Associations among Financial Well-Being, Daily Relationship Tension, and Daily Affect in Two Adult Cohorts Separated by the Great Recession.

Financial well-being may be an important context for daily emotional reactivity to relationship tension (e.g., arguments) whose salience varies across historical time or as a function of exposure to economic downturns. This study investigated how emotional reactivity, operationalized as daily fluctuations in negative and positive affect associated with the occurrence of daily relationship tension, varied by financial well-being among those who were and were not exposed to the Great Recession of 2008. Two matched, independent subsamples of partnered individuals from the National Study of Daily Experiences completed identical 8-day diary protocols, one before the Great Recession (n = 587) and one after (n = 351). Individuals reported higher negative affect and lower positive affect on days when relationship tension occurred. Further, results indicated that negative affect reactivity, but not positive affect reactivity, was moderated by both financial well-being and cohort status. For the pre-recession cohort, negative affect reactivity was stronger among those with lower financial well-being. However, among the post-recession cohort, financial well-being did not moderate negative affect reactivity to relationship tension. Findings highlight the utility of considering major societal events, such as economic downturns, to understand variability in emotional reactivity to day-to-day relationship tension in the context of financial well-being, as the salience of financial well-being in the ways relationship tension and negative affect are related on a daily basis appears to vary by historical context.

Love, health, and the 'hood: An examination of romantic relationship adjustment and perceived neighborhood quality as predictors of partnered Black Americans' long-term psychological health.

Existing disparities regarding Black Americans' psychological health warrant further investigation of socioecological factors that may be associated with negative and positive dimensions of psychological health in this population. Romantic relationship functioning and neighborhood context are two domains relevant to Black Americans' mental health. However, less is known about how they may serve as independent and interactive prospective predictors of Black Americans' psychological health and potentially in distinctive ways for Black men and women. Using data from 333 partnered Black Americans who participated in the Midlife in the United States study, we investigated relationship adjustment and neighborhood quality as independent and interactive predictors of negative and positive affect 10 years later and examined gender differences in these linkages. Higher neighborhood quality predicted lower levels of negative affect and higher levels of positive affect for both men and women a decade later. Additionally, for Black men, the longitudinal association between relationship adjustment and negative affect differed by neighborhood quality such that better relationship adjustment predicted higher subsequent negative affect only for men in lower quality neighborhoods. Findings demonstrate the connections among romantic relationship functioning, ecological resources, and gender in this population and highlight the importance of incorporating socioecological and intersectional perspectives for predicting Black Americans' long-term psychological health. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Responsivity to Interviewer during Interview-Based Assessment of Physical Intimate Partner Violence.

Objective: Interview assessments of intimate partner violence (IPV) may provide more accurate behavior frequency estimates than self-report questionnaires. However, concerns have been raised about whether participants underreport IPV during interviews due to an emotional response to the interviewer. Method: Participants were 42 mixed gender community couples (83 individuals) in which at least one partner endorsed physical IPV perpetration or victimization in their relationship. We examined whether participants were emotionally responsive to the interviewer during an interview about physical IPV. Responsivity was defined as the extent to which participants' emotional arousal, indexed by vocal fundamental frequency (f0), was predicted by interviewers' emotional arousal at the previous talk turn on a moment-by-moment basis. We then examined whether participants' responsivity predicted interview-based reporting of IPV relative to their own self-report on an IPV measure and to the highest other available report (including partner report). Results: Repeated measures actor-partner interdependence models conducted in a multi-level modeling framework indicated that, on average, participants were responsive to interviewers' emotional arousal, even when controlling for responsivity to their own arousal, and that responsivity varied across participants. However, participants' responsivity to interviewer arousal did not significantly predict reporting of IPV perpetration or victimization during the interview relative to their own self-report or to the highest other available report. Conclusions: Participants are emotionally responsive to interviewer arousal, but this responsivity does not appear to reduce interview-based reporting of IPV relative to self-report, supporting the utility of IPV interviews in clinical and research settings.