This study examined daily fluctuations in marital behavior (anger and withdrawal) as a function of same-day job stressors, using hierarchical linear modeling (HLM). Forty-three couples provided daily diary reports of their workload and negative social interactions at work on 5 consecutive days. Within-subject analyses demonstrate that husbands and wives reported greater marital anger and withdr...

Violence against wives occurs in all societies, but the rates at which wives are beaten and killed are enormously variable over time and place. The rate of uxoricide (wife killing) in the United States, for example, is currently approximately five to ten times greater than in western Europe. In some societies, wife beating is normative and allegedly almost universal; in others, it is apparently...

This paper analyses how spouses in older couples react to ‘shocks’ or ‘surprises’ in their partner’s labour income using data from the British Household Panel Survey, 1991–2004. Wives’ labour supply proves to be much more sensitive to shocks than husbands’. After a divorce or separation, wives reduce their labour supply while the effect on husbands’ labour supply is positive or not statisticall...

Does forgiveness predict later conflict resolution in married couples? Twelve-month follow-up data on conflict resolution were collected from the couples studied by F. D. Fincham, S. R. Beach, and J. Davila, who had provided earlier reports of forgiveness and conflict resolution. For wives, the positive dimension of forgiveness or benevolence predicted husbands' later reports of better conflict...

Studies examining the association of housework with earnings have not tested for causal directionality despite competing theories about causal ordering. Autonomy theory, and the relative resources, gender display, and gender deviance neutralization hypotheses suggest personal and relative earnings affect time in housework while human capital theory implies the opposite. Using data from N = 3,71...

Cooperative models of household decision-making are proving inadequate in an increasing number of contexts. We argue that altruism among family members can, in fact, inhibit cooperation by increasing the utility that players expect to receive in a non-cooperative equilibrium. To test this, we examine agricultural productivity in polygynous households in West Africa. We find that cooperation is ...

I examine the response of husbands' and wives' earnings to a tax reform in which husbands' and wives' tax rates changed independently, allowing me to examine the effect of both spouses' incentives on each spouse's behavior. I analyze the large Swedish tax reform of 1990–1991 and find that in response to a compensated fall in one spouse's tax rate, each spouse's earnings rise. I compare these re...

This study explored secondary traumatization among wives of former POWs. Forgiveness and self-differentiation were investigated for their role in wives’mental and marital distress. Participants included wives (N 1⁄4 82) of former Israeli POWs (18 with PTSD [posttraumatic stress disorder] and 64 without PTSD) and a control group of 72 women whose husbands fought in the war but who were neither P...

This cross-sectional study examined how three types of social support-social participation, emotional support, and caregiving support-were related to depressive symptoms in wives caring for their elderly husband and daughters caring for their elderly parent. We investigated whether different dimensions of social support affect mental health via different mechanisms and whether the context in wh...

In this study, we compare the association of marital satisfaction with the division of labor between husband and wife in Asia, based on Chinese, Japanese, and Korean General Social Surveys in 2006 (N = 2,346, 997, and 990, respectively). Results show that in all three countries, wives are less satisfied than husbands with marriage, mainly because wives do disproportionately more housework than ...