The present study investigates how coordination between stress responsivity of the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS) and sympathetic nervous system (SNS) moderates the prospective effects of marital conflict on internalizing and externalizing symptoms across adolescence. Although an important avenue for psychophysiological research concerns how…

Background: Parental school involvement is associated with social, psychological, and academic child outcomes. Beyond school, demographic, and individual influences, research on the relationship between family level processes and parental school involvement is limited. Coparenting is a unique family level relationship that influences parental…

The deleterious effects of marital conflict on youth outcomes are well-documented in both cross-sectional and longitudinal studies. To date, longitudinal studies have focused on repeated measures of youths' outcomes and the temporal dynamics of marital conflict have largely been ignored. Marital conflict changes over time as contextual and…

Although the assertion that marital hostility relates to higher levels of youth adjustment difficulties has been well established, few studies have examined cooperative marital conflict in relation to youth behavior problems. This study examined the main and moderating effects of cooperative marital conflict on youth behavior problems in a sample…

In her welcome and opening remarks, Lynne Peyton--a consultant specialising in children's services in Northern Ireland--set the scene for the proceedings of this seminar on marital separation. She confirmed that the escalating extent of marital separation is a worldwide phenomenon and certainly one that represents an increasing challenge for…

This study examined whether children’s difficulties with stage-salient tasks served as an explanatory mechanism in the pathway between their insecurity in the interparental relationship and their disruptive behavior problems. Using a multimethod, multi-informant design, 201 two-year-old children and their mothers participated in 3 annual…

Marital conflict is a distressing context in which children must regulate their emotion and behavior; however, the associations between the multidimensionality of conflict and children's regulatory processes need to be examined. The current study examined differences in children's (N=207, mean age=8.02 years) emotions (mad, sad, scared, and happy)…

The present study investigated associations between maternal relationship instability patterns and children's behavioral and emotional functioning in middle childhood in a representative sample of low-income urban families (N = 891). Data from the "Three-City Study" tracked maternal partnerships through the child's life, assessing total marital…

Existing studies of mediation models have been limited to normal-theory maximum likelihood (ML). Because real data in the social and behavioral sciences are seldom normally distributed and often contain outliers, classical methods generally lead to inefficient or biased parameter estimates. Consequently, the conclusions from a mediation analysis…

The present study examined the impact of domestic violence (DV) on children's emotion regulation abilities measured via baseline vagal tone (VT). Specifically, the authors examined the relationship between DV exposure and children's regulatory functioning over time, investigating whether DV exposure was related to the trajectory of children's…

Much research has argued for the existence of a marriage benefit to men, women, and children. Although the commonly suggested current response to a husband's violence has been for the couple to separate, traditionally women were often told to "stay for the children." This paper uses the Project on Human Development in Chicago…

In this article, I use data on women (N= 655) from the 2002 National Survey of Family Growth to examine the correlates of second marital dissolution. I update the limited number of previous studies on this topic by focusing on the relationships between divorce and the complex life course patterns that characterize respondents in second marriages.…

Using data from a national sample of two-parent families with 11- and 12-year-old youths (N = 591), we tested a structural model of family background, family process (marital conflict and parenting), youth self-control, and delinquency four years later. Consistent with the conceptual model, marital conflict and youth self-control are directly…

This report examines whether the presence of children in marriage differentially influences the risk of wives or husbands initiating separation. The analytic sample consists of 9,118 first marriages from the Households, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia survey (2001). Using event history and competing risks analysis, I find weak evidence…

Self-representations of 1st-, 3rd-, and 5th-graders' social and academic competence were examined in relation to children's personal (grade/age); family (attachment to parents, marital conflict, anxiety related to conflict); and school (teacher appraisals) contexts. Children who reported higher levels of security of attachment to parents and lower…