Positivity in Marriage: The Role of Discord and Physical Aggression against Wives.

The prevalence of marital aggression has been reported as quite substantial even in normative samples (e.g., approximately 25% of husbands and wives in a representative national sample reported using some type of physical aggression during a marital conflict within the past year; Straus, Gelles, & Steinmetz, 1980). The high prevalence of physical aggression in marriage and the potentially destructive consequences of this behavior have led researchers to focus on what factors differentiate aggressive from nonaggressive couples (e.g., Heyman, 1992; Vivian & O'Leary, 1987) and to consider whether some types of behavior may function either to escalate or mitigate the probability of violence. One major area of focus has been investigating the communication differences between aggressive and nonaggressive spouses when they are engaged in a conflictual discussion. This work has arisen from the theory that marital aggression is primarily a result of poor conflict management skills or individual difficulties with anger management. As predicted, aggressive couples have been shown to have more intensely negative and lower quality communication during a conflictual discussion (e.g., Heyman, 1992; Margolin, John, & Gleberman, 1988; Vivian & O'Leary, 1987). Specifically, aggressive husbands have been rated as more overtly negative while simultaneously reporting a more negative emotional state and more physiological arousal during problem-oriented discussions than nonaggressive husbands. Wives in aggressive marriages also have been shown to differ from other discordant but nonaggressive wives both by their escalating and then deescalating pattern of overt negative behaviors (Margolin et al., 1988). Likewise, Vivian and O'Leary (1987) found that aggressive engaged-to-be married couples were more likely to disagree with and criticize their partner as well as display more negative affect during a problem-solving discussion than were nonaggressive engaged couples. Using a similar methodology, Heyman (1992) found that aggressive early-married community couples were more likely to reciprocate blame than were nonaggressive early-married couples. While this research has contributed to a better understanding of the negative communication styles of aggressive couples during problem-solving or conflictual discussions, little is known about how these couples communicate when they are discussing positive or nonconflictual events. Specifically, it is not clear whether all aspects of marital communication are impaired (i.e., a global deficit) or whether aggressive couples have a difficult time with only conflictual communication. Furthermore, little is known about the positive behaviors that nonaggressive spouses may engage in that may function to reduce the probability of aggression in their marriage. Researchers have used perceptions of positive marriage behaviors to discriminate between discordant and nondiscordant couples. For example, Broderick and O'Leary (1986) collected measures of positive feelings toward spouse, commitment, exchange orientation, and 7 days of behavioral records from a sample of 30 distressed clinic couples and 25 nondistressed community control couples. They found that affective and attitudinal self-report data of positive behavior explained more of the marital satisfaction variance than did actual behavioral records. Moreover, using both self-report and observational data, Robinson and Price (1980) reported that while the observable rates of pleasurable behavior exchanged did not differ between distressed and nondistressed couples, the distressed couples underestimated their pleasurable behavior rates by as much as 50%. Both of these results suggest that couples' perceptions of the positive aspects of their marriages may strongly influence the quality and satisfaction they experience in their marriage. While the results of studies that have measured the observed amount of positive communication exchanged during a conflictual discussion have been less conclusive, Schaap (1984), in an extensive review of the communication literature, concluded that nondistressed couples can be differentiated from distressed couples by their positive communication. …