Jeffry A Simpson

• Ph.D.
• Professor at University of Minnesota

Objective: Intimate partner violence (IPV) is related to many negative health outcomes for victims. Our aim was to determine whether two types of emotion regulation strategies—cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression—moderate the effect of IPV victimization on health over time. Method: We recruited 1,200 participants to complete an initial...

The overarching aim of the Research Handbook on Couple and Family Relationships is to promote integration across couple and family scholarship. In this conclusion chapter, we consider some general commonalities and differences in the couple and family literatures reviewed in this handbook. We use these points to identify opportunities for integrati...

This Research Handbook facilitates the integration between two substantial yet often separated fields: the study of couple relationships and the study of family relationships. An array of expert contributors provide an up-to-date understanding of these important bonds, highlighting opportunities for consolidation and growth and identifying new aven...

Couple and family relationships have been the focus of considerable scientific inquiry, but work on couple and family relationships has evolved in parallel with little crosstalk. The aim of the Research Handbook on Couple and Family Relationships is to promote integration across couple and family scholarship. For each of 12 topics, the handbook inc...

The primary aim of the current mixed-method study was to examine factors that predict adult sexual assault disclosure in romantic relationships and understand how romantic partners respond if survivors choose to disclose their experiences to them. Sexual assault survivors (N = 330; 93% cisgender women) completed online surveys assessing disclosure...

Close relationships are associated with many positive outcomes throughout life, including improved physical health and well‐being. Traditionally, theory and research on the health benefits of close relationships have focused on either the total amount of support perceived available within a person's entire social network or the support provided by...

This research examined potential matching patterns between romantic partners in Big Five personality traits and relationship-specific characteristics such as attachment orientations, caregiving systems, conflict resolution, partner responsiveness, and trust. We analyzed two existing longitudinal studies that had complementary samples: 184 couples w...

Women are often viewed as more romantic than men, and romantic relationships are assumed to be more central to the lives of women than to those of men. Despite the prevalence of these beliefs, some recent research paints a different picture. Using principles and insights based on the interdisciplinary literature on mixed-gender relationships, we ad...

The idea that some abilities might be enhanced by adversity is gaining traction. Adaptation-based approaches have uncovered a few specific abilities enhanced by particular adversity exposures. Yet, for a field to grow, we must not dig too deep, too soon. In this paper, we complement confirmatory research with principled exploration. We draw on two...

Background: Research on the relation between sexual assault (SA) and romantic functioning has yielded inconsistent results. The goals of the current studies were to examine this association while addressing limitations of past research; assessing revictimization, multiple victimization, and assault timing; and examining whether this association was...

The Minnesota Longitudinal Study of Risk and Adaptation (MLSRA) is a landmark prospective, longitudinal study of human development focused on a sample of mothers experiencing poverty and their firstborn children. Although the MLSRA pioneered a number of important topics in the area of social and emotional development, it began with the more specifi...

Interparental interactions have an important influence on child well-being and development. Yet prior theory and research have primarily focused on interparental conflict as contributing to child maladjustment, which leaves out the critical question of how interparental positive interactions—such as expressed gratitude, capitalization, and shared l...

Meta-analyses demonstrate that the quality of early attachment is modestly associated with peer social competence ( r = .19) and externalizing behavior ( r = −.15), but weakly associated with internalizing symptoms ( r = −.07) across early development (Groh et al., Child Development Perspectives, 11 (1), 70–76, 2017). Nonetheless, these reviews suf...

Over the past two decades, there has been a significant shift in how dehumanization is conceptualized and studied. This shift has broadened the construct from the blatant denial of humanness to groups to include more subtle dehumanization within people’s interpersonal relationships. In this article, we focus on conceptual and empirical advances in...

Stress-induced dysregulation of diurnal cortisol is a cornerstone of stress-disease theories; however, observed associations between cortisol, stress, and health have been inconsistent. The reliability of diurnal cortisol features may contribute to these equivocal findings. Our meta-analysis (5 diurnal features from 11 studies; total participant n...

Two key processes in romantic relationships—power and dominance—can contribute to relationship disruption, but the association between these variables is complex. Elucidating the association between power and dominance during the COVID‐19 pandemic is particularly important given the economic, social, and health‐related stressors that pose a risk to...

Power, the capacity to influence others while resisting their attempts at influence, has implications for a wide variety of individual- and relationship-level outcomes. One potential mechanism through which power may be associated with various outcomes is motivation orientation. High power has been linked to greater approach-oriented motivation, wh...

Due to the unavailability of assessment tools focused on support recipients, the aged-care literature has not been able to document the support seeking that occurs within familial support contexts. Therefore, we developed and validated a Support-Seeking Strategy Scale in a large sample of aging parents receiving care from their adult children. A po...

Extant research has demonstrated that higher mean (average) levels of social support often produce robust relational benefits. However, partners may not maintain the same level of support across time, resulting in potential fluctuations (i.e., within-person variations across time) in support. Despite the theorizing and initial research on fluctuati...

Attachment theory suggests that both the quality and consistency of early sensitive care should shape an individual’s attachment working models and relationship outcomes across the lifespan. To date, most research has focused on the quality of early sensitive caregiving, finding that receiving higher quality care predicts more secure working models...

Relationship processes often involve fluctuating, variable, or tumultuous dynamics. Yet, close relationship models have traditionally focused on linear processes. The purpose of this Journal of Social and Personal Relationships special issue is to provide examples of how modeling nonlinear effects and dynamics can: (I) test nonlinear theoretical as...

Cross-sectional studies have shown that greater friendship satisfaction in adulthood is associated with many positive outcomes (Chopik, 2017; Gillespie, Frederick, et al., 2015). However, the developmental antecedents of satisfaction with close friends in adulthood have not been examined using prospective data. We do not know, for example, whether...

Childhood adversity is associated with higher adult weight, but few investigations prospectively test mechanisms accounting for this association. Using two socioeconomically high-risk prospective longitudinal investigations, the Minnesota Longitudinal Study of Risk and Adaptation (MLSRA; N = 267; 45.3% female) and the Fragile Families and Child Wel...

Background Prior research has shown that social control strategies can have either positive or negative effects on individuals’ health behaviors. However, no research has examined the degree to which social control attempts enacted by romantic partners are associated with individuals’ relational behaviors or whether perceptions of a partner’s motiv...

This paper reports on the first meta-analysis of studies on the association between government-imposed social restrictions and mental health outcomes published during the initial year of the COVID-19 pandemic. Thirty-three studies (N=131,844) were included. Social restrictions were significantly associated with increased mental health symptoms over...

To lose one’s sense of what it means to be human reflects a profound form of loss. Recent research in the study of dehumanization highlights that the loss of humanness can be experienced at the hands of close others. Moreover, acts of dehumanization can take many forms in close relationships. In this paper, we review the emerging literature on the...

Close relationships are crucial to health and well-being. However, anxious expectations of rejection (attachment anxiety) and avoidant beliefs that romantic partners cannot be trusted (attachment avoidance) undermine long-term relationship functioning and well-being. In this Review, we outline how romantic attachment anxiety and avoidance create ha...

Since its inception more than 50 years ago, attachment theory has become one of the most influential viewpoints in the behavioral sciences. What have we learned during this period about its fundamental questions? In this paper, we summarize the conclusions of an inquiry into this question involving more than 75 researchers. Each responded to one of...

Background Parents can influence their children to live healthier lifestyles by modeling healthy behaviors and/or trying to persuade their children to engage in healthier activities. Adolescents and their parents tend to have similar eating and exercise patterns, but less is known about the simultaneous influence of parent’s health behavior and soc...

It is difficult to appreciate attachment theory fully without understanding its evolutionary foundations and purposes, many of which are rooted in infancy. In this chapter, we showcase attachment-relevant models of social development guided by the overarching evolutionary framework of life history theory (LHT). We begin by discussing the features o...

Relationship partners affect one another’s health outcomes through their health behaviors, yet how this occurs is not well understood. To fill this gap, we present the Dyadic Health Influence Model (DHIM). The DHIM identifies three routes through which a person (the agent) can impact the health beliefs and behavior of their partner (the target). An...

Trust is essential for establishing and maintaining cooperative behaviors between individuals and institutions in a wide variety of social, economic, and political contexts. This book explores trust through the lens of neurobiology, focusing on empirical, methodological, and theoretical aspects. Written by a distinguished group of researchers from...

Being able to control oneself in emotionally upsetting situations is essential for good relationship functioning. According to life history theory, childhood exposure to harshness and unpredictability should forecast diminished emotional control and lower relationship quality. We examined this in three studies. In Studies 1 and 2, greater childhood...

The transition to parenthood can be a challenging time for new parent couples, as a baby comes with changes and stress that can negatively influence new parents’ relational functioning in the form of reduced relationship satisfaction and disrupted partner social support. Yet, the transition to parenthood is also often experienced as a joyous time....

Familial caregiving research is yet to examine the factors that underpin the association between attachment insecurity and carer burden. Furthermore, previous research consists largely of data collected at a single point in time. This paper addresses these gaps by reporting on a study involving 57 parent-child dyads to determine whether adult child...

Using data from the Family Life, Activity, Sun, Health, and Eating (FLASHE) study, we examined how adolescents’ age as well as parents’ and their adolescent’s gender are associated with the influence strategies parents use to promote healthy behaviors. Parents reported their use of intentional modeling and social control for four health behaviors:...

This longitudinal study examined associations between perceptions of partner responsiveness and relationship satisfaction of each partner (new parents) across the first 2 years of a chronically stressful life event-the transition to parenthood. Responsiveness indexes the degree to which partners respond to each other with understanding, validation,...

The economic, social, and health impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic are expected to increase the occurrence of intimate partner violence (IPV) victimization. IPV victimization may, in turn, contribute to physical and mental health, substance use, and social distancing behaviors during the COVID-19 pandemic. The primary objective of the current study...

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the significant and varied losses that couples can experience during times of global and regional disasters and crises. What factors determine how couples navigate their close relationships during times of loss? In this paper, we elaborate and extend on one of the most influential frameworks in relationship sci...

Adult friendships are important relationships, yet little work has examined the processes through which they end and the antecedents and consequences of endings. Building on work that has highlighted the reasons friendships end [1∗], we propose an adult friendship dissolution process model that features how situational, personal, and interpersonal...

Negative affect caused by stressful life events can carry over to parental relationships and induce parental distress. Such spillover effects, however, may not operate uniformly in men and women, and may not be the same for different types of stressful life events. Employing life history theory, we hypothesized that male parents should experience m...

Data from the Minnesota Longitudinal Study of Risk and Adaptation (MLSRA) were utilized to provide the first investigation into the early childhood antecedents of dehumanization (i.e., treating another as less than human) in adult romantic relationships. Drawing on a sample of 109 MLSRA participants, multiple assessments of maternal care and empath...

Attachment theory posits that early experiences with caregivers are made portable across development in the form of mental representations of attachment experiences. These representations, the secure base script included, are thought to be stable across time. Here, we present data from two studies. Study 1 (N = 141) examined the degree of empirical...

Attachment orientations in adulthood can change over time, but the specific circumstances that directly affect change are not well understood. Bowlby proposed that those circumstances involve the assimilation of information that is incongruent with an individual's existing attachment orientation and underlying working models. In this study, 137 cou...

Attachment insecurity is consequential for both personal and relationship wellbeing. Some research has documented that partner buffering can downregulate insecure individuals' immediate feelings of distress, allowing them to feel more secure at least temporarily. The benefits of partner buffering, however, may be limited by several contextual facto...

Given the powerful implications of relationship quality for health and well-being, a central mission of relationship science is explaining why some romantic relationships thrive more than others. This large-scale project used machine learning (i.e., Random Forests) to 1) quantify the extent to which relationship quality is predictable and 2) identi...

Language style matching (LSM) refers to similarity in function word use between two people during a conversation. Previous research has shown that LSM predicts romantic relationship stability, but it remains unknown why LSM is associated with stability. Across five studies from five different labs, we aimed to identify links between LSM and two rel...

Attachment anxiety can decline in relationships but little is known about how or why. A new framework—the Attachment Security Enhancement Model (ASEM)—suggests that what allays current (momentary) insecurity may not necessarily reduce attachment anxiety across time. This article differentiates momentary versus extended attachment processes by exami...

Interdependence, Interaction, and Close Relationships - edited by Laura V. Machia June 2020

Waters, Ruiz, and Roisman (2017) recently published evidence based on the Minnesota Longitudinal Study of Risk and Adaptation (MLSRA) that sensitive caregiving during childhood is associated with higher levels of secure base script knowledge during the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI sbs ). At present, however, little is known about the role of var...

Background and Objectives This study takes an interpersonal approach to the study of carer burden in families where adult children care for older parents. The study aims to determine whether different pairings of attachment insecurity in older parent-adult child dyads are predictive of carer burden. Research Design and Methods Seventy dyads whereb...

This study explored the moderating effect of sociosexual orientation on the association between coparenting alliance/coparenting conflict and relationship satisfaction in mothers in a romantic relationship. Sociosexuality is defined as a personality trait that reflects the individual difference in willingness to engage in uncommitted sexual relatio...

Stressful experiences affect biological stress systems, such as the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal (HPA) axis. Life stress can potentially alter regulation of the HPA axis and has been associated with poorer physical and mental health. Little, however, is known about the relative influence of stressors that are encountered at different developmenta...

In the 21st century, efforts to reduce the prevalence of disease and to improve life expectancy are inextricably linked to modifying patterns of human behavior (Adams, Grandpre, Katz, & Shenson, 2019; Bauer, Briss, Goodman, & Bowan, 2014). To achieve this goal, health professionals need a toolbox composed of intervention strategies that effectively...

Infant attachment is theorized to lay the foundation of emotion regulation across the life span. However, testing this proposition requires prospective designs examining whether attachment assessed in infancy predicts emotion regulation strategies observed in adult relationships. Using unique data from the Minnesota Longitudinal Study of Risk and A...

This research examined links between attachment orientations and evaluations of potential and existing relationship partners with respect to ideal standards. In Study 1, attachment anxiety and avoidance predicted the tradeoffs individuals made when choosing between potential mates. In Studies 2 and 3, attachment anxiety and avoidance were associate...

The transition to parenthood is a stressful life event that often leads to decreases in relationship satisfaction over time. Guided by the Stress Buffering Model, we examined how pregnancy intention and humor use are associated with relationship satisfaction across the transition to parenthood using a multi-wave longitudinal design. First-time pare...

Our research deals with the question how people look back at their ex-partners—those with whom they were once romantically involved? Such views are important because they may shape our views of current relationships or new (potential) partners. Across three studies (total N = 876), we find that men hold more positive attitudes towards their female...

Increasing evidence suggests that both attachment representations and autobiographical memories are moderately stable over time. Evidence examining the stability of attachment-related memories is scarce, although these memories of early caregiving are thought to underpin attachment representations. Connecting research on stability of autobiographic...

According to life history theory, exposure to harshness and/or unpredictability early in life should promote a fast life history strategy. Such a strategy entails, among other traits, elevated aggression and impaired relationship functioning. While detrimental under safe and stable conditions, these characteristics become more evolutionary adaptive...

The stress that arises during the transition to parenthood often places significant strain on marriages that can result in marital problems such as aggression victimization. In this research, we use an I³ framework to identify specific partner variables that are likely to promote physical aggression victimization across the transition to parenthood...

Major life stress often produces a flat diurnal cortisol slope, an indicator of potential long-term health problems. Exposure to stress early in childhood or the accumulation of stress across the life span may be responsible for this pattern. However, the relative impact of life stress at different life stages on diurnal cortisol is unknown. Using...

In this article, I review three longitudinal studies that have investigated how exposure to more versus less predictable environments shunt individuals down different developmental pathways. After describing key principles of life history theory and how stress can shape social development over time, I discuss an interrelated set of findings from th...

Power in Close Relationships - edited by Christopher R. Agnew February 2019

Research has shown that greater stress responses predict worse sleep and that the quality of one's current romantic relationship predicts one's sleep. Despite these established links, research has not examined connections between ongoing patterns of interpersonal experiences and competencies (relationship effectiveness) and stress exposure on sleep...

Objective: Interpersonal relationships are important predictors of health outcomes and interpersonal influences on behaviours may be key mechanisms underlying such effects. Most health behaviour theories focus on intrapersonal factors and may not adequately account for interpersonal influences. We evaluate a dyadic extension of the Theory of Planne...

This article introduces a metatheoretical framework—the Relationship Trajectories Framework—that conceptualizes how human mating relationships develop across their complete time span, from the moment two people meet until the relationship ends. The framework depicts relationships as arc-shaped evaluative trajectories that vary on five dimensions: s...

Children who experience high-quality early parenting tend to have better physical health, but limited research has tested whether this association extends into adulthood using prospective, observational assessments. Likewise, mechanisms that may explain such links have not yet been illuminated. In this study, we test whether the quality of early ma...

This study examined the predictive significance of maternal sensitivity in early childhood for electrophysiological responding to and cognitive appraisals of infant crying at midlife in a sample of 73 adults (age = 39 years; 43 females; 58 parents) from the Minnesota Longitudinal Study of Risk and Adaptation. When listening to an infant crying, bot...

Migration is a critical issue for child development in the 21st century. We expand on García Coll et al.’s (1996) integrative model of minority child development by drawing from principles of attachment theory and interpersonal relationships research to offer new insights into how youth manage and respond to migration experiences. Immigrant and ref...

Psychological theories of health behavior focus on intrapersonal influences on behavior. Greater attention to interpersonal effects and the relational contexts that regulate them has the potential to improve theory, and offer innovative strategies for intervention. This research takes a dyadic approach to understanding how parent and adolescent bel...

Many psychological hypotheses require testing whether the similarity between two variables predicts important outcomes. For example, the ideal standards model posits that the match between (A) a participant’s ideal partner preferences, and (B) the traits of a current/potential partner, predicts (C) evaluative outcomes (e.g., the decision to date so...

Jealousy is a complex, dynamic experience that unfolds over time in relationship-threatening situations. Prior research has used retrospective reports that cannot disentangle initial levels and change in jealousy in response to escalating threat. In three studies, we examined responses to the Response Escalation Paradigm (REP)—a 5-stage hypothetica...

In this article, we discuss theory and research on how people who have different adult romantic attachment orientations fare across one of life's often happiest, but also most chronically stressful, events-the transition to parenthood. We first discuss central principles of attachment theory and then review empirical research revealing how two type...

In this article, we discuss theory and research on how individual differences in adult attachment mediate the adaptive calibration of reproductive strategies, cognitive schemas, and emotional expression and regulation. We first present an integration of attachment theory and life history theory. Then, we discuss how early harsh and/or unpredictable...

Exposure to childhood abuse puts women at risk for revictimization in adult intimate relationships, but knowledge about the mechanism by which it occurs is limited. The present study investigated whether dissociation mediates the effect of exposure to physical or sexual child abuse on intimate partner violence in adulthood. We tested this using pro...

Although growing up in an adverse childhood environment tends to impair cognitive functions, evolutionary-developmental theory suggests that this might be only one part of the story. A person’s mind may instead become developmentally specialized and potentially enhanced for solving problems in the types of environments in which the person grew up....

This study used data from the Minnesota Longitudinal Study of Risk and Adaptation (N = 267) to investigate whether abuse and neglect experiences during the first 5 years of life have fading or enduring consequences for social and academic competence over the next 3 decades of life. Experiencing early abuse and neglect was consistently associated wi...