Benjamin R. Karney's research while affiliated with University of California, Los Angeles and other places
What is this page?
This page lists the scientific contributions of an author, who either does not have a ResearchGate profile, or has not yet added these contributions to their profile.
It was automatically created by ResearchGate to create a record of this author's body of work. We create such pages to advance our goal of creating and maintaining the most comprehensive scientific repository possible. In doing so, we process publicly available (personal) data relating to the author as a member of the scientific community.
If you're a ResearchGate member, you can follow this page to keep up with this author's work.
If you are this author, and you don't want us to display this page anymore, please let us know.
It was automatically created by ResearchGate to create a record of this author's body of work. We create such pages to advance our goal of creating and maintaining the most comprehensive scientific repository possible. In doing so, we process publicly available (personal) data relating to the author as a member of the scientific community.
If you're a ResearchGate member, you can follow this page to keep up with this author's work.
If you are this author, and you don't want us to display this page anymore, please let us know.
Publications (146)
The social networks surrounding intimate couples provide them with bonding and bridging social capital and have been theorized to be associated with their well-being and relationship quality. These networks are multidimensional, featuring compositional (e.g., the proportion of family members vs. friends) and structural characteristics (e.g., densit...
Although prominent theories of intimate relationships, and couples themselves, often conceive of relationships as fluctuating widely in their degree of closeness, longitudinal studies generally describe partners' satisfaction as stable and continuous or as steadily declining over time. The increasing use of group-based trajectory models (GBTMs) to...
Since the onset of COVID-19, a rise in loneliness has raised concerns about the social impact of lockdowns and distancing mandates. Yet, to date, the effects of the pandemic on social networks have been studied only indirectly. To evaluate how the pandemic affected social networks, the current analyses analyzed five waves of detailed social network...
Marriage sanctifies the relationship between two spouses, but what happens to their relationships with family, friends, and others who comprise their social networks? Scholarly accounts disagree about whether couples' networks strengthen, weaken, or remain stable in the years after marriage. To reconcile competing perspectives, marriage licenses fr...
Objective
Efforts to understand why some marriages thrive while others falter are (a) not well integrated conceptually and (b) rely heavily on data collected from White middle-class samples. The Vulnerability-Stress-Adaptation Model (VSA; Karney and Bradbury, 1995 ) is used here to integrate prior efforts and is tested using data collected from cou...
Natural disasters have been purported to increase, and decrease, hostile conflict in intimate relationships, but heavy reliance on retrospective designs prohibits strong tests of these contrasting perspectives. The present study aims to resolve this ambiguity using a sample of newlywed couples from Houston, Texas who reported their levels of hostil...
Objective:
To estimate the effects of state-level changes in the minimum wage on marriage and divorce among low-wage earners.
Background:
Proponents of raising the minimum wage highlight the potential benefits of increased earnings for low-income families, yet to date research on the effects of raising the minimum wage has focused almost exclusi...
How do natural disasters affect intimate relationships? Some research suggests that couples are brought closer together after a disaster, whereas other research suggests that relationships become more strained in the aftermath. Yet all of this work is limited by a lack of predisaster data that would allow for examination of how relationships actual...
Although satisfying friendships are crucial for well-being throughout adulthood, measures of friendship satisfaction have been limited by: (1) item content relevant to children only, (2) a focus on single relationships rather than the friendship network, and (3) disagreement about the number of dimensions necessary to capture the construct. To over...
Significance
Understanding the factors that explain declines in marital satisfaction is one of the most pressing challenges for relationship science. Yet, several lines of recent research relying on singular theoretical models have questioned our ability to do so. The current research pooled data from 10 independent longitudinal studies of married...
Partners in intimate relationships, because they have each other to rely on, have generally been considered safe from the negative consequences of social isolation. Here we question this assumption, suggesting instead that social isolation may pose a threat to couples by depriving them of the tangible and emotional support that couples are likely t...
Background
Theoretical and clinical perspectives argue that couples’ maladaptive attributions for marital problems lead to marital distress and that these attributions will detract from couples’ relationships regardless of their external circumstances. However, emerging work in cognitive psychology indicates that stress simplifies individuals’ info...
Missing data are exceedingly common across a variety of disciplines, such as educational, social, and behavioral science areas. Missing not at random (MNAR) mechanism where missingness is related to unobserved data is widespread in real data and has detrimental consequence. However, the existing MNAR-based methods have potential problems such as le...
The ways that couples form and manage their intimate relationships at higher and lower levels of socioeconomic status (SES) have been diverging steadily over the past several decades. At higher SES levels, couples postpone marriage and childbirth to invest in education and careers, but they eventually marry at high rates and have relatively low ris...
Objective:
Psychological aggression is common in intimate relationships, yet only a subset of psychologically aggressive couples also engage in physical violence. We examine two factors proposed to identify which psychologically aggressive couples display physical violence, emphasizing (a) couples' negative and ineffective communication during rel...
Although a number of theoretical perspectives in relationship science argue that variability in couples' relationship satisfaction over time is driven by changes in their communication, tests of this hypothesis have been limited to single assessments of behavior. To address this gap, we examine within-couple, across-time changes in communication, a...
Although getting married is no longer a requirement for social acceptance, most people do marry in their lifetimes, and couples across the socioeconomic spectrum wish their marriages to be satisfying and long lasting. This review evaluates the past decade of research on the determinants of satisfaction and stability in marriage, concluding that the...
The stress-generation model, commonly applied in studies of psychopathology, purports that vulnerabilities to depression (e.g., rumination, doubt, self-blame, social withdrawal) increase the likelihood that stressful events will later occur, thus activating depressive vulnerabilities and worsening the course of depression. We adapt this model to ex...
An increasing number of couples in the United States are entering their first marriage having already had a child together, raising important questions about whether and how these couples' marriages differ from newlywed couples who enter marriage without children. The current study used 5 waves of data collected over the first 4.5 years of marriage...
Researchers often seek to synthesize results of multiple studies on the same topic to draw statistical or substantive conclusions and to estimate effect sizes that will inform power analyses for future research. The most popular synthesis approach is meta‐analysis. There have been few discussions and applications of other synthesis approaches. This...
Despite being at elevated risk for relationship distress and dissolution, couples living with low incomes are less likely than their middle-class counterparts to participate in couple therapy. To increase treatment use among economically disadvantaged couples, information is needed on how they perceive barriers to treatment and on factors that migh...
Demands for change in a relationship, particularly when met by behavioral withdrawal, foreshadow declines in relationship satisfaction. Yet demands can give partners opportunities to voice concerns, and withdrawal can serve to de-escalate conflict, stabilizing satisfaction instead (e.g., Overall, Fletcher, Simpson, & Sibley, 2009). We aim to reconc...
Interventions aimed at reducing interpartner aggression assume that within-couple declines in aggression enhance individual and relational outcomes, yet reductions in aggression may fail to yield these benefits when other risk-generating mechanisms remain intact. The present study evaluates this possibility by investigating whether naturally observ...
Despite evidence that empirically supported couple therapies improve marital relationships, relatively few couples seek help when they need it. Low-income couples are particularly unlikely to engage in relationship interventions despite being at greater risk for distress and dissolution than their higher-income counterparts. The present study aimed...
For the past two decades, policymakers have invested heavily in promoting the quality and stability of intimate relationships in low-income communities. To date, these efforts have emphasized relationship-skills education, but large-scale evaluations of these programs indicate that they have produced negligible benefits. Current policies are limite...
Intimate partner aggression is common in dissatisfied relationships, yet it remains unclear whether intimate partner aggression is a correlate of relationship satisfaction, whether it predicts or follows from relationship satisfaction over time, or whether longitudinal associations are in fact bidirectional in nature. The present study evaluates th...
The early years of marriage are a time of significant personal and relational changes as partners adjust to their new roles, but the specific ways that spouses’ personalities may change in early marriage and how these changes are associated with spouses’ marital satisfaction trajectories have been overlooked. Using 3 waves of data collected over th...
Are the marriages of lower income couples less satisfying than the marriages of more affluent couples? To address this question, we compared trajectories of marital satisfaction among couples with a wide range of household incomes. The marital satisfaction of 862 Black, White, and Latino newlywed spouses (N = 431 couples) was assessed five times, e...
Although interpersonal communication is a defining feature of committed relationships, the quality of couple communication has not proven to be a straightforward cause of relationship quality. At the same time, emerging models argue that external circumstances likely combine with communication to generate changes in relationship quality. We integra...
In 2009, RAND launched the Deployment Life Study, a longitudinal study of military families across a deployment cycle in order to assess family readiness. Family readiness refers to the state of being prepared to effectively navigate the challenges of daily living experienced in the unique context of military service. The study surveyed families at...
Objective:
Government initiatives undertaken to improve the earning potential of disadvantaged unmarried parents assume that job training and additional schooling will strengthen these families, yet alternative models predict that these same interventions could overwhelm couples' limited resources, undermining family stability.
Method:
We use 3...
Prevailing views of marital functioning generally adopt the view that marital problems predict decreases in marital satisfaction, but alternative theoretical perspectives raise the possibility that lowered satisfaction can also predict increases in problems. The current study sought to integrate and compare these perspectives by examining the bidir...
Although the experience of deployments has been described as devastating to married life, evidence linking deployments directly to poorer marital functioning has been sparse. The analyses described in this article compare associations between prior deployments and current marital satisfaction across four different ways of measuring prior deployment...
Compared to affluent marriages, lower income marriages develop within a context filled with negative stressors that may prove quite toxic for marital stability. The current paper argues that stressful contexts may undermine marital well-being through two routes. First, external stressors create additional problems within the marriage by diverting t...
Although people with a history of child abuse are known to be at elevated risk for later difficulties in relationships, there is debate over whether these effects are enduring and relatively immutable or are moderated by characteristics and behaviors of the partner. To reconcile these competing perspectives, we conducted a longitudinal study of 414...
Although much has been learned from cross-sectional research on marriage, an understanding of how marriages develop, succeed, and fail is best achieved with longitudinal data. In view of growing interest in longitudinal research on marriage, the authors reviewed and evaluated the literature on how the quality and stability of marriages change over...
The quality of communication between spouses is widely assumed to affect their subsequent judgments of relationship satisfaction, yet this assumption is rarely tested against the alternative prediction that communication is merely a consequence of spouses' prior levels of satisfaction. To evaluate these perspectives, newlywed couples' positivity, n...
Divorced individuals offer explanations for why their relationship ended, yet little is known about the development of these problems during the relationship. Problems that lead to divorce may exist at the beginning of the marriage (enduring dynamics model) or may develop over time (emergent distress model). We asked 40 divorced individuals about t...
Drawing upon data from the Deployment Life Study, this article examines whether female military spouses (SPs) are disadvantaged relative to matched civilian peers in terms of hours worked and earnings, paying particular attention to gaps among the highest educated women. Female SPs do earn less than comparable civilian peers in terms of raw dollars...
The appropriate format for services supporting military families depends on how vulnerabilities and resources are distributed across and within those families. If different types of vulnerabilities cluster together, then programs supporting families should combine multiple services rather than targeting specific concerns. Yet scant data exist about...
Despite narcissism's relation with interpersonal dysfunction, surprisingly little empirical research has been devoted to understanding narcissism's effect on intimate relationships in general or marital relationships in particular. The current study addressed this gap using longitudinal data from a community sample of 146 newlywed couples assessed...
Marriages and other intimate partnerships are facilitated or constrained by the social networks within which they are embedded. To date, methods used to assess the social networks of couples have been limited to global ratings of social network characteristics or network data collected from each partner separately. In the current article, the autho...
Strong marriages are associated with a range of positive
outcomes for adults and their children. But many couples struggle to build
and sustain strong marriages. Federal initiatives have sought to support
marriage, particularly among low-income populations, through programs
that emphasize relationship education. Recent results from three largescale...
Developing programs to support low-income married couples requires an accurate understanding of the challenges they face. To address this question, we assessed the salience and severity of relationship problems by asking 862 Black, White, and Latino newlywed spouses (N = 431 couples) living in low-income neighborhoods to (a) free list their 3 bigge...
Relative to White families, Black families have been described as relying on extended social networks to compensate for other social and economic disadvantages. The presence or absence of supportive social networks should be especially relevant to young couples entering marriage, but to date there has been little effort to describe the social netwo...
Although couples' management of differences and problems is widely assumed to be central to the course and outcome of their relationships, some theoretical perspectives hold that marital conflicts increase over the newlywed years, whereas others maintain that couples' problems remain stable. We tested these opposing views by examining changes in ma...
This study was designed to examine whether spouses' work-to-family (WF) enrichment experiences account for their own and their partner's marital satisfaction, beyond the effects of WF conflict. Data were collected from both partners of 215 dual-earner couples with children. As hypothesized, structural equation modeling revealed that WF enrichment e...
Sexual selection theory and parental investment theory suggest that partner physical attractiveness should more strongly affect men's relationship outcomes than women's relationship outcomes. Nevertheless, the contextual nature of this prediction makes serious methodological demands on studies designed to evaluate it. Given these theories suggest t...
Interventions intended to prevent relationship distress are expected to enhance relationship satisfaction and, in turn, reduce the need for later couples counseling. We test this prediction against an alternative possibility: participation in preventive interventions may operate as a gateway for later help-seeking, paradoxically increasing receipt...
Do men value physical attractiveness in a mate more than women? Scientists in numerous disciplines believe that they do, but recent research using speed-dating paradigms suggests that males and females are equally influenced by physical attractiveness when choosing potential mates. Nevertheless, the premise of the current work is that sex differenc...
Newlywed spouses routinely hope and believe that their relationships will thrive, but theoretical accounts differ on whether optimistic projections such as believing that one's marriage will improve are sources of strength, random forecasting errors, or self-protective mechanisms. To test these opposing perspectives, we asked 502 newlywed spouses i...
Objective:
Prior research makes competing predictions regarding whether marital satisfaction is positively or negatively associated with weight gain. The health regulation model suggests that satisfying relationships facilitate the functions of marriage that promote health. Thus, spouses should be most likely to gain weight when either partner is...
This paper provides new evidence on the wealth advantage of marriage. We analyze the relationship between a lifetime of marital status changes and wealth levels near retirement age. We consider type of change whether from divorce, widowing, remarriage, number and timing of changes, and duration in marriage. We document that lifetime marriage experi...
Communication behavior is an integral part of relationship functioning and, therefore, a common target of relationship interventions. Between-couple variability in observed behaviors is commonly interpreted as reflecting their underlying skill in communication, but other factors, including perceived difficulty of the problem and the topic being dis...
Social-learning perspectives explicitly recognize the role of partners' personal histories and contexts as possible causes of couple communication behavior, but these assumptions are rarely tested directly, and operationalizations of context in behavioral research on couples rarely extend beyond the interacting dyad. To broaden our understanding of...
Since military operations began in Afghanistan and Iraq, lengthy deployments have led to concerns about the vulnerability of military marriages. Yet evaluating military marriages requires some benchmark against which marital outcomes in the military may be compared. These analyses drew from personnel records from the entire male population of the a...
Are the doubts that people feel before marriage signs of impending difficulties or normative experiences that can be safely ignored? To test these opposing views, we asked 464 recently married spouses whether they had ever been uncertain about getting married and then compared 4-year divorce rates and marital satisfaction trajectories among those p...
Spouses tend to gain weight over the early years of marriage. Given that maintaining a healthy weight is a common goal among newlyweds, and given the importance of partner support to goal achievement, the current study examined whether the quality of spouses' supportive behaviors in early marriage predicted weight gain over the first 4 years of mar...
Understanding the psychology of online dating can turn a frustrating experience into a fruitful mission
Most couples begin marriage intent on maintaining a fulfilling relationship, but some newlyweds soon struggle, and others continue to experience high levels of satisfaction. Do these diverse outcomes result from an incremental process that unfolds over time, as prevailing models suggest, or are they a manifestation of initial differences that are l...
Although stressful events and poor mental health predict worse intimate relationships in all segments of society, they may be especially detrimental for poorer couples who lack the financial resources that facilitate successful coping. To examine this hypothesis, associations among stress, mental health, and relationship satisfaction were examined...
In the United States, low marriage rates and high divorce rates among the poor have led policymakers to target this group for skills‐ and values‐based interventions. The current research evaluated the assumptions underlying these interventions; specifically, the authors examined whether low‐income respondents held less traditional values toward mar...
Most research on couple communication patterns comes from North America and Europe and suggests cross-cultural universality in effects, but emerging studies suggest that couple communication takes different forms depending on the cultural context in which it occurs. The current study addressed this discrepancy by comparing the observed social suppo...
Online dating sites frequently claim that they have fundamentally altered the dating landscape for the better. This article employs psychological science to examine (a) whether online dating is fundamentally different from conventional offline dating and (b) whether online dating promotes better romantic outcomes than conventional offline dating. T...
Hypothesizing that genetic factors partially govern sensitivity to interpersonal cues, we examined whether a polymorphism (5-HTTLPR) in the serotonin transporter gene would moderate spouses' sensitivity to positive and negative partner affect. Before and after marital discussions, participants from 76 couples (total n = 150) reported their affectiv...
The experience of racial or ethnic discrimination is a salient and severe stressor that has been linked to numerous disparities in important outcomes. Yet, the link between perceived discrimination and marital outcomes has been overlooked by research on relationship stressors. The current study examined this link and tested whether ethnic identity...
Although commitment is theoretically distinct from relationship satisfaction, empirical associations between the concepts are high. After drawing from classic definitions of commitment to distinguish between commitment as the desire for a relationship to persist versus the behavioral inclination to maintain the relationship, we predicted that the f...
Observational coding systems are uniquely suited for investigating interactional processes in couples and families, but their validity in diverse populations is unknown. We addressed this issue by applying factor analysis to interactional data collected from couples in low-income neighborhoods and coded with the widely used Iowa Family Interaction...
Support from an intimate partner predicts recovery in individuals who have survived a traumatic injury, but not all partners are willing or able to provide support. To account for support provision after a traumatic injury, both members of 58 young couples were interviewed shortly after one member experienced a traumatic injury. Characteristics of...
Body weight plays a significant role in attraction and relationship formation, but does it continue to shape more established relationships? The current 4-year longitudinal study of 169 newlywed couples addressed this question by examining the implications of own and partner body mass index (BMI) for the trajectory of marital satisfaction. In contr...
Stress, on average, is bad for relationships. Yet stress at work is not always associated with negative relationship outcomes. The premise of the current study was that associations between workload and trajectories of marital satisfaction depend on circumstances that may constrain or facilitate partners' ability to negotiate their multiple roles....
To promote optimal mental health, is it best to evaluate negative experiences accurately or in a positively biased manner? In an attempt to reconcile inconsistent prior research addressing this question, we predicted that the tendency to form positively biased appraisals of negative experiences may reduce the motive to address those experiences and...
Marriages under stress are generally at increased risk of ending in separation and divorce. Since 2001, military marriages have been under unprecedented levels of stress, with deployments longer and more frequent than in recent decades. The analyses described here drew from the personnel records and deployment histories for the entire population of...
Although HIV is contracted by individuals, it is typically transmitted in dyads. Most efforts to promote safer sex practices, however, focus exclusively on individuals. The goal of this paper is to provide a theoretical framework that specifies how models of dyadic processes and relationships can inform models of HIV-prevention. At the center of th...
Intimate partners are a crucial source of support for survivors of traumatic injury, but partners may vary in the support they provide. When are partners most likely to provide support after a traumatic injury? To address this question, this chapter first reviews the consequences of traumatic injury and the role of social support in recovery. The s...
Although newlyweds tend to be satisfied with their marriages, they nevertheless vary in their ability to resolve problems effectively. This study examined whether problem-solving effectiveness was associated with the complexity of spouses' thoughts about their problems. Newlyweds provided open-ended descriptions of marital problems and then engaged...
There is no gift of nature, or effect of art, however beneficial to mankind, which, either by casual deviations, or foolish perversions, is not sometimes mischievous. Whatever may be the cause of happiness, may be made, likewise, the cause of misery. The medicine, which, rightly applied, has power to cure, has, when rashness or ignorance prescribes...
The authors reviewed 29 studies that provide prevalence estimates of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) among service members previously deployed to Operations Enduring and Iraqi Freedom and their non-U.S. military counterparts. Studies vary widely, particularly in their representativeness and the way PTSD is defined. Among previously deployed pe...
Spouses and families alike are nurtured in families, and the integrity of these families is crucial to the well-being of our communities. At the center of these families are intimate bonds between two adults, and we know from a vast body of research that a great deal pivots on the quality of these bonds. Effective interventions for distressed coupl...
Maintaining a relationship requires that intimates successfully navigate the ups and downs of their daily experiences with their partners. Intimates whose daily global satisfaction is heavily dependent on these experiences exhibit worse relationship outcomes than do intimates whose satisfaction is less sensitive to fluctuating daily experiences. Th...
Risks associated with less satisfying intimate relationships often co-occur within individuals, raising questions about approaches that consider only their independent impact. Utilizing the cumulative risk model, which acknowledges the natural covariation of risk factors, this study examined individuals in intimate relationships using the Florida F...
Although couples seeking guidance frequently seek out a religious or spiritual counselor, empirically-based marital interventions seldom acknowledge religious and spiritual beliefs. Beach et a. have proposed that, at least for some couples, religious practice is an appropriate element of marital therapy and a potential agent for strengthening and i...
To maintain intimate relationships in the face of negative experiences, many recommend cognitive strategies that minimize the implications of those experiences for global evaluations of the relationship. But are such strategies always adaptive? Suggesting otherwise, 2 longitudinal studies spanning the 1st 4 years of 251 new marriages revealed that...
Physical appearance plays a crucial role in shaping new relationships, but does it continue to affect established relationships, such as marriage? In the current study, the authors examined how observer ratings of each spouse's facial attractiveness and the difference between those ratings were associated with (a) observations of social support beh...
Like relationship satisfaction, constraints on leaving a relationship have been described as a component of global commitment. But do constraints increase or decrease efforts to maintain the relationship? To address this question, the authors of the current article describe 3 independent studies of spouses and married couples. Across all studies, w...
