particular group of individuals. Reducing student bullying, increasing interest among teens in math and science, and improving perceptions of women in engineering are the focus of today’s talks in San Diego.

Reducing student bullying

In the bullying intervention study, Elizabeth Levy Paluck and Hana Shepherd of Princeton University set out at a U.S. public high school to change students’ perceptions that harassment of fellow students is a normal way to gain and maintain status.

“We were interested in the idea that harassment and bullying in schools is a social norm that is not necessarily related to students’ personal feelings,” says Levy Paluck. Her team used social network analysis to identify the students who might have the most influence in setting social norms. A random subset of these students participated in public denouncements of harassment and bullying. The researchers then tracked the social network over one year, also collecting data on disciplinary records and teacher assessments.

Levy Paluck and Shepard found that students who were socially tied to the intervention significantly decreased their perception that harassment and bullying is a desirable norm. At the same time, those students’ decreased their harassment and bullying behavior as measured through disciplinary records, teacher assessments, and independent behavioral observations.

Increasing teens’ interest in math and science

In a different intervention study aimed at changing teen behavior in math and science, researchers did not target the students themselves but rather their parents. The goal was to increase students’ interest in taking courses in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). “We focus on the potential role of parents in motivating their teens to take more STEM courses, because we feel that they have been an untapped resource,” says Judith Harackiewicz of the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

The participants consisted of 188 U.S. high school students and their parents from the longitudinal Wisconsin Study of Families and Work. Harackiewicz and her colleague Janet Hyde found that a relatively simple intervention aimed at parents – two brochures mailed to parents and a website that all highlight the usefulness of STEM courses – led their children to take on average nearly one semester more of science and mathematics in the last two years of high school, compared with the control group. “Our indirect intervention,” funded by the National Science Foundation, “changed the way that parents interacted with their teens, leading to a significant and important change in their teens’ course-taking behavior,” Harackiewicz says.

Improving perceptions of women engineers

“Many of these interventions work by changing the stories people tell themselves about who they are and why they do what they do, in ways that lead to self-sustaining changes in behavior,” says Wilson of the University of Virginia. For example, new work being presented by Greg Walton of Stanford University tested the effects of two interventions on female engineering students, one aimed at making them feel like they belong in engineering and another at teaching them to reflect on core values to help them cope with stress.

Both interventions improved the first-year grades of women enrolled in male-dominated engineering majors compared to a control group, eliminating a gender gap. The two interventions worked in different ways, however: Women in the belonging group were able to build better relationships with male engineers, while women in the value-training group made more friends outside of engineering, according to the study funded by the Spencer Foundation. “The two interventions suggest the power of social-psychological approaches to help people cope with settings in which their group is underrepresented and negatively stereotyped,” Walton says.

Poor schools even influence how parental education protects kids from becoming overweight.

“It was once thought that family income was the main factor when we talk about the research on adolescent weight,” said Molly Martin, assistant professor of sociology and demography. “That’s not true. The environments the children live in play a key role in weight problems among adolescents.”

Martin said that the level of a school’s financial resources significantly predicted adolescent weight problems, but the average education level of the parents for students in those schools did not.

The researchers said that students with well-educated parents are less likely to be overweight. However, the effect of having a better-educated parent is minimized if the student attends a poor school, said Michelle Frisco, associate professor of sociology and demography.

A parent with a graduate degree and who has a child in a poor school is more likely to raise an overweight adolescent than a parent with an eighth grade education who has an adolescent enrolled in a rich school, according to researchers.

“The environment can actually limit our ability to make the choices that we all think we make freely,” said Frisco.

Many experts believe that well-educated parents can use more tools to help their children maintain a healthy weight, despite environmental pressures, Martin said. For instance, they can recognize health issues associated with being overweight and are more comfortable communicating with doctors. Well-educated parents can also teach their children about nutrition and food choices.

The researchers, who report their findings in the current issue of Social Science and Medicine, analyzed data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health that included information about 16,133 students in 132 schools.

Poor schools may influence overweight adolescents in several ways beyond providing the unhealthy food choices at cafeterias that are typically blamed for adolescents being overweight, said Martin.

According to Martin and Frisco, who worked with Claudia Nau, a graduate student in sociology, and Kristin Burnett, of the U.S. Census Bureau, poor schools may not have the resources to pay for athletic and fitness programs. Better-funded schools may offer food choices that are unhealthy, but they may also have the means to provide additional healthy food options, such as vegetarian dishes, while schools with limited resources may rely more on vending machine income.

Stress also may play a role in the weight gain of students at poor schools.

“Schools with limited financial resources tend to be more stressful environments,” said Martin. “Stress promotes weight gains and usually the worst kinds of weight gains.” Stress tends to promote excess weight gain in the midsection, which is associated with such health problems as cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes.

“Love is not merely sexual desire nor a unique emotion but rather a motivational drive-like state,” says Arthur Aron of State University of New York at Stony Brook, whose research involves the use of fMRI brain scans in understanding love. New research, being presented today at a conference of personality and social psychologists in San Diego, CA, is shedding light into the role romantic love plays in the formation, development, and maintenance of close relationships.

The dark side of love

“From an evolutionary perspective, love binds romantic partners together for the long term and is associated with a wealth of positive relationship processes,” says Jon Maner of Florida State University. Yet, love can also cause problems. “The more love one feels for one’s partner, the more one has to lose if the relationship ends,” he says. “It’s all about protecting one’s relationship.”

Maner’s research team set out to investigate just how love may sensitize people to relationship threats. In three experiments involving 130 people involved in long-term relationships, the researchers tested people’s responses to attractive rivals. In one of the experiments, for example, they gave participants the opportunity to blast attractive rivals with painful, but non-injurous, blasts of white noise. In another, participants reviewed mock profiles for a student dating service and could then belittle attractive rivals.

To compare feelings of romantic love versus sexual attraction, researchers primed some participants in advance by having them write essays about times they had strong feelings of love for their partners and had some write either neutral essays or ones involving a time about sexual attraction to their partners. In each experiment, researchers found that people primed with feelings of love for their partner behaved more aggressively and belittled their rivals more. “This was especially the case for people who were chronically jealous and who worried about infidelity,” Maner says.

“Experiencing strong feelings of love their partner made them vigilant to the potential for infidelity and led them to behave aggressively toward attractive rivals,” Maner says. “Thus, while love serves an important relationship function – and in that sense is a ‘many-splendored thing’ – it can also have a dark side.”

The resourceful side of love

Another recent study looking at love form an evolutionary perspective found that even when a partner chooses to say “I love you” depends on a cost-benefit analysis of the relationship and what best protects it.

Across six studies, Josh Ackerman of the MIT Sloan School of Management and his colleagues found that although people think that women are the first to confess love and feel happier when they receive such confessions, it is actually men who confess love first and feel happier. They also found that saying “I love you” makes the man in a couple feel most happy if the confession occurs before the couple has sex and makes women most happy if the confession happens after sex.

“This work shows that our intuitions are not always correct,” Ackerman says. “When and why we express romantic love are guided by deep-seated motivations that are best understood in an economic framework. Love confessions are akin to economic resources that people use to negotiate evolved romantic interests.”

The studies were published in the June 2011 Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

The health side of love

Researchers are also finding that love can play a critical role in the health of long-term relationships and of the couples themselves. Lisa Diamond of the University of Utah studies the multiple levels on which individuals in romantic relationships influence each others’ moods and physical functioning.

Diamond’s research team studied 34 co-habitating couples and tracked their health and well-being before, during, and after a four- to seven-day separation. The tracking included testing the couples’ saliva for cortisol, a hormone associated with stress. Physical separations increased cortisol levels and had negative impacts on their sleep and levels of positive interactions. “During separations, only lengthy phone calls appeared to ‘stand in’ for contact,” she says. “The findings can contribute to our emerging understanding of the processes through which longstanding romantic ties are beneficial for our health.”

Hui Liu said the findings, which appear in the research journal Social Science & Medicine, suggest older people have more coping skills to deal with the stress of divorce.

“It’s clear to me that we need more social and family support for the younger divorced groups,” said Liu, assistant professor of sociology. “This could include divorce counseling to help people handle the stress, or offering marital therapy or prevention programs to maintain marital satisfaction.”

Liu analyzed the self-reported health of 1,282 participants in Americans’ Changing Lives, a long-term national survey. She measured the gap in health status between those who remained married during the 15-year study period and those who transitioned from marriage to divorce, at certain ages and among different birth cohorts, or generations.

Liu found the gap was wider at younger ages. For example, among people born in the 1950s, those who got divorced between the ages of 35 and 41 reported more health problems in relation to their continuously married counterparts than those who got divorced in the 44 to 50 age range.

From a generational perspective, the negative health impact was stronger for baby boomers than it was for older generations – a finding that surprised Liu.

“I would have expected divorce to carry less stress for the younger generation, since divorce is more prevalent for them,” she said.

Liu said this may be because the pressure to marry and stay married was stronger for older generations, and so those who did divorce may have been among the most unhappily married – and thus felt a certain degree of relief when they did divorce.

Overall, the study found that those who transition from marriage to divorce experience a more rapid health decline than those who remain married. However, those who remained divorced during the entire study period showed no difference than those who remained married.

“This suggests it is not the status of being married or divorced, per se, that affects health, but instead is the process of transitioning from marriage to divorce that is stressful and hurts health,” Liu said.

“After unscrambling sentences containing religiously oriented words, participants in our studies exercised significantly more self-control,” says psychology graduate student and lead researcher on the study, Kevin Rounding.

Study participants were given a sentence containing five words to unscramble. Some contained religious themes and others did not. After unscrambling the sentences, participants were asked to complete a number of tasks that required self-control – enduring discomfort, delaying gratification, exerting patience, and refraining from impulsive responses.

Participants who had unscrambled the sentences containing religious themes had more self-control in completing their tasks.

“Our most interesting finding was that religious concepts were able to refuel self-control after it had been depleted by another unrelated task,” says Mr. Rounding. “In other words, even when we would predict people to be unable to exert self-control, after completing the religiously themed task they defied logic and were able to muster self-control.”

“Until now, I believed religion was a matter of faith; people had little ‘practical’ use for religion,” Mr. Rounding explains. “This research actually suggests that religion can serve a very useful function in society. People can turn to religion not just for transcendence and fears regarding death and an after-life but also for practical purposes.”

Other members of the research team include psychology graduate student Albert Lee and Queen’s professors Jill Jacobson and Li-Jun Ji. The study was published in Psychological Science.

When presented with scenarios that could possibly but not obviously indicate child abuse, 2,109 physicians from across the United States who participated in the study were most likely to suspect maltreatment rather than accident for white children from families with low socioeconomic status than for black children with low socioeconomic status or for either black or white children of high socioeconomic status.

These findings contradict previous studies that linked differentiated diagnosis to race, reporting increased likelihood to consider abuse in black patients.

The new study appears online in advance of publication in the Journal of Pediatrics.

“It is possible that we were able to determine that socioeconomic status has a more significant impact on the physician’s diagnosis than race, when previous studies did not see this, because most of these earlier studies did not include a significant number of low-income white patients and thus were unable to evaluate the influence of family income level,” said Antoinette Laskey, M.D., M.P.H., associate professor of pediatrics at the IU School of Medicine, a Regenstrief Institute affiliated scientist and a physician with Riley Hospital for Children at Indiana University Health and with Wishard Health Services.

Even among pediatricians with expertise in child abuse evaluations, broad variability exists in determination of abuse.

“Interactions with patients are driven by past experiences and stereotypes. Neither are necessarily negative,” Dr. Laskey said. “Past experiences provide valuable information. A stereotype is a rule of thumb, such as ‘police are authority figures and should be obeyed’ or ‘a hooded figure who walks toward you in the dark should be considered a potential threat,’ that helps us categorize complicated environments. It is important to understand what stereotypes — socioeconomic status, as we found in this study — influence physician decision-making.”

Her next study investigates the multiple factors that drive physician decision-making in child neglect situations as the health care team determines whether an incident was a tragic accident or was avoidable.