This is a request for an ADAMHA RSDA Level II award, competing continuation. There are two themes of the proposed series of short-term longitudinal research studies. The first theme is the longitudinal study of change in marriages. This series of research studies will test and modify a theoretical model of short-term longitudinal change in marriages. This will involve the identification of specific social and biological processes that predict change in marital satisfaction, marital interaction, and health. Pathways will be mapped between emotional processes in marital interaction, physiological, endocrinological, and immunological processes that relate to the longitudinal prediction of health and illness. The relative contributions of positive and negative affect in a naturalistic context will be mapped as they contribute to longitudinal change in marriages. The life course of this theoretical model will be mapped from the newlywed phase through retirement. The focus in this research is on emotion. In another short-term longitudinal study of a population that is extreme in its inability to regulate emotion, a social interactional and physiological analysis of marital violence will be constructed that discriminates abusive from distressed but non-abusive marriages and that predicts longitudinal change toward and away from abuse. The second theme is the transfer of marital discord to the child and its effects on the child's emotional development and peer social relationships. The dynamics of how marital discord leads to a wide variety of child problems in the early elementary years will be described in a theoretical model that includes marital interaction, marital physiology, parent-child interaction, children's abilities in emotional expression and regulation. Linkages will be delineated from the marital to the parent-child to the child-peer system. The relationship between facial expressions in posed and spontaneous conditions and autonomic specificity will be described. The developmental nature of """"""""emotion regulation"""""""" ability in young children and its consequences will be delineated.
