The research, led by psychology department chair Timothy Smith, was published in the January issue of the Annals of Behavioral Medicine.
Smith, who is interested in the link between psychology and physiology, had 45 married couples in their late 20's participate in staged arguments. The couples had been married an average of four years.
The couples were first asked a battery of questions that gauged their perceptions of each other's power in the relationship. Then they were asked to defend opposing viewpoints in a hypothetical scenario involving school budget cuts and the firing of personnel. Each subject was told, in private, to defend four different personnel positions, thus creating conflict. Blood pressure cuffs on each participant kept track of blood pressure rates.
As an added incentive, some participants were told that they would receive $100 in a lottery for helping with the study, but the reward would depend on the number of times they were successful in changing their spouse's position.
It has been well established that relationship stress can be a contributor to heart disease. Cardiovascular response (CVR) -- the sudden surges in heart activity due to anger or stress -- is thought to be a factor in that connection.
Smith, who has performed other studies examining the link between marital stress and heart disease, found the current research lended further credence to the relationship between psychosocial processes and health.
Smith discovered that subjects arguing with spouses they perceived as their equals had large jumps in CVR. Subjects who had spouses they perceived as clearly dominant or clearly submissive, however, displayed lower CVR.
"For both husbands and wives, the people who had the smallest increases were the ones who saw themselves as typically dominant in the relationship," Smith explained. "The people who saw themselves as equals had the largest blood pressure increases because if you're equal, it's tougher to argue your opinion than if you're always the dominant one.
"If you see yourself as quite submissive, with your spouse as clearly dominant, then those increases aren't very large either. That's because those people probably aren't trying very hard because they don't see themselves as likely to succeed. "When the roles are very clear, the interaction is probably pretty routine and isn't very cardiovacularly taxing, whereas it is a lot more work to resolve something when people are equal in status," he says.
In addition, men who were given the money incentive -- no matter if they saw their spouses as dominant or submissive -- all experienced increased blood pressure responses. Only women who saw themselves as submissive had their blood pressure rise with the money incentive.
The research results don't necessarily mean that people in marriages with lopsided power struggles are healthier than those in more equal marriages, Smith says.
The power differences, he explains, "might eventually contribute to long-term resentments. I don't know if they're off the hook (healthwise), since the stress might come from other factors in the relationship."
And despite the higher CVR fluctuations In the equal status group, that doesn't mean those relationships are unhealthy, either. "It becomes important to know how those couples are resolving problems," Smith says. "If they're equal status and know to compromise and work things out, one would assume those relationships would be healthier despite the blood pressure increases during arguments.
"Our main concern is knowing how it is that relationships influence people's cardiovascular health," he says. "We know that marital conflict increases risk for cardiovascular disease. We should be able to see why that is in moment to moment interactions."
Hopefully, research like Smith's will be useful in helping marriage counselors and other mental health professionals determine which types of interactions between couples are potentially unhealthy, so as to find new ways of showing couples how to argue better and healthier in the future.
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Contact: Tim Smith, 581-6124 Writer: Karen Wolf, 581-4628; [email protected]
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