Robert Emery

University of Virginia | UVa · Department of Psychology

This overview discusses key findings, questions, and controversies about joint physical custody (JPC) emphasizing psychological issues for research and practice. Children living in JPC are slightly better adjusted, on average, but it is not clear whether this is a consequence of the arrangement or due to nonrandom selection into it. Moreover, no co...

Parental denigration is a phenomenon characterized by disparaging comments made by one parent about the other parent, in front of their children. It is an emerging area of research with implications that appear to follow from a conflict perspective, rather than a parental alienation perspective. In three prior studies of young adults, sibling pairs...

Objective To assess parental denigration, parents demeaning each other to or in front of their children, and whether denigration is one‐sided or reciprocal, related to distance or closeness between parents and children, and associated with measures of children's well‐being. Background The parental alienation hypothesis argues that denigration is o...

Marriages consist of shared experiences and interactions between husbands and wives that may lead to different impressions of the quality of the relationship. Few studies, unfortunately, have tested gender differences in the structure of marital quality, and even fewer studies have evaluated whether genetic and environmental influences on marital q...

Parental denigration is a phenomenon characterized by disparaging comments made by one parent about the other parent in front of their children. It is an emerging area of research with implications that could either follow a parental alienation perspective or a conflict perspective. In two prior studies of 648 and 994 young adults, denigration was...

Prior research has documented an association between lone motherhood and depression using traditional analysis tools. Such an association, however, is insufficient for establishing a causal effect. There are many possible non-causal confounds of this association, including a shared genetic background, or a shared influence by the same socioeconomic...

This study aimed at moving beyond previous research on couple therapy efficacy by examining moment-by-moment proximal couple and therapist interactions as well as final treatment outcomes and their reciprocal association. Seven hundred four episodes of dyadic coping within 56 early therapy sessions, taken from 28 married couples in treatment, were...

Marriage is associated with reductions in both perceived stress and depressive symptoms, two constructs found to be influenced by common genetic effects. A study of sibling twins was used to test whether marriage decreases the proportion of variance in depressive symptoms accounted for by genetic and environmental effects underlying perceived stres...

Objective: Prior twin studies provide support for a single "common factor" that contributes genetic and environmental risk to a range of disordered eating symptoms. However, the common factor may be indexed less well by binge eating (BE) than other symptoms of eating disorders [i.e., body dissatisfaction (BD) and weight preoccupation (WP)]. We sou...

This study intended to explore how child custody evaluations might help in supporting parents during the transition of divorce to continue to be parents together. Sixteen Italian divorced parents were interviewed using an ad hoc semistructured interview. Data were analyzed by T-LAB software. Findings indicated a shift from the structural aspects of...

Married adults have consistently been found to drink less than their single or divorced counterparts. This correlation may not be causal, however, as people nonrandomly “select” into marriage and into alcohol use. The current study uses a sample of 2,425 same-sex twin pairs (1,703 MZ; 722 DZ) to control for genetic and shared environmental selectio...

There are a number of salient public policy issues in the family law field that have invoked impassioned policy debates on a recurrent basis. In the absence of a body of research to address these critical concerns, advocates under the guise of social science scholarship have exacerbated the confusion and controversy by construing the scant availabl...

This is the second of two articles on the risks of advocacy bias in the reporting of research findings when boundaries are blurred between social science research and advocacy in the pursuit of public policy. In the first article we identify common ways in which social science researchers and reviewers of research—wittingly or unwittingly—can becom...

Although the Swedish Adoption Twin of Aging (SATSA) has been used to investigate phenotypic stability of late life depressive symptoms, the biometric processes underlying this stability have not been studied. Under a reciprocal effects modeling framework, we used SATSA twins' Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression (CES-D) Scale data across 5 w...

General systems theory concepts, such as reciprocal causality and nested systems, compel a re-conceptualization of how families work. However, the application of systems theory to families (i.e. family systems theory) is short on theoretical specifics in regard to the internal functions of families. While family systems theory identifies important...

Over the past 30 years, number researchers have documented that interparental conflict predicts (predicts) adjustment difficulties among children from divorced and married families, as well as strained parent–child relationships. The conflict literature, reports of “parental alienation” behaviors, and clinical experience make it clear that some par...

Many legal issues involve conflicts that are at least as much psychological and relational as they are legal in nature. Juvenile and family courts have always embraced a helping philosophy under the parens patriae legal doctrine. These courts address problems where family relationships are central, for example, custody and coparenting disputes, div...

We welcome the chance to respond to Millar and Kruk’s (2014) comment primarily because this gives us an opportunity to expand on an issue that we think deserves broader consideration: Where does the burden of proof lie when there is no neutral null hypothesis? Tests of statistical significance continue to rely on the null hypothesis testing premise...

Large numbers of infants and toddlers have parents who live apart due to separation, divorce, or nonmarital/noncohabiting childbearing, yet this important topic, especially the controversial issue of frequent overnights with nonresidential parents, is understudied. The authors analyzed data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, a lon...

Marital dissolution is commonly assumed to cause increased depression among adults, but causality can be questioned based on directionality and third-variable concerns. The present study improves on past research by using a propensity score matching algorithm to identify a subsample of continuously married participants equivalent in divorce risk to...

Married adults show better psychological adjustment and physical health than their separated/divorced or never-married counterparts. However, this apparent "marriage benefit" may be due to social selection, social causation, or both processes. Genetically informed research designs offer critical advantages for helping to disentangle selection from...

Background: Previous studies have found that child attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is associated with more parental marital problems. However, the reasons for this association are unclear. The association might be due to genetic or environmental confounds that contribute to both marital problems and ADHD. Method: Data were drawn...

Previous studies of the association between multiple parental relationship transitions (i.e., when a parent begins or terminates an intimate relationship involving cohabitation) and offspring antisocial behavior have varied in their efforts to rule out confounding influences, such as parental antisocial behavior and low income. They also have been...

Research consistently links adolescents' and young adults' drinking with their peers' alcohol intake. In interpreting this correlation, 2 essential questions are often overlooked. First, which peers are more important, best friends or broader social networks? Second, do peers cause increased drinking, or do young people select friends whose drinkin...

Parental divorce almost always is a very difficult experience for adolescents, whether the divorce occurred when they were younger or during their teen years. Divorce also sets into motion a series of difficult changes in family life, often including troubled parent-child relationships, lost contact with one parent, involvement in parent conflict,...

This article uses a genetically informed design to evaluate whether (1) the well-documented association between marital support and depressive symptoms is accounted for by genetic and/or shared environmental selection, (2) gender differences are found after controlling for selection effects, and (3) parenthood moderates any nonshared environmental...

Associations between parental depression and offspring affective and disruptive disorders are well documented. Few genetically informed studies have explored the processes underlying intergenerational associations. A semi-structured interview assessing DSM-III-R psychiatric disorders was administered to twins (n=1296) from the Australian Twin Regis...

Divorce rates increased dramatically in South Korea in recent years, raising important questions about possible effects on children. In this study, we compared South Korean early adolescents from divorced and non-divorced families on measures of psychological problems, emotional pain, and parent-child relationships. Early adolescents from divorced...

Divorce rates increased dramatically in South Korea in recent years, raising important questions about possible effects on children. In this study, we compared South Korean early adolescents from divorced and non-divorced families on measures of psychological problems, emotional pain, and parent-child relationships. Early adolescents from divorced...

Married adults are better adjusted than never married, remarried, and – especially – separated/divorced adults as indexed by a wide variety of measures including: (1) psychological adjustment, notably greater happiness/subjective well-being (Gove et al. 1983; Johnson & Wu 2002), less depression (Pearlin & Johnson 1977; Wade & Pevalin 2004), and les...

Children raised without a biological father in the household have earlier average ages of first sexual intercourse than children raised in father-present households. Competing theoretical perspectives have attributed this either to effects of father absence on socialization and physical maturation or to nonrandom selection of children predisposed f...

To study changes in nonresident father contact since the 1970s, we pooled data from 4 national surveys: the National Survey of Children (1976), the National Survey of Families and Households (1987 – 1988), the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (1996), and the National Survey of America’s Families (2002). On the basis of mothers’ reports, levels...

Even “irrational” anger felt by divorcing partners may serve legitimate psychological purposes. Awareness of the types and functions of anger should help the process of anger management in mediation.

The children-of-twins design was used to isolate a potentially causal environmental impact of having an alcoholic parent on offspring alcohol use disorder, by an examination of whether the children of alcoholics were at a higher risk for alcohol use disorders than were the children of nonalcoholic parents, even after correlated familial factors wer...

Parentification, a parent-child dynamic wherein children come to provide ongoing emotional support for their parents, has been documented extensively in the clinical literature; however, it rarely has been studied systematically. Using a community sample of 83 couples and their adolescent children (mean age = 15.26 years; 52% male, 48% female), the...

Peer relationships are commonly thought to be critical for adolescent socialization, including the development of negative health behaviors such as alcohol and tobacco use. The interplay between genetic liability and peer influences on the development of adolescent alcohol and tobacco use was examined using a nationally-representative sample of ado...

The relation between timing of first sex and later delinquency was examined using a genetically informed sample of 534 same-sex twin pairs from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, who were assessed at three time points over a 7-year interval. Genetic and environmental differences between families were found to account for the asso...

Divorce is an inherently interpersonal experience, yet too often adults' reactions to marital dissolution are investigated as intrapersonal experiences that unfold outside of the relational context in which they exist. This article examines systemic patterns of interpersonal influence between divorced parents who were randomly assigned to either me...

We examine interactive effects of childhood sexual abuse (CSA) on heritable variation in age at first consensual sexual intercourse in a young cohort of 3,350 female and 2,724 male Australian twins. Consistent with hypotheses, genetic influences explained little if any variation in age at first consensual sexual intercourse for female twins reporti...

Affiliation with substance using peers is one of the strongest predictors of adolescent alcohol use. This association is typically interpreted causally: peers who drink incite their friends to drink. This association may be complicated by uncontrolled genetic and environmental confounds because teens with familial predispositions for adolescent sub...

Debates about child custody following parental separation often have been framed in terms of a battle between the competing rights of different family members. In the United States, advocates of mothers’ rights square off against proponents of fathers’ rights, with each side claiming to truly represent children's rights. Of course, not all advocate...

ABSTRACT—Warshak defends the principle of deciding custody based on children’s future “best interests,” a goal that seems laudable on the surface. However, the law defines “best” only very generally, resulting in conflicting interpretations on the part of different parents, custody evaluators, and judges. In response to widespread dissatisfaction w...

The present study examines the relations between adolescent motherhood and children's behavior, substance use, and internalizing problems in a sample of 1,368 children of 712 female twins from Australia. Adolescent motherhood remained significantly associated with all mental health problems, even when using a quasiexperimental design capable of con...

Environmental or genetic influences, or both could account for the increased risk of divorce among the offspring of separated parents. Previous studies have used covariates to statistically control for confounds, but the present research is the first genetically informed study of the topic. The investigation used the Children of Twins Design with t...

The familial nature of childhood conduct problems has been well documented, but few genetically informed studies have explicitly explored the processes through which parental conduct problems influence an offspring's behavior problems. To delineate the genetic and environmental processes underlying the intergenerational transmission of childhood co...

Although parental divorce is associated with increased substance use and internalizing problems, experiencing the separation of one's parents may not cause these outcomes. The relations may be due to genetic or environmental selection factors, characteristics that lead to both marital separation and offspring functioning. We used the Children of Tw...

CONTEXT: The familial nature of childhood conduct problems has been well documented, but few genetically informed studies have explicitly explored the processes through which parental conduct problems influence an offspring's behavior problems. OBJECTIVE: To delineate the genetic and environmental processes underlying the intergenerational transmis...

Girls who report first sexual intercourse during their early teen years have much higher rates of teenage pregnancy and childbearing than girls who delay sexual onset until older adolescence. In this study, we examine genetic and environmental influences on variation in teenage pregnancy and covariation with age at first sexual intercourse in two c...

Though often discussed as though it were a discrete event, puberty comprises one segment of a larger developmental continuum and is notable for rapid transformation across a multitude of domains. Research suggests that an earlier rate of pubertal maturation in girls correlates with a number of detrimental outcomes compared with on-time or later mat...

The Children-of-Twins design was used to test whether associations between marital conflict frequency and conduct problems can be replicated within the children of discordant twin pairs. A sample of 2,051 children (age 14-39 years) of 1,045 twins was used to estimate the genetic and environmental influences on marital conflict and determine whether...

The Children-of-Twins design was used to test whether associations between marital conflict frequency and conduct problems can be replicated within the children of discordant twin pairs. A sample of 2,051 children (age 14-39 years) of 1,045 twins was used to estimate the genetic and environmental influences on marital conflict and determine whether...