Marital satisfaction, recovery from work, and diurnal cortisol among men and women.

Abstract

Design: Multilevel modeling was used to model relationships between salivary cortisol, daily diary ratings of work experiences, and Marital Adjustment Test scores (Locke & Wallace, 1959), in a sample of 60 adults who sampled saliva 4 times per day over 3 days. Results: Among women but not men, marital satisfaction was significantly associated with a stronger basal cortisol cycle, with higher morning values and a steeper decline across the day. For women but not men, marital satisfaction moderated the within-subjects association between afternoon and evening cortisol level, such that marital quality appeared to bolster women's physiological recovery from work. For both men and women, evening cortisol was lower than usual on higher-workload days, and marital satisfaction augmented this association among women. Men showed higher evening cortisol after more distressing social experiences at work, an association that was strongest among men with higher marital satisfaction. Conclusion: This work has implications for the study of physiological recovery from work, and also suggests a pathway by which marital satisfaction influences allostatic load and physical health.

The interaction of testosterone and cortisol is associated with attained status in male executives.

“…Mehta & Josephs, 2010;Zilioli & Watson, 2010). This discrepancy may be due to our late afternoon collection time (3:30pm -4:00pm), an interpretation that is consistent with time of day effects reported previously (Saxbe, Repetti, & Nishina, 2008).…”

For better or worse? Coregulation of couples’ cortisol levels and mood states.

“…The HPA axis also appears to be specifically sensitive to social inputs, including social evaluative threat (Dickerson & Kemeny, 2004); momentary social contacts, or "social zeitgebers" (Stetler, Dickerson, & Miller, 2004); and social support (Kirschbaum, Klauer, Filipp, & Hellhammer, 1995). Marital quality and attachment style have also been linked with HPA axis functioning, both in terms of reactivity to laboratory-based conflict interactions (e.g., KiecoltGlaser et al, 1993;Kiecolt-Glaser et al, 1996;Malarkey, KiecoltGlaser, Pearl, & Glaser, 1994;Powers, Pietromonaco, Gunlicks, & Sayer, 2006) and in daily life (e.g., Adam & Gunnar, 2001;Saxbe, Repetti, & Nishina, 2008). Due to its sensitivity to both social threat and social support, the HPA axis appears to be a fruitful physiological system to target in studying within-couple processes.…”

“…In other words, the three days of data collection, each with four saliva or mood sampling time points, can be conceptualized as one day with 12 sampling time points, and each mood or cortisol value at any given time of day can be tested as a deviation from the expected value, given the overall "slope" of mood and cortisol across the day. This is a common strategy used by researchers using multilevel modeling to study cortisol (Adam, 2006;Adam & Gunnar, 2001;Saxbe et al, 2008;Smyth et al, 1997) and was adopted in this study after high intraindividual stability in levels of mood and cortisol over the three days was established. Participants' cortisol, mood, time, and time-squared variables were group-centered in SPSS before being entered into HLM so that their values would represent deviations from each participant's individual means.…”

Relationships between diurnal adrenocortical activity, children’s attachment security and mothers’ attachment representations

“…In fact, relationship functioning and work demands predict individual differences in diurnal cortisol patterns in women and greater hours of maternal employment is associated with lower morning cortisol in mothers of two-years-old children (Adam & Gunnar, 2001). For both men and women, evening cortisol is lower than usual on higher-workload days (Saxbe, Repetti, & Nishina, 2008). The presence of these external stress variables may mask the real influence of attachment security on diurnal adrenocortical activity and should be further investigated in the future.…”