Should positive expectancies benefit or harm marriage and mental health? Empirical research suggests that the answer to this question depends on whether such expectancies get confirmed through processes of expectancy confirmation or get disconfirmed and thus serve as contrasts that make actual outcomes look worse by comparison. One factor affecting the way positive expectancies operate should be the breadth of the expected outcome. Given that global outcomes are more open to interpretation, they should be more susceptible to the assimilating processes of expectancy confirmation. Given that concrete outcomes are less open to interpretation, in contrast, they should be more likely to disconfirm prior expectancies and thus be contrasted against such expectancies. Accordingly, positive expectancies for more global marital outcomes should benefit marriage and mental health by leading to more positive perceptions and experiences through processes of expectancy confirmation whereas positive expectancies for more concrete outcomes should harm marriage and mental health by making actual outcomes look worse by comparison. The proposed research will examine the effects of positive expectancies for global versus specific outcomes on changes in marital satisfaction and depression in a sample of 135 newlywed couples from East Tennessee. At baseline, these couples reported their marital satisfaction, depression, and the positivity of their expectancies for various global and specific outcomes. Every six months, they will again report their marital satisfaction, depression, and their expectancies for global and specific outcomes. It is predicted that prior positive expectancies for global outcomes will lead to more positive perceptions of such outcomes and thus more satisfaction and less depression over time. Prior positive expectancies for concrete outcomes, in contrast, are expected to predict more negative perceptions of such outcomes and thus less satisfaction and more depression over time. The extent to which spouses'expectancies for their partners'specific behaviors interact with objective observations of those behaviors to predict contrasting evaluations and the extent to which spouses'expectancies for the global quality of their partners'behaviors interact with objective observations of those behaviors to predict assimilated evaluations will be examined by video-recording and coding problem-solving discussions. Any individual differences in the tendency toward contrast and confirmation effects are expected to mediate the effects of expectancies on marital outcomes.
Findings from this research could provide insights valuable to efforts to improve marital and pre-marital interventions. Specifically, results supporting the current predictions would suggest that married spouses should be encouraged to process the content of their positive expectancies more globally but to process the content of their negative expectancies more specifically.
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