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The psychological impact of military deployment on nondeploying partners of service members is only recently gaining attention in the literature, with preliminary findings suggesting that partners of military service members experience significant mental health consequences of deployment, but with little work examining factors that could heighten or attenuate risk for maladjustment in response to deployment. The current study uses attachment theory as a guide to explore the unique and interactive effects of two factors likely to increase risk for maladjustment among nondeploying partners: attachment anxiety and trauma history. Participants (N = 86) completed assessments 2 weeks prior to and 2 weeks following their partners' deployment departure, as well as 2 weeks following their partners' return. Attachment anxiety and trauma history independently contributed to adjustment during and following the deployment, with partners high in either factor at greatest risk for maladjustment and partners high in both exhibiting the most linguistic signs of threat orientation. Further, low attachment anxiety was associated with better adjustment when trauma history was low or moderate, but not high; similarly, low trauma history was associated with better adjustment when attachment anxiety was at low or moderate, but not high. In terms of postdeployment adjustment, partners with less trauma history reported less distress. Somewhat surprisingly, among those with more trauma history, higher attachment anxiety was associated with less risk for maladjustment. We discuss these findings in terms of their implication for theory and prevention. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Although marital dissolution is associated with increased risk for poor mental and physical health outcomes, many people report improvements in functioning after divorce. To study the hypothesis that women in lower quality marriages would report the best outcomes upon separation/divorce, we investigated the combined effects of marital quality, gender, and marital status for predicting changes in life satisfaction (LS). Participants (N = 1,639; 50.3% men) were drawn from a nationally representative sample (Midlife in the United States Study), which included assessments of marital quality, marital status, and LS, at 2 time points (T1 and T2), roughly 10 years apart. Hierarchical linear regression analyses revealed an interaction between marital quality, marital status, and gender when predicting residual change in LS. Divorced women evidenced a negative association between marital quality and later LS, whereas continuously married women had a positive association between marital quality and later LS. In addition, women in higher quality marriages that become divorced showed the lowest LS, and women in lowest quality marriages show the highest LS among women with similar levels of marital quality. There was no association between marital quality and later LS for divorced or continuously married men. This work extends prior findings regarding gender differences in marital quality to postdivorce well-being, and suggests women in the lowest quality marriages may gain LS following divorce.

Building on prior research that marital functioning is associated with a variety of health outcomes, we evaluated the association between marital adjustment and a marker of inflammation in a sample of married adults between the ages of 35 and 84 years old (N = 415) from the second wave of the population-based Survey of Midlife Development in the United States (MIDUS II). Specifically, we evaluated associations between positive (i.e., partner support) and negative (i.e., partner strain) dimensions of marital adjustment and interleukin-6 (IL-6) separately for men and women, and whether these associations were moderated by age. Results indicated that (a) marital adjustment was not associated with IL-6 in men, (b) age moderated the association between marital adjustment and IL-6 in women, (c) partner support and partner strain were associated with IL-6 in younger women, and (d) partner support but not partner strain was uniquely associated with IL-6 in younger women. The associations between marital adjustment and IL-6 in younger women were significant when controlling for demographic variables, health status indicators, health behaviors, depressive symptoms, and perceived stress. These findings suggest that IL-6 may be a useful biomarker for studying health-relevant biological responses within intimate relationships, and that young women, in particular, may exhibit increased inflammation when partner support is low.