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Dyadic exchanges of support and control were investigated in couples in which the husband was recently treated or assessed for heart disease. Each partner in 61 marital dyads (N = 122 participants) reported the frequency with which both social support and social control to promote a healthy lifestyle were provided to and received from one another. Multivariate findings demonstrated the influence of intrapersonal (or actor) and interpersonal (or partner) contributions of providing support and control to each spouse's perception of receiving such exchanges from the other. These findings reveal that marital partners' perspectives of receipt of health-related exchanges of support and control are associated not only with the behavior of the partner, but also with their own initiation of health-promoting exchanges on their partner's behalf. KEY WORDS: dyadic analysis • marriage and health • social control • social support Although social exchanges necessarily involve at least two partners, one to provide and the other to receive, relatively few studies involve both

U.S. studies indicate that children tend to stabilize marriage but, paradoxically, to reduce marital satisfaction. To explore whether this finding exists in a similar fashion in other cultures, the authors studied the impact of number of children on spousal love in the United States, United Kingdom, and Turkey, while accounting for other marital demographics (such as duration of marriage and the ages of wives and husbands). The number of children predicted diminished marital satisfaction in couples from all three cultures, although this effect arguably was not present in Turkish wives. In addition, marital satisfaction in couples from all three cultures was generally negatively predicted by the duration of marriage. Marital satisfaction was generally unrelated to wife's age. The effect of husband's age was important to marital satisfaction in couples from all cultures, although the nature of this effect diverged in relating positively to marital satisfaction for British and American couples but negatively for Turkish couples and especially Turkish wives. The authors identify several potentially important implications of these results.Marital satisfaction has been found to decline with the arrival, number, and development of children. Studies in England (reviewed by

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