Study Finds that When A Spouse Feels Secure about Partner's Regard, Marriage Is Strengthened

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Robert Louis Stevenson once quipped that "Marriage...is a field of battle and not a bed of roses."

He may be right, but researchers at the University at Buffalo and Stanford University say some marriages are rosier than others -- not because they have no battles, but because of the way the spouses deal with them. And how they deal, the researchers note, depends on how much the partners value themselves and feel valued by the other.

The study, "Once Hurt, Twice Hurtful: How Perceived Regard Regulates Daily Marital Interactions," appears in the January issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (Vol. 84, No. 1). It was funded by the National Science Foundation.

The study was conducted by Sandra Murray, UB associate professor of psychology, who was principal investigator; Gina M. Bellavia, post-doctoral fellow in UB's Research Institute on Addictions; Paul Rose, doctoral candidate in the UB Department of Psychology, and Dale W. Griffin of Stanford University.

"The findings," says Murray, a social psychologist, "suggest that finding or failing to find a sense of 'belongingness' in marriage has dramatic effects on how much intimates read into and respond to slights and hurts at the hands of a spouse."

The ability of couples to weather marital storms, she says, depends largely on each partner's sense of "felt security" within the marriage. When subjects in the study felt loved and valued by their partner, they tended to move closer to that partner during difficult times.

On the other hand, the study found that people who feel chronically less valued typically scrutinize their spouse's behavior for evidence that they are accepted. They read more into stressful events and, when conflict arises, tend to feel more rejected and hurt than do other subjects, and display more negative attitudes and behaviors toward their spouse.

"For these people, even ambiguous behaviors, if sufficiently scrutinized, might seem to reveal a partner's irritation or disinterest in the self," Murray says. "The study found that insecure people 'felt' rejected and undervalued even when the partner's responses indicated that this was not the case."

The study required its 308 subjects (154 married couples) to take a number of background personality measures and keep a daily diary for 21 days in which they described the positive and negative events that took place each day and rated their emotional reactions. Subjects' mean age was 34.4 years; average duration of marriage was 7.6 years.

The diaries contained two sections: a daily 103-item positive and negative event inventory (events included successes or failures at work; interactions with spouse, friends, children and extended families) and a daily 54-item inventory of feelings in which subjects rated how much of each emotion they experienced that day, with reactions centered around self-valuation, perceptions of partner's regard for the self, perceptions of partner and overall reevaluations of the relationship.

The information gleaned from the tests and diaries then were analyzed using multi-level data analytic procedures to determine how the perception of a partner's regard affected the way individuals perceive and behave toward one another when there is conflict.

An earlier study on which Murray was principal investigator found that individuals' level of self-esteem regulates the extent to which they idealize their partner and feel valued by him or her. ("When Rejection Stings: How Self-Esteem Constrains the Relationship-Enhancement Process," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2002, Vol. 83, No. 3, 556-573; http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~paulrose/Rose.RejectionStings.pdf).

Murray says, "Conflicts of interest are a routine part of married life and no spouse is always kind, helpful and selfless.

"In our current study, we found, however, that how individuals interpret and respond to these conflicts and stresses are regulated by chronic perceptions of their partner's regard for them.

"Those who feel highly regarded by their partner do not read as much negativity into conflicts and use their partner as a resource or a safe source for self-affirmation," Murray says, "but those who feel they are held in low regard by their partner anticipate their partner's rejection and read more negative fears into stressful events."

Because of their acute self-doubt, Murray says, those who feel they are not valued protect themselves against the imagined eventuality of rejection by derogating their partner and behaving in angry ways that actually increase the likelihood of being rejected.

"Insecure individuals approach day-to-day life with the chronic goal of getting their security goals met," she says, "only to trigger the exact kinds of inferential and behavioral dynamics likely to undermine the quality of the marriages they want to save and invite further rejection from the person they want to value them."

"In fact, their fear of devaluation by their partner was a self-fulfilling prophecy," says Murray. "On the days these subjects experienced the greatest fear of rejection, their partners, in fact, tended to describe them as 'overly dependent,' 'selfish' and 'needy.'"

"Earlier research has shown," says Murray, "that people's most immediate, impulsive reaction to feeling hurt and rejected is to reject the partner in turn." After all, she says, "the sting of Sally's bad temper may hurt Harry less if he is able to believe that Sally isn't all that important to him in the first place."

Those who felt highly valued, on the other hand, typically responded to the partner's bad moods or ill behavior toward them by casting the behavior in a positive light and drawing closer to the offender on subsequent days.

Because the potential for hurt is ever present, Murray says the challenge in maintaining a satisfying marriage is for individuals -- particularly those with low self-esteem -- to find some way of construing conflicts and slights in ways that protect the sense of security in their partner's love.

It would also help if partners were sensitive to the other's need for affirmation and to behave in a reassuring manner when conflict arises. That would prevent occasional feelings of hurt from triggering a defensive devaluation of the partner, the urge to inflict further pain and damage to the marriage.