Amy Zwicker’s research while affiliated with Government of British Columbia, Canada and other places

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Publications (3)


Marital Satisfaction and Divorce in Couples in Stepfamilies
  • Literature Review

November 2016

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368 Reads

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81 Citations

Current Opinion in Psychology

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Amy Zwicker

We review research and theory examining stress and coping in stepfamilies as predictors of marital quality and divorce. Although the divorce rate in first-marriages has stabilized after years of increase in North America, the divorce rate of remarriages continues to increase. We argue that depression and marital distress are both mechanisms through which stepfamily stress impacts marital stability, with parenting stressors particularly potent determinants of divorce. We draw upon our own research predicting divorce across 20 years in 112 married couples in stepfamilies, as well as from the larger literature on stepfamilies.


Gender, Stress, and Coping

January 2010

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201 Reads

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29 Citations

Despite an extensive literature on stress and coping, it is difficult to pinpoint ways of coping that, as a rule, are adaptive or maladaptive. Coping is a dynamic process, one that is shaped by characteristics of the person and situation (DeLongis & Holtzman, 2005; Folkman, Lazarus, Dunkel-Schetter, DeLongis, & Gruen, 1986). What is stressful to one individual in one situation may not be stressful to another person or to the same person in a different situation. This dynamic nature of stress and coping poses many challenges and requires that researchers pay adequate attention to the personal and situational context in which stress and coping occur. Across all cultures, to various degrees, there are differences in the stressful situations to which men and women are exposed. It follows, then, that gender may be an important factor to consider in understanding the dynamics of the stress process.


Couples Coping with Stress The Role of Empathic Responding
  • Article
  • Full-text available

January 2009

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555 Reads

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96 Citations

European Psychologist

Tess Byrd O’Brien

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Amy Zwicker

The primary objective of the study was to increase understanding of interpersonal dimensions of stress and coping within married couples. Our sample included 82 couples living in a stepfamily context. Data were collected using structured telephone interviews and twice-daily questionnaires for a period of 1 week. Using matched-pair hierarchical linear modeling analysis, the study examined how stress and coping processes unfold over the course of a given day and across days within couples. First, we investigated antecedents of empathic responding, a form of relationship-focused coping. Second, we examined the role of empathic responding in within-couple variations in marital tension across days. We found that when greater personal significance was attached to family stressors, husbands and wives tended to increase their use of empathic responding. Also considered were the contextual effects of marital adjustment on how family stressors are experienced and managed by couples. The results indicate a link between marital adjustment and the use of empathic responding for both husbands and wives within couples. As well, the study suggests that marital adjustment plays an important role in determining whether the negative effects of stress will persist across days. Higher use of empathic responding was found to be associated with lower levels of next-day marital tension. When relational outcomes are considered, empathic responding may represent an adaptive way of coping with everyday stress. Our findings indicate that examination of relationship-focused coping may add to the theoretical and explanatory power of current models of stress and coping.

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Citations (3)


... Research on couples confirms that approximately 10 to 15 percent of married individuals regularly report significant communication problems (DeLongis & Zwicker, 2017). Communication skills provide couples with tools to resolve conflicts, increase intimacy that meets the needs of both women and men, and improve their quality of life (Shadanloo et al., 2023). ...

Reference:

Effectiveness of Imago Therapy-Based Couples Therapy on the Improvement of Communication Skills, Conflict Resolution, and Sensitivity to Rejection among Couples
Marital Satisfaction and Divorce in Couples in Stepfamilies
  • Citing Article
  • November 2016

Current Opinion in Psychology

... When asked about self-care practices [49] to address the study sub-objective of what self-care interventions teachers were implementing, this study revealed that female teachers were more likely to practice self-care than male teachers. The existing literature also suggests that women, more often than men, tend to seek social support when coping with various stressors, i.e., there are gender differences in self-care practices like seeking social support and mental health service use [50]. For the self-care options directly related to physical health care like participating in regular exercise, eating healthily, and staying hydrated, female teachers were more likely to practice these than male teachers. ...

Gender, Stress, and Coping
  • Citing Article
  • January 2010

... For instance, empathy beneficially contributes to increased satisfaction in romantic relationships (Cramer and Jowett, 2010) and friendships (Portt et al., 2020) and more successful conflict resolution in couples, friends, and at work (Klimecki, 2019). It is especially in times of challenges to interpersonal emotion processesbe it a global pandemic or conflicts in relationshipsthat empathy is crucial in responding to others (Ferguson et al., 2010;O'Brien et al., 2009). From a clinical perspective, deficits in empathy are present in various affective disorders, including bipolar and major depressive disorder (Epa and Dudek, 2015). ...

Couples Coping with Stress The Role of Empathic Responding

European Psychologist