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Hundreds of books offer advice about intimate relationships. How should we choose which advice to follow?
David Young-Wolff/Photo Edit
Figure 2.1

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The scientific method.
Figure 2.2

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Socioeconomic status and divorce. National data collected in 1995 reveals that knowing the economic stability of a neighborhood allows us to predict the stability of marriages in that neighborhood. Marriages in neighborhoods where economic indicators are weak (e.g., high unemployment, low family incomes, high poverty, high rates of people receiving public assistance) were almost twice as likely to break up than marriages in neighborhoods where these indicators were strong. By themselves, though, these data do not help us to understand how this association comes about. Going beyond simple description and prediction requires research that focuses on explanation.
Adapted from Figure 26: Probability that the first marriage breaks up within 10 years by community male unemployment rate, median family income, percent below poverty, and percent receiving public assistance, from Bramlett, M. D., & Mosher, W. D. (2002). Cohabitation, marriage, divorce, and remarriage in the United States (Vital and Health Statistics No. Series 23, Number 22). Hyattsville, Maryland: National Center for Health Statistics, United States 1995.
Figure 2.3

5. 2 Table 2.1 Seven Essential Attributes of Love
Zick Rubin, “The Love Scale” from “Measurement of Romantic Love,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 16.2 (1970). Copyright © 1969, 1970 by Zick Rubin. Reprinted by permission.
Table 2.1

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“The Sociosexual Orientation Inventory” (Appendix B, page 883) from “Individual differences in sociosexuality: Evidence for convergent and discriminant validity,” Simpson, Jeffry A.; Gangestad, Steven W., Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
Vol 60, Jun 1991, 870–883. Copyright © 1991 by the American Psychological Association. Reproduced with permission.
Table 2.2

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P. C. Miller, et al., “Construction and Development of the Miller Marital Locus of Control Scale,” Canadian Journal of Behavioral Science, 15.3 (1983). Reprinted by permission of the Canadian Psychological Association.
Table 2.3

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Interpreting self-reports can be complex. Couples who fill out questionnaires and the people who administer those questionnaires do not always interpret the same answers in the same way.
© The New Yorker Collection Robert Mankoff. All Rights Reserved.
Figure 2.4

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Memory biases in self-reports. When asked to describe how their marital satisfaction had changed over 20 years, wives reported improvements over the first 10 years, and stability over the next 10 years. In fact, their rates of marital satisfaction had declined over each period. When memories fail, self-reports are weak operationalizations of psychological constructs.
Adapted from Figure: Observed and perceived trajectories over 20 years, from Karney, B. R., & Coombs, R. H. (2000). “Memory bias in long-term close relationships: Consistency or improvement?” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 26, 959–970.
Corbis Sygma
Figure 2.5

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Simple questions are not always simple. When President Bill Clinton was asked if he had sex with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, he answered, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.” Seems like a straightforward answer to a straightforward question, though later disclosures led many to accuse the president of telling a straightforward lie. However, research published in the Journal of the American Medical Association suggests that people differ widely in their definitions of sex, suggesting that questions that seem clear to the researcher asking may not be as clear to the person answering.
Corbis Sygma
Figure 2.6

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Table 1 from S. A. Sanders and J. M. Reinisch, “Would You Say You ‘Had Sex’ If . . .?,” Journal of the American Medical Association, Vol. 281, No. 3, 275–277 (1999). Copyright © 1999 American Medical Association. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.
Table 2.4

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Locke & Wallace, Selected Items from Martial Adjustment Test, “Short Marital Adjustment Prediction Tests,” Marriage and Family Living, 21 (1959). Copyright © National Council on Family Relations, Reproduced with permission of Blackwell Publishing Ltd. M. A. Straus, Selected Items from Conflict Tactics Survey, “Measuring Intrafamily Conflict and Violence,” Journal of Marriage and the Family, 41.1 (1979). Copyright © National Council on Family Relations, Reproduced with permission of Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Selected items from Andrew Christensen and Megan Sullaway, Communication Patterns Questionaire (1984). Reprinted by permission.
Box 2.1 Spotlight On…

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Different types of correlations. When we say that two variables are correlated, we mean that knowing something about one variable tells us something about the other variable. What a correlation tells us depends on whether the correlation is positive or negative, and how much a correlation tells us depends on whether the correlation is strong or weak.
Adapted from model from Gazzaniga et al., Introduction to Psychological Science, 2nd edition, Fig. 2.16, p. 66.
Figure 2.7

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Box 2.2a Spotlight On…

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Box 2.2b Spotlight On…

16. 2 Figure 2.8a How does marital satisfaction change over time?
VanLaningham, Johnson, and Amato (2001) compared the current marital satisfaction of people who had been married for different amounts of time in This cross-sectional analysis revealed the same U-shaped curve that others had found, suggesting that marital satisfaction is highest in early marriage, declines in the middle years, and then rises again in the later years.
Adapted from Figure 1 Marital Happiness by Marital Duration for 1980 sample, Lowess and Quadratic Curves; Figure 2 Marital Happiness by Marital Duration for the Fixed Effects Models, from VanLaningham, J., Johnson, D. R., & Amato, P. (2001). “Marital happiness, marital duration, and the U-shaped curve: Evidence from a five-wave panel study.” Social Forces, 78, 1313–1341.
Figure 2.8a

17. 2 Figure 2.8b How does marital satisfaction change over time?
(b) When VanLaningham et al. (2001) used longitudinal data to examine how marital satisfaction actually changed over time at different marital durations, a different picture emerged. The U-shaped curve is revealed to be an illusion—marital satisfaction on average declines more or less linearly over time.
Adapted from Figure 1 Marital Happiness by Marital Duration for 1980 sample, Lowess and Quadratic Curves; Figure 2 Marital Happiness by Marital Duration for the Fixed Effects Models, from VanLaningham, J., Johnson, D. R., & Amato, P. (2001). “Marital happiness, marital duration, and the U-shaped curve: Evidence from a five-wave panel study.” Social Forces, 78, 1313–1341.
Figure 2.8b

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Table 2.5

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Can we read the future in a face? College yearbooks can be treasured mementos for some people, but for psychologists LeeAnne Harker and Dacher Keltner (2001), they proved a source of archival data. These researchers found that women who displayed more positive expressions in their college yearbook photos were more likely to be happily married 30 years later.
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Figure 2.9 a

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Can we read the future in a face? College yearbooks can be treasured mementos for some people, but for psychologists LeeAnne Harker and Dacher Keltner (2001), they proved a source of archival data. These researchers found that women who displayed more positive expressions in their college yearbook photos were more likely to be happily married 30 years later.
Paul Taylor Riser/Getty Images
Figure 2.9 b

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Table 2.6

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