Using a Computerized Evaluative Conditioning App to Enhance Marital Well-Being
Abstract
Large bodies of research in multiple domains document the benefits of healthy long-term close relationships, such as marriage, to meeting goals relevant to health and occupational performance. These associations suggest Service Members’ marital well-being should have important implications for their mental health, physical health, and job performance. Nevertheless, several marital challenges associated with military service, such as physical separation from one’s partner and increased stress, have been linked to notable marital disruption. The proposed research would test the efficacy of a brief intervention designed to protect active-military Service Members (and their partners) from such relational threats. The procedure rests on the assumption that a key predictor of marital functioning is one’s automatic attitudes toward ones’ partner—that is, the immediate positive or negative affective response one has upon encountering one’s partner. Such automatic attitudes are critical because they are activated spontaneously (i.e., without intention, effort, or conscious deliberation) and, once activated, automatically guide (a) attention toward the attitude target (e.g., the partner), (b) construal and categorization of the target, and (c) approach/avoidance responses toward or away from the target, all without deliberation. Confirming the power of automatic partner attitudes, we published research in Science demonstrating that automatic partner attitudes predict marital functioning across 4 years. Automatic partner attitudes are typically built through repeated affect-laden experiences that come to be associated with the partner. Accordingly, military personnel who are physically separated from their partners have fewer opportunities to build and strengthen such positive associations. Moreover, even among military personal who are not physically separated from their partners, stress associated with military service can transfer to the partner and thus limit positive associations. Nevertheless, given that automatic partner attitudes are a mere summary of associations with the partner in memory, one way to directly strengthen them is through evaluative conditioning (EC)—simple pairings of a target, such as one’s spouse, with positive stimuli. Indeed, our pilot work used a sample of civilian married couples to demonstrate that couples who viewed photos of their partners paired with positive stimuli for 6 weeks experienced enhanced automatic partner attitudes over 8 weeks relative to control couples who viewed their partners paired with neutral images. The proposed research would test the feasibility and efficacy of this procedure among active-duty military personnel and their partners. If the procedure is effective, it would offer a brief (6-7 minute) application (i.e., app) that could be used to benefit marriage over the course of several weeks. Marriage is a significant source of social connection among Americans, and military personnel are no exception. Yet, a growing body of evidence indicates that stressors and physical separation due to military service result in significant marital disruption. Thus, if our procedure is effective, we expect it will have wide-ranging benefits. Not only may couples suffering from minor problems or physical separation benefit from our procedure, couples suffering from more serious problems may also benefit to the extent that our procedure is combined with other skills-based training. In the latter case, we argue that using EC to enhance partner attitudes as a potential supplement to more traditional marital therapy would increase couple members’ positive feelings and thereby increase their motivation to work together through their more serious problems. Strengthening military marriages through EC would provide several benefits to the Armed Forces. First, given the effects of marital quality on mental and physical health, strengthening marriage may improve the mental and physical health
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Dec 05, 2021
- Source ID
- W81XWH2120020
Entities
People
- James Mcnulty
Organizations
- Florida State University
- United States Army