New research sheds light on the temporal relationships between depressive symptoms and couple relationship intimacy. The findings have been published in the Journal of Marriage and Family.
“Relationship quality and mental health are both important to individual well-being and they are interconnected. A better understanding of the directionality of the relations between relationship quality and mental health could inform clinical practice,” said study author Jia (Julia) Yan, who will join the faculty of Utah State University as an assistant professor in August 2020.
The researchers analyzed data collected between 1994 to 2006 from 654 couples who participated in the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development. The participants reported their depressive symptomology and the level of intimacy in their relationship across the six time points.
“For women, greater couple relationship quality is associated with future decreases in depressive symptoms and better mental health conditions. For men, it is the other way around: Depressive symptoms predict future decreases in couple relationship quality,” Yan told PsyPost.
In other words, women who agreed with statements such as “My spouse/partner listens to me when I need someone to talk to” tended to report lower levels of depressive symptoms at the next time point. Men with higher levels of depressive symptoms at one time point, on the other hand, became more likely to agree with statements such as “I feel neglected at times by my spouse/partner” at the next.
“We also found that partners’ perceptions of relationship intimacy were interrelated, such that greater couple relationship intimacy perceived by one partner predicted their partner’s higher subsequent ratings of couple relationship intimacy,” the researchers said.
The study controlled for demographic characteristics such as age and socioeconomic status. But as with all research, the study includes some caveats.
“To understand the long-term bi-directional relations between couple relationship quality and mental health, we were only able to study couples who stayed together for the longer-term in this study. We do not know if these findings stand for couples who go through break-ups or divorces,” Yan noted.
The study, “Transactional Associations Between Couple Relationship Intimacy and Depressive Symptoms Across 10 Years“, was authored by Jia J. Yan Sarah J. Schoppe‐Sullivan, and Xin Feng.