Risky families are characterized by conflict and aggression and by relationships that are cold, unsupportive, and neglectful. These family characteristics create vulnerabilities and/or interact with genetically based vulnerabilities in offspring that produce disruptions in psychosocial functioning (specifically emotion processing and social competence), disruptions in stress-responsive biological regulatory systems, including sympathetic-adrenomedullary and hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenocortical functioning, and poor health behaviors, especially substance abuse. This integrated biobehavioral profile leads to consequent accumulating risk for mental health disorders, major chronic diseases, and early mortality. We conclude that childhood family environments represent vital links for understanding mental and physical health across the life span.

Risky families are characterized by conflict and aggression and by relationships that are cold, unsupportive, and neglectful. These family characteristics create vulnerabilities and/or interact with genetically based vulnerabilities in offspring that produce disruptions in psychosocial functioning (specifically emotion processing and social competence), disruptions in stress-responsive biological regulatory systems, including sympathetic-adrenomedullary and hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenocortical functioning, and poor health behaviors, especially substance abuse. This integrated biobehavioral profile leads to consequent accumulating risk for mental health disorders, major chronic diseases, and early mortality. We conclude that childhood family environments represent vital links for understanding mental and physical health across the life span.

This review explores the role of environments in creating chronic and acute health disorders. A general framework for studying the nesting of social environments and the multiple pathways by which environmental factors may adversely affect health is offered. Treating socioeconomic status (SES) and race as contextual factors, we examine characteristics of the environments of community, work, family, and peer interaction for predictors of positive and adverse health outcomes across the lifespan. We consider chronic stress/allostatic load, mental distress, coping skills and resources, and health habits and behaviors as classes of mechanisms that address how unhealthy environments get "under the skin," to create health disorders. Across multiple environments, unhealthy environments are those that threaten safety, that undermine the creation of social ties, and that are conflictual, abusive, or violent. A healthy environment, in contrast, provides safety, opportunities for social integration, and the ability to predict and/or control aspects of that environment.

This article examines daily variability in 2 marital behaviors, social withdrawal and the expression of anger, as a function of daily taskload at work. Thirty-three air traffic controllers (ATCs) and 27 wives completed surveys on 3 consecutive days. Subjective and objective indicators of daily workload (air traffic volume and visibility at the airport) were related to the couples' descriptions of the ATCs' behavior after work. Despite a positive association between withdrawal and anger, workload seemed to influence these 2 behaviors in opposite ways. On high spouse-support evenings, work overload was associated with increased social withdrawal and less expression of anger. Social withdrawal may help an aroused individual return to a baseline emotional and physiological state. By facilitating their stressed partner's social withdrawal, supportive spouses may buffer the effects of minor daily stressors.

Although a majority of adults live with a close relationship partner, little is known about whether and how partners' momentary affect and physiology covary, or "coregulate." This study used a dyadic multilevel modeling approach to explore the coregulation of spouses' mood states and cortisol levels in 30 married couples who sampled saliva and reported on mood states 4 times per day for 3 days. For both husbands and wives, own cortisol level was positively associated with partner's cortisol level, even after sampling time was controlled. For wives, marital satisfaction weakened the strength of this effect. Partner's negative mood was positively associated with own negative mood for both husbands and wives. Marital satisfaction fully moderated this effect, reducing the strength of the association between one's own and one's partner's negative mood states. Spouses' positive moods were not correlated. As expected, within-couple coregulation coefficients were stronger when mood and cortisol were sampled in the early morning and evening, when spouses were together at home, than during the workday. The results suggest that spouses' fluctuations in negative mood and cortisol levels are linked over several days and that marital satisfaction may buffer spouses from their partners' negative mood or stress state.