Rebecca J Cobb

Simon Fraser University · Department of Psychology

Objectives: This study was undertaken to examine bidirectional effects of well-being over time in long-wed couples. Method: We recruited 125 couples 50+ years of age who had been married 20+ years. Both spouses reported life satisfaction and depressive symptoms independently at three annual points over 2 years. We computed actor-partner interdep...

Objective: To test whether the effects of relationship education programs generalize across couples regardless of their baseline levels of risk for relationship distress, or whether intervention effects vary systematically as a function of risk. The former result would support primary prevention models; the latter result would support a shift towa...

Celebrating good news with others (i.e., capitalization) is associated with positive affect and relationship well-being. However, it remains unclear whether the benefits of capitalization result in enduring changes in personal and relationship well-being, and whether contextual factors (i.e., chronic stress) moderate the value of positive capitaliz...

Attachment insecurity (i.e., attachment anxiety or avoidance) puts people at risk for dissatisfying relationships. However, the dyadic regulation model of insecurity buffering suggests that an understanding and responsive partner may help insecure individuals to regulate emotions, thus improving couples’ relationships. It may also be that perceivin...

Body satisfaction predicts sexual quality among women and men; however, mechanisms of the association are largely unknown. We hypothesized that sexual anxiety would mediate average associations over 1 year between individuals’ body satisfaction and their own and their partner’s sexual quality, which is comprised of their sexual satisfaction and dis...

How well people manage emotions is an important predictor of relationship satisfaction; however, the mechanisms of this association are unclear. We examined whether daily negative behaviours mediated associations between difficulties with emotion regulation and daily relationship satisfaction in 125 mixed-sex couples (wives Mage = 30.16; husbands M...

Sexual relationships suffer if individuals have difficulty regulating emotions, but mechanisms are unclear. However, emotion regulation aids in effective communication and sexual communication improves sexual satisfaction; thus, we predicted that poor sexual communication would mediate the association between emotion dysregulation and daily sexual...

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...

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...

Many couples have explicit discussions regarding the emotional and sexual boundaries in their relationship, which can benefit their relational and sexual health. However, the implicit assumption in health research that couples discuss relationship boundaries to protect their sexual health is counter to evidence that many couples discuss boundaries...

Sexual problems, including problems with desire, subjective arousal, initial physiological arousal, maintenance of physiological arousal, pain, and orgasm are associated with personal distress and sexual dissatisfaction. Self-compassion facilitates psychological adjustment to distressing events, and therefore we predicted that self-compassion would...

Negative feedback to a partner about their body may reduce their body satisfaction, which may cause body concealment during sex. This may then interfere with satisfying sexual interactions. We hypothesized that individual’s body dissatisfaction would mediate the association between partner’s expressions of dissatisfaction with individuals’ bodies (...

Individuals who perceive that their partner is satisfied with individuals’ bodies are more sexually satisfied than those who perceive that their partner is dissatisfied. Using the truth and bias model of judgment, we investigated whether perceptions were based on (a) truth (partners’ actual satisfaction with individuals’ bodies), (b) projection (in...

Emotion regulation is positively associated with constructive communication (e.g., Richards et al., 2003), and constructive sexual communication is associated with sexual satisfaction (e.g., MacNeil & Byers, 2009). Moreover, difficulties regulating emotions is negatively associated with sexual satisfaction (e.g., Pepping et al., 2018). Thus, we pre...

Objectives Body satisfaction during pregnancy is an important determinant of maternal and fetal health outcomes. It is therefore critical to investigate factors related to changes in body satisfaction and to elucidate how body satisfaction changes over time in pregnant women. The purpose of this study was to examine the relation between two novel f...

Finkel, Rusbult, Kumashiro, and Hannon (2002, Study 1) demonstrated a causal link between subjective commitment to a relationship and how people responded to hypothetical betrayals of that relationship. Participants primed to think about their commitment to their partner (high commitment) reacted to the betrayals with reduced exit and neglect respo...

Relationship satisfaction and sex frequency are robustly related to sexual satisfaction (e.g., Impett et al., 2014), and recent work suggests that they are bidirectionally related to sexual satisfaction in couples (McNulty et al., 2014). However, the role of perceptions of partner's sexual satisfaction in individuals' own sexual satisfaction has re...

Although accumulating microlongitudinal research has examined emotion regulatory models of nonsuicidal self-injury (NSSI), few studies have examined how interpersonal contingencies influence daily NSSI behavior. Participants with repeated NSSI (N = 60) provided daily ratings of perceived social support, interpersonal conflict, and NSSI urges and be...

The Compassionate and Accepting Relationships through Empathy (CARE) program is a psychoeducational program for couples that seeks to strengthen relationships and prevent adverse marital outcomes by encouraging and promoting the use of prosocial, empathy-based skills that couples already possess to varying degrees. This chapter discusses the backgr...

Background: Body image has implications for sexual satisfaction for women (van den Brink et al., 2014) and men (Milhausen et al., 2014), and sexual satisfaction is related to relationship functioning (Stephenson & Metson, 2010), quality of life, and general health (Henderson, Lahavot, & Simoni, 2009). Existing measures of body image primarily focus...

The purpose of this study was to investigate whether premarital relationship education and characteristics of relationship education in a community sample of newlywed couples predicted marital trajectories over 27 months. Newlywed couples (N = 191) completed measures of marital satisfaction 9 times over 27 months, and prior to marriage they provide...

Objective: Evidence in support of skill-based programs for preventing marital discord and dissolution, while promising, comes mainly from studies using single treatment conditions, passive assessment-only control conditions, and short-term follow-up assessments of relationship outcomes. This study overcomes these limitations and further evaluates...

Associations among perceptions of partner responses to disclosures about capitalization and support experiences and relationship satisfaction were examined over 1 year in 268 individuals in romantic relationships. Multilevel modeling indicated that capitalization and support perceptions covaried over 1 year, but they independently predicted contemp...

Polyamory is characterized by simultaneous consensual romantic relationships with multiple partners. Polyamory allows individuals to fulfill their relationship needs with multiple romantic partners, yet researchers have not identified how having needs met in one romantic relationship may be related to relationship outcomes in a concurrent relations...

Partners in close relationships inevitably encounter situations in which their interpersonal goals are incompatible, and a disturbing number of partners resort to violence when confronted by these challenges. We present a dyadic framework for integrating theory and research on intimate partner violence based on the premise that relationships are in...

In a two-year study of 190 newlywed couples, multi-level contemporaneous and time-lagged models indicated that marital satisfaction and depressive symptoms covaried over time, but only marital satisfaction predicted subsequent changes in depressive symptoms and depressive symptoms did not predict subsequent changes in marital satisfaction. Average...

We investigated whether residual partner perceptions (after controlling spouses' self-reports) of physical and psychological aggression predicted marital satisfaction in 188 heterosexual newlywed couples over the first 6 months of marriage. Husbands' and wives' reports of physical and psychological aggression were moderately associated, highlightin...

Most of the work on the transition to parenthood can be linked to the following question: To what extent does the first child's arrival affect spouses' marital satisfaction? This question is critical to address given that marital satisfaction is strongly associated with the 50% divorce rate in the United States (U.S. Census Bureau, 2005), with spou...

The purpose of the present study was to discriminate between the 2 dominant perspectives governing research on the nature of marital change over the transition to parenthood. Progress can be made in understanding this transition by recognizing the role of uncontrolled sources of variability in research designs, defining and using control groups, an...

Associations among prenatal expectations, the extent to which expectations were confirmed or disconfirmed, and trajectories of marital satisfaction over the transition to parenthood were assessed 7-11 times in a sample of newlywed couples. Piecewise growth curve analyses were conducted to examine levels of marital satisfaction at the beginning of m...

Demographic and relationship quality data were collected from 704 individuals recruited to participate in a randomized study of relationship enhancing interventions. Recruiting at bridal shows produced partners who were more satisfied, earlier in their relationships, and less likely to be parents, with a marginally higher proportion of Latino coupl...

Two studies examined the association between depressive symptoms and romantic involvement in adolescence and tested the hypothesis that romantic involvement is associated more strongly with symptoms among adolescents who have a more preoccupied style of relating, compared to adolescents who have a less preoccupied style of relating. Study 1 (N = 96...

The study tested the key assumption of the individual difference model of adult attachment change: that people who have experienced certain vulnerability factors will be prone to change attachment styles because they have developed unclear models of self and others that render their attachment models unstable. This model was compared to a life stre...

University Microfilms order no. 3066439. Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, 2002. Includes bibliographical references.

The authors examined how positive perceptions about partners’ attachment security predicted supportive behavior and satisfaction in newlywed marriage. The authors tested a mediation model in which positive perceptions were associated with adaptive support behavior, which in turn predicted increases in marital satisfaction. The self-report measures...

In this chapter, we explore the links between individual differences in adult attachment and social support processes. First, we review attachment theory and research, and the theoretical and empirical links between attachment and social support in adulthood. We then present a model of the processes through which attachment may impact upon various...