This article reviews the advances made in the decade of the 1990s in observing marital interaction. Many technological advances in data collection, including synchronization of physiology, behavior, and cognition, and advances in data analysis such as sequential analysis, have yielded new understanding and advances in prediction of marital outcomes. The advances have also included the study of developmental processes, including the transition to parenthood and the study of midlife and older marriages. Central advances have been made in the study of affect and the study of power and in their integration. This advance has included the mathematical modeling of interaction using nonlinear difference equations and the development of typologies. There has been an added focus on health outcomes and the bidirectional effects of marriages on children. There has been an expansion of the study of marital interaction to common comorbid psychopathologies. Most important has been emergent theorizing based on the interaction of behavior, perception, and physiology, as well as their predictive power.Observational research plays a major role in research on marriage, both for purposes of description and for building theories of the mechanisms underlying central phenomena occurring within

In this article we review the advances made in the 20th century in studying marriages. Progress moved from a self-report, personality-based approach to the study of interaction in the 1950s, following the advent of general systems theory. This shift led, beginning in the 1970s, to the rapid development of marital research using a multimethod approach. The development of more sophisticated observational measures in the 1970s followed theorizing about family process that was begun in the decade of the 1950s. New techniques for observation, particularly the study of affect and the merging of synchronized data streams using observational and self-report perceptual data, and the use of sequential and time-series analyses produced new understandings of process and power. Research in the decades of the 1980s and 1990s witnessed the realization of many secular changes in the American family, including the changing role of women, social science's discovery of violence and incest in the family, the beginning of the study of cultural variation in marriages, the expansion of the measurement of marital outcomes to include longevity, health, and physiology (including the immune system), and the study of comorbidities that accompany marital distress. A research agenda for the 21st century is then described.

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Responses of 2-5-year-old children to angry adult behavior were examined as a function of parental report of marital distress, history of interparent verbal hostility, and history of interparent physical hostility. A trained actor engaged the child's mother in an emotionally expressive verbal exchange while the child played in the same room. The exchange was standardized and consisted of a 7-episode sequence of shifting background conditions (no emotion, friendly, no emotion, angry, no emotion, reconciliation, no emotion). Preoccupation with anger, expressed concern and support-seeking, and accepting of social responsibility (e.g., providing physical or verbal comfort to the mother) were greater in response to background anger than in response to prosocial conditions. The parents' marital adjustment was positively associated with expressed concern and support-seeking by children in response to anger. Form and degree of marital conflict interacted with age and sex in predicting children's response to anger as well. In particular, children whose parents engaged in physical aggressiveness showed increased preoccupation, concern and support-seeking, and social responsibility responses with increasing age. Implications of these findings for the study of the effects of marital discord on children are discussed.