attributions and anger in marriage

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Attributions and Anger in Early Marriage: Wives AreEvent-Dependent and Husbands Are Schematic

Keith SanfordBaylor University

Two types of attribution believed to predict anger in married couples were investigated.Wives anger was expected to be predicted by event-dependent attributions, appraisals basedon the unique aspects of ones current situation. Husbands anger was expected to bepredicted by schematic attributions, appraisals based on ones global sentiment in therelationship. Seventy-seven recently married couples attended 2 assessment sessions, andeach couple identied 4 incidents pertaining to unresolved relationship issues. Participantsrated their event-dependent attributions and their anger prior to a discussion for each incident.They also completed questionnaires regarding schematic attributions and relationship senti-ment. Hierarchical linear modeling was used to distinguish between the 2 types of attribution.Strong support was found for the expected gender differences. Results suggest that wives areparticularly attentive to the details of interpersonal interaction.

Keywords: attributions, marriage, couples, emotion, gender differences

There is a robust relationship between satisfaction inmarriage and the types of attribution couples make fornegative relationship events (Bradbury & Fincham, 1990).When there is conict in a marriage, distressed couples tendto view each other as the cause of the problem and to ascribeblame to each other. When couples make negative attribu-tions, they are more likely to engage in destructive forms of communication when discussing areas of conict (Brad-bury, Beach, Fincham, & Nelson, 1996; Bradbury & Fin-cham, 1992; Miller & Bradbury, 1995), which in turn ispredictive of relationship dissatisfaction and instability(Karney & Bradbury, 1995). Along this line, Karney andBradbury (2000) demonstrated that attributions in marriageoften change over time and that changes in attributionspredict longitudinal changes in relationship satisfaction.

Although it is clear that attributions play an importantrole in relationship process, one issue that has receivedrelatively little attention is how attributions are related toemotion in marriage. Presumably, emotions are a product of human evolutionary history and serve important adaptivefunctions (Smith & Lazarus, 1990). To the extent thatattachment relationships are essential for human survival,

emotions are likely to play an important role in the main-tenance and dissolution of close interpersonal relationships.Emotions prepare and motivate a person to act, shape the

way a situation is perceived, and, when expressed, inuencethe responses of others. Thus, it is likely that emotion playsan important role in marital process. It is possible that onereason attributions are strongly predictive of marital out-comes is that attributions are closely linked with emotion.

Along this line, Weiner (1985) suggested that one impor-tant function of attributions is that they lead to emotion.Specically, attributions are expected to produce angerwhen a negative event is attributed to the partners control-lable behavior. Similarly, Lazaruss (2001) appraisal theoryof emotion suggests that a person is likely to feel anger if heor she blames another for a salient negative event. Accord-ingly, research indicates that attributions or appraisals re-garding blame, locus, and controllability are correlated withanger (Smith, Haynes, Lazarus, & Pope, 1993). In researchusing laboratory and eld simulations, participants reportfeeling more anger when led to believe that a confederatesnegative behavior is internal and controllable rather thanexternal and uncontrollable (Weiner, Amirkhan, Folkes, &Verette, 1987). In addition, when primed to make blamingattributions, participants are more likely to experience angerin response to a confederates rebuff (Neumann, 2000). Inresearch specically involving married couples, negativeattributions have been correlated with self-report ratings of trait hostility (Senchak & Leonard, 1993) and negativeaffect (Fincham, Beach, & Nelson, 1987). In addition, Fin-cham and Bradbury (1992) found that attributions correlatewith both self-report ratings of anger and behavioral ratingsof anger made during problem-solving discussions.

Taken together, it appears that negative attributions areindeed correlated with anger in marriage. However, to fullyunderstand the link between attributions and anger, it isnecessary to consider an important distinction made byBugental and Johnston (2000) between schematic and

Valuable input and support was provided by Kristen Sanford,who unexpectedly passed away on November 16, 2002. This studywas supported in part by a grant from the Baylor UniversityResearch Committee.

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed toKeith Sanford, Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, Bay-lor University, One Bear Place, No. 97334, Waco, TX 767987334. E-mail: [email protected]

Journal of Family Psychology Copyright 2005 by the American Psychological Association2005, Vol. 19, No. 2, 180 188 0893-3200/05/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/0893-3200.19.2.180

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event-dependent cognition. Schematic cognition includesattributions that are made not in response to a particularcontext but on the basis of ones schemata or memoriesregarding how things typically are in ones relationship.According to Smith and Kirbys (2001) appraisal theory of emotion, this type of cognition can become activated auto-

matically and largely outside of conscious awarenessthrough priming or spreading activation. When schemata ormemories are activated, the associated appraisals also be-come activated, and this is believed to produce emotion. Tothe extent that schemata tend to be stable over time, thisprocess would produce a link between attribution and emo-tion that remains relatively consistent across contexts. Forexample, a negative relationship event could automaticallyactivate a persons schema of spouse blame or maritaldissatisfaction, which in turn could produce anger, and thiscould occur regardless of the conscious attributions theperson might make for his or her spouses behavior in thatparticular situation. At the schematic level, then, the link between attributions and emotion is similar to Weisss(1980) concept of sentiment override, whereby couples re-spond to a situation on the basis of their overall sentimenttoward the relationship as a whole rather than on the basisof the unique features of the situation.

In contrast, event-dependent cognition includes attribu-tions that are made when a person consciously attends to theunique characteristics of a particular situation and engagesin a deliberate appraisal. In their appraisal theory of emo-tion, Smith and Kirby (2001) describe this as cognitionbased on reasoning. Importantly, event-dependent attribu-tions will change or uctuate from one situation to the next,whereas schematic attributions do not. This uctuationcould be produced by changes in the situation, changes in

the relationship, changes in a persons mood or goals, orchanges in a persons knowledge. The dening feature of anevent-dependent effect is that when the attributions change,there is a corresponding change in emotion. For example, if a wife consciously appraises a negative relationship eventand concludes that her husband is to blame, she may feelangry for that particular event, but she may not feel angryfor a negative event occurring a few days later where sheexcuses him from blame.

Importantly, event-dependent and schematic effects arenot mutually exclusive. It is likely that any given attributionwill be part schematic and part event dependent. This raisesa question, however, of whether both parts are active ingre-dients in predicting anger. At the event-dependent level, dowithin-person changes in attribution predict correspondingchanges in anger? At the schematic level, do schematicattributions or measures of relationship sentiment predictanger over and above what can be explained by event-dependent attributions?

Recent research on gender differences in marriage sug-gests that the answers to these questions might be differentfor husbands and wives. An interesting and consistent nd-ing in attribution research is that correlations between attri-butions and behavior are stronger for wives than for hus-bands (Bradbury et al., 1996; Bradbury & Fincham, 1992;Miller & Bradbury, 1995). This research nds that wives

attributions predict behavior during problem-solving con-versations and that husbands attributions are sometimesunrelated to behavior. Other research on social support inmarriage has also found that wives are more responsive tothe immediate context than are husbands (Carels & Bau-com, 1999; Cutrona & Suhr, 1994). In previous research

specically distinguishing between event-dependent andschematic cognition, Sanford (2003a) found that onlywives event-dependent (or proximal) expectancies predictbehavior. One explanation for this gender difference is thatwives engage in more bottom-up processing, whereas hus-bands engage in more top-down processing. That is, wivesmay be more attentive to the subtle details of interpersonalinteraction (Acitelli, 1992), whereas husbands may be lesssensitive to changes in the relationship and respond on thebasis of their overall sentiment. If this is true, then the link between event-dependent attributions and anger should bestronger for wives than for husbands. In contrast, the link between schematic attributions and anger should be stronger

for husbands than for wives. In addition, husbands angershould be strongly related to their overall relationship sen-timent, whereas this may not be true for wives.

Following an approach outlined by Sanford (2003a,2003b), this study used hierarchical linear modeling (HLM)to empirically distinguish between event-dependent andschematic effects. To do this, it was necessary to assess bothevent-dependent attributions and anger in response to realrelationship events on multiple occasions. This made itpossible to determine the extent to which attributions showwithin-person uctuations over time, and whether theseuctuations correspond to within-person changes in anger.In addition, this study investigated two schematic variables:schematic attributions and relationship sentiment. Sche-matic attributions were assessed by asking participants torate the attributions they would make in response to a set of hypothetical negative events. Relationship sentiment wasassessed via a self-report rating of marital quality. Thismade it possible to determine the extent to which individualdifferences in schematic attributions and in relationshipsentiment predict emotion after controlling for the event-dependent effects. Taken together, this study investigatedthe following hypotheses:

1. Within-person changes in event-dependent attribu-tions are expected to predict correspondingchanges in anger.

2. Schematic attributions are expected to explainunique variance in anger after controlling forevent-dependent attributions.

3. The effect for event-dependent attributions is ex-pected to be stronger for wives than for husbands.

4. The effect for schematic attributions is expected tobe stronger for husbands than for wives.

5. For husbands, overall relationship sentiment is ex-pected to predict unique variance in anger after

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controlling for both schematic and event-dependent attributions.

Method

Participants

Participants were 77 recently married couples. The majority of participants were recruited through letters sent to all couples underthe age of 40 who had applied for marriage licenses in the previous2 years in a mediumsmall Texas city. These letters described theresearch study, invited couples to schedule two assessment ses-sions in a communication laboratory, and stated that couples wouldreceive $60.00 for their participation. The rst 60 couples whoscheduled and kept both assessment appointments were includedin the sample. Previous research has found that couples recruitedin this way are often slightly better adjusted than couples recruitedthrough other methods, such as newspaper advertisements (Karneyet al., 1995). Thus, to reduce the overall risk of sampling bias inthe present study, an additional 17 couples were recruited througha newspaper advertisement that read Focus on your marriage.

Contribute to our research program and earn $60.00. The adver-tisement also stated that couples had to be recently married toparticipate. In the present study, there were no signicant differ-ences between couples recruited via the two different strategies onany of the salient variables considered. All participating coupleshad been married 3 years or less at the time of participation. Theparticipants average age was 26.48 years ( SD 6.72), and theyhad an average income of $40,387 ( SD $21,606). Forty-ninepercent had no children, 23% had been previously married, and58% lived together prior to marriage. The sample was 76% Cau-casian, 16% Hispanic, 3% African American, and 5% other races.

Procedure

All participants took part in two assessment sessions that wereheld at least 2 weeks apart. Each session lasted about 1 to 1.5 hr,and both involved engaging in several videotaped communicationexercises and completing a number of questionnaires. During therst assessment session, spouses were taken to separate rooms andgiven a Specic Incident Form printed on carbon paper. Thisform instructed participants to identify a specic incident thatillustrates an important unresolved issue in your relationship andto answer the following questions: (a) When did the incident takeplace? (b) Where did the incident take place? (c) What happened?and (d) What is the issue? After both spouses had completed thisform, the experimenter set the husbands form aside for later andseparated the carbon copy from the wifes original form. Whilecouples remained seated in separate rooms, one copy of the wifesincident form was given to the husband, and the other copy wasleft in front of the wife. Participants were told that they would soonhave a conversation with their spouse about the wifes chosenincident, and the husband was given time to read the wifescompleted incident form. Each spouse was then given a precon-versation questionnaire regarding his or her thoughts and feelingsabout the particular incident described on the wifes form. Thecopies of the wifes incident form were left in front of both spouseswhile they completed this questionnaire to ensure that there was noconfusion regarding the specic incident under consideration. Af-ter completing the questionnaire, couples were reunited and askedto engage in a 10-min conversation about the wifes incident.Couples were then taken back to separate rooms, and this timeeach spouse was given a copy of the husbands specic incidentform. Couples then completed a second preconversation question-

naire, this time in regard to the husbands incident. Subsequently,couples were reunited to have a 10-min conversation about thehusbands incident.

The second assessment session was scheduled at least 2 weeksafter the rst. The procedure was identical to the rst session withtwo exceptions. First, at the beginning of the second assessmentsession, couples completed a questionnaire packet that included ameasure of overall relationship satisfaction and a measure of schematic attributions. Second, the order of conversations wasreversed so that the husbands issue was considered and discussedbefore the wifes issue. This order was the same for all couples(not counterbalanced), in part to keep the procedure from becom-ing unnecessarily complex and in part because previous researchusing this particular protocol has found the ordering of incidents tobe inconsequential (Sanford, 2003b). Altogether, couples consid-ered a total of four different topics (two on the rst visit and twoon the second), and they completed four separate preconversationquestionnaires.

Measures

Relationship sentiment. The Quality Marital Index (QMI;Norton, 1983) was used to assess participants relationship senti-ment, or satisfaction. The items on this questionnaire ask partici-pants to evaluate the overall goodness of their relationship. Forexample, participants rate the extent to which they agree withstatements such as Our marriage is strong. This questionnairewas specically designed to assess relationship quality withoutasking respondents to describe particular events or behaviors thatmight overlap with other aspects of relationship functioning, suchas agreement or communication. As such, the QMI provides agood index of a persons global, subjective evaluation of his or herrelationship. The QMI contains six items, and in the present studyit produced alphas of .94 for wives and .93 for husbands. Theparticipants in this study were relatively nondistressed, with meanQMI scores of 34.23 ( SD 6.82) and 34.19 (SD 6.15) for wivesand husbands, respectively.

Schematic attributions. The Responsibility/Blame subscale of Fincham and Bradburys (1992) Relationship Attribution Measure(RAM) was used to measure a persons current, general tendencyto make blaming attributions for his or her partners behavior. Thisquestionnaire was chosen as a measure of schematic attributionsbecause it was specically designed to eliminate situation-specicresponses by having participants rate hypothetical events and notreal events. The questionnaire includes four hypothetical events,each representing a common form of negative partner behavior(e.g., Your partner criticizes something you say). For eachhypothetical event, participants rate on a 6-point scale the extent towhich they agree with three different attributions. In the presentstudy, this 12-item scale produced alphas of .87 for wives and .88for husbands.

Preconversation questionnaire. A separate preconversationquestionnaire was completed for each of the four incidents spousesidentied on the specic incident forms. Spouses were instructedto look at the specic incident form under consideration andanswer questions in response to the particular incident identiedon that form. To assess event-dependent attributions, spouses wereinstructed to look at the specic incident form and think aboutwhat your partner did during the specic incident described.Participants then indicated their agreement with six different attri-butions drawn from Fincham and Bradburys (1992) RAM: Mypartner did this on purpose rather than unintentionally, Mypartners behavior was motivated by selsh rather than unselshconcerns, My partner deserves to be blamed for this, Mypartners behavior is caused by something about him/her, The

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cause of my partners behavior is something that is not likely tochange, and The cause of my partners behavior is somethingthat affects other areas of our marriage. Each item was rated ona 6-point scale ranging from 1 ( disagree strongly ) to 6 (agreestrongly ). Reliability estimates across the four separate assess-ments ranged between .76 and .85 for wives and between .77 and.79 for husbands.

Anger was assessed using the Hard Emotion subscale from aquestionnaire developed by Sanford and Rowatt (2004) for assess-ing emotional responses to conict in close interpersonal relation-ships. Participants were instructed to look at the specic incidentform and take a moment to consider how you feel about the issuedescribed. They then rated their agreement with the followingfour items: I feel angry, I feel irritated, I feel annoyed, andI feel aggravated. Each item was rated on a 6-point scale rangingfrom 1 (disagree strongly ) to 6 (agree strongly ). The four emotionitems are intended to include generic and socially acceptable waysof describing anger. Previous research indicates that these itemsform a single factor that is distinct from other negative emotionsand that this scale is related to measures of attachment and rela-tionship satisfaction in theoretically expected ways (Sanford &Rowatt, 2004). Reliability estimates across the four separate as-sessments ranged between .87 and .92 for wives and between .89and .91 for husbands.

Results

Correlations were computed between each of the eightevent-dependent variables (four assessments of attributionand four assessments of anger). In addition, correlationswere computed between the schematic variables (schematicattributions and relationship quality) and the event-dependent variables. These correlations are reported in Ta-ble 1 for wives and Table 2 for husbands. As would beexpected, event-dependent attributions were moderatelycorrelated with schematic attributions, although the corre-lations were not so high as to suggest that these variables areredundant. For wives, each event-dependent attribution cor-related with the corresponding event-dependent anger rat-ing, and most of the correlations between event-dependentattributions and relationship quality were signicant. Hus-bands event-dependent attributions produced fewer signif-

icant correlations with other variables. However, husbandsschematic attributions, as well as husbands relationshipquality, correlated with anger at all four assessments,whereas most of these correlations were nonsignicant forwives.

In general, these results are consistent with the hypothe-

sized gender differences. Event-dependent attributions pro-duced strong results for wives, whereas schematic attribu-tions produced strong results for husbands. However, thesecorrelations are somewhat ambiguous because they cannotfully isolate the effects of event-dependent attributions fromthe effects of schematic attributions. This is because there isa degree of overlap between the measures of the two typesof attribution. Participants event-dependent appraisalscould be inuenced by their schematic attributions, andconversely, ratings of schematic attributions could merelyreect a cumulative sum of event-dependent appraisalsrather than a stable, schematic-level process. To obtain anaccurate estimate of event-dependent effects, it is necessary

to control for individual differences in schematic attribu-tions, which can be done by limiting the analysis to explain-ing changes occurring within the person. At the event-dependent level, changes in attributions should predictcorresponding changes in anger. Likewise, to obtain anaccurate estimate of schematic effects, it is necessary tocontrol for the effects of event-dependent attributions. As isdemonstrated shortly, accurate estimates of effects forevent-dependent and schematic attributions can be obtainedusing HLM.

As a preliminary step in the hierarchical analysis, intra-class correlations were computed for event-dependent attri-butions and anger. These correlations were useful becausethey indicate (a) the proportion of variance due to event-dependent changes within persons and (b) the proportion of variance due to stable, individual differences. To computeintraclass correlations, the variance between people wasdivided by the total variance (variance between people plusvariance within people). The intraclass correlations for at-tributions were .53 for wives and .48 for husbands. This

Table 1Correlations Between Event-Dependent and Schematic Variables for Wives

VariableEvent-dependent attributions Event-dependent anger

Time 1 Time 2 Time 3 Time 4 Time 1 Time 2 Time 3 Time 4

Event-dependent attributionsTime 1 Time 2 .57*** Time 3 .49*** .35** Time 4 .52*** .29** .44***

Event-dependent angerTime 1 .23* .17 .00 .25* Time 2 .14 .38*** .11 .33** .45*** Time 3 .02 .07 .35** .11 .15 .25* Time 4 .12 .00 .18 .50*** .36*** .21 .41***

Schematic variablesRelationship sentiment .28* .13 .27* .37*** .10 .14 .21 .30**Attributions .58*** .42*** .40*** .50*** .21 .25* .17 .20

* p .05. ** p .01. *** p .001.



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suggests that approximately half of the variance in attribu-tions reected changes occurring within persons and half of the variance reected individual differences between peo-ple. The intraclass correlations for anger were .29 for wivesand .41 for husbands. This suggests that there was some-what less consistency in anger across assessments, withmore than half of the variance representing within-personchange.

HLM (Bryk & Raudenbush, 1992) was used to examinethe relationship between attributions and anger across twolevels of analysis: the event-dependent level and the sche-matic level. This data analysis procedure is best described asa process that begins by creating a separate regressionequation for each individual couple in the sample. Follow-ing the multivariate hierarchical model described by Rau-denbush, Brennan, and Barnett (1995), this study used asingle equation to estimate a separate intercept and slope forthe wife and husband of each couple. In the present study,this equation took the following form:

yct b w0 wife bh0 husband bw1 wife attribution ct bh1 husband attribution ct ect .

For each couple, anger is assessed at 8 times (4 times foreach spouse), and yct is the anger score for couple c atassessment t (t 1, . . . , 8). For the wife, the variablelabeled wife is a dummy variable equal to 1, and thevariable labeled wife attribution is the wifes attribution zscore at assessment point t . For the husband, both of thesevariables are set to equal zero, and they drop out of theequation when predicting outcomes for the wife. This meansthat bw0 is the intercept for the wife, and bw1 is the slope forthe wife. Similarly for the husband, the variable labeledhusband is a dummy variable equal to 1 (and set to zerofor the wife), and the variable labeled husband attributionis the husbands attribution z score at assessment point t (setto equal zero for the wife). Thus, bh0 is the intercept for thehusband, and bh1 is the slope for the husband. Taken to-gether, it is possible to estimate four parameters for each

couple in the sample: the wifes intercept and slope and thehusbands intercept and slope. The slope indicates the extentto which within-person uctuations in event-dependent at-tributions predict corresponding within-person changes inemotion. The intercept gives a persons expected emotion,holding event-dependent attributions constant. Notably,event-dependent attributions scores were turned into zscores in this study so that the intercept gives a personsexpected emotion when his or her event-dependent attribu-tion is equal to the sample average attribution.

After the four parameter estimates were computed foreach couple in the sample (two intercepts and two slopes),these parameters were then used as outcome variables at thesecond level of analysis. The following second-level equa-tions were used to estimate each of the rst-level parame-ters:

b w0c w00 w01 wife attribution c uw0c

b h0c h00 h01 husband attribution c uh0c

b w1c w10

b h1c h10,

where w00 is the average expected anger for wives when allattributions are held constant; h00 is the average expectedanger for husbands when all attributions are held constant; w01 is the slope indicating the extent to which wivesschematic attributions predict their expected anger scoresafter controlling for event-dependent attributions; h01 is theslope indicating the extent to which husbands schematicattributions predict their expected anger scores after con-trolling for event-dependent attributions; w10 is the averagewithin-person slope for event-dependent attributions for allwives; and h10 is the average within-person slope forevent-dependent attributions for all husbands.

Taken together, these equations provide parameters indi-cating (a) the expected anger for wives and husbands after

Table 2Correlations Between Event-Dependent and Schematic Variables for Husbands

Variable

Event-dependent attributions Event-dependent anger

Time 1 Time 2 Time 3 Time 4 Time 1 Time 2 Time 3 Time 4

Event-dependent attributionsTime 1 Time 2 .48*** Time 3 .40*** .30** Time 4 .31** .22 .40***

Event-dependent angerTime 1 .30** .01 .25* .12 Time 2 .21 .19 .28* .05 .62*** Time 3 .17 .10 .40*** .21 .45*** .35** Time 4 .15 .05 .25* .17 .33** .25* .50***

Schematic variablesRelationship sentiment .29** .00 .11 .11 .52*** .41*** .37*** .36***Attributions .35** .33** .64*** .48*** .39*** .38*** .36*** .31**

* p .05. ** p .01. *** p .001.

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holding all attributions constant, (b) the effect of schematicattributions for wives and husbands after holding event-dependent attributions constant, and (c) the within-personeffect for event-dependent attributions for wives and hus-bands. The HLM 5.05 software program (Raudenbush,Bryk, & Congdon, 2001) was used to estimate the param-

eters for the equations listed above, and t tests were used totest the signicance of each coefcientor, specically, totest the null hypothesis that the coefcient is zero. In addi-tion, chi-square tests were used to test for signicant dif-ferences between wives and husbands. Each chi-square testcontrasted a selected coefcient for wives with the corre-sponding coefcient for husbands and tested the null hy-pothesis that the two coefcients were equal. To aid in theinterpretation of the results, all variables were standardizedprior to analysis.

Results from the HLM analysis are reported in Table 3.Although no specic hypotheses were made regarding theintercepts, the results are worth noting. After holding attri-butions constant, the expected z score for wives anger issignicantly higher than zero, and the expected z score forhusbands anger is signicantly lower than zero. Consistentwith these ndings, the chi-square test indicates that, hold-ing attributions constant, wives report signicantly moreanger than do husbands. This gender difference is congruentwith previous research using the same emotion question-naire, which also found that wives report more emotion thanhusbands (Sanford & Rowatt, 2004).

The slopes reported in Table 3 directly address the spe-cic hypotheses for this study. The results for schematicattributions were signicant for husbands but not for wives,and the chi-square test indicates that the effect is signi-cantly stronger for husbands than for wives. In contrast, the

event-dependent attributions produced a large effect forwives and a small, albeit signicant, effect for husbands.The difference between wives and husbands in event-dependent attributions was also signicant. Taken together,the results are consistent with the hypotheses that the event-dependent effects will be strongest for wives and the sche-matic effects will be strongest for husbands.

At the schematic level, relationship sentiment was alsoexpected to be predictive of husbands anger, but not nec-

essarily wives anger. To test this, relationship sentiment, asassessed by the QMI, was added to the HLM analysis. Thesecond-level equations were simply expanded so that bothschematic attributions and relationship sentiment were usedto predict the expected emotion score for each person. Theresults from this analysis are reported in the lower half of

Table 3. The results for relationship sentiment were strongand signicant for husbands, yet they were close to zero forwives. Moreover, the difference between wives and hus-bands was signicant. The results for husbands schematicattributions were attenuated after controlling for relation-ship sentiment. Although husbands schematic attributionsremained signicant, the difference between wives andhusbands schematic attributions became nonsignicant af-ter controlling for relationship sentiment. Moreover, thecoefcient for husbands relationship sentiment was signif-icantly larger than the coefcient for husbands schematicattributions, 2 (1, N 77) 31.57, p .01.

DiscussionThis study builds on previous research indicating that

attributions are correlated with anger in marriage (Finchamet al., 1987; Fincham & Bradbury, 1992; Senchak &Leonard, 1993), and it distinguished between two types of attribution: event dependent and schematic (Bugental &Johnston, 2000). The results indicate that the processes thatlink attributions and anger are not the same for husbandsand wives. Event-dependent attributions were the best pre-dictor of wives anger, whereas schematic attributions werethe best predictor of husbands anger. This means that forwives, changes and uctuations in attributions from onecontext to the next are strongly predictive of corresponding

changes in emotion. Moreover, variables that are distal tothe current context, such as relationship sentiment and sche-matic attributions, appear to have no additional inuence onwives emotion after controlling for their event-dependentappraisals. In contrast, husbands emotion was closely re-lated to schematic-level variables and especially to overallsentiment in the relationship. For husbands, changes oructuations in attributions were only weakly related tochanges in emotion. Thus, wives anger appears to be most

Table 3 Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM) Results Using Event-Dependent and Schematic

Variables to Predict Anger

Equation

HLM coefcients

2 (1, N 77) forgender differenceWives Husbands

First equationExpected anger Z score (intercept) .20** .18* 15.45***Schematic attributions (slope) .04 .25** 3.75*Event-dependent attributions (slope) .43*** .19** 8.00**

Second equationExpected anger Z score (intercept) .20** .19** 19.19***Schematic attributions (slope) .04 .17* 1.44Relationship sentiment (slope) .01 .33*** 11.19**Event-dependent attributions (slope) .43*** .17** 9.66**

* p .05. ** p .01. *** p .001.



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closely connected to event-dependent appraisals of the cur-rent context, whereas husbands anger appears to be mostclosely connected with schematic appraisals of the overallrelationship.

The distinction between event-dependent and schematiccognition is similar to distinctions made by other research-

ers from varying lines of inquiry using somewhat differentterminology. For example, Sanford (2003a, 2003b) distin-guishes between proximal and distal cognition, Solomon(2001) distinguishes between phasic and tonic attributions,and Smith and Kirby (2001) distinguish between cognitionbased on reasoning and that based on associative process-ing. Although researchers have used differing terminologyto describe the two types of cognition, there are threecommon assumptions suggested by many researchers in thisarea.

The rst common assumption is that there is an importantdistinction between attributions made in response to a spe-cic event and attributions based on memories or on sche-mata for how things typically are in the relationship. Thecorrelation results in the present study indicate that thesetwo types of attribution are moderately correlated. Thismakes assessment of attributions difcult, because the twotypes of attribution can be easily confounded. That is, anymeasure of event-dependent attributions is likely to be in-uenced, to a degree, by schematic attributions. Conversely,a measure of schematic attributions may reect, to an ex-tent, a simple cumulative sum of event-dependent attribu-tions. Consequently, if attributions are assessed for only asingle occasion, it is impossible to determine what percent-age of the variance actually represents an event-dependentappraisal and what percentage represents a schematic ap-praisal. However, the present study demonstrates a method

for distinguishing between these two types of attribution.This requires assessing both types of attribution and usingHLM to identify the unique effects associated with eachtype. The results based on this procedure conrm the va-lidity of both event-dependent and schematic attributions.Specically, the results indicate that the function and cor-relates of event-dependent attributions are not the same asthe function and correlates of schematic attributions.

A second common assumption suggested by researchersis that event-dependent cognition will change from onecontext to the next, whereas schematic cognition is a rela-tively stable characteristic of the person. In other words,event-dependent attributions pertain to within-personchange, whereas schematic attributions pertain to individualdifferences. Results from the present study suggest thatattributions include a degree of both stability and within-person change. For both wives and husbands, approximately50% of the variance in event-dependent attributions repre-sented individual differences between people, and approxi-mately 50% of the variance represented changes occurringwithin people. Given the strong reliability estimates for theattribution questionnaire, most of this variance appears to betrue variance. This means that the weak effect for husbandsevent-dependent attributions was not the result of a lack of reliable event-dependent variance. Husbands did changetheir attributions across situations, but these changes were

only weakly related to husbands emotion. Taken together,the results of this study t with the assumption that event-dependent attributions show substantial within-personchange from one context to the next. Although it wouldhave been useful to also investigate stability or change inschematic attributions, the present study was not able to do

this because it was conducted over a relatively brief timespan. In addition, couples made attributions in response tofour different incidents that were not necessarily ordered ina particular linear sequence. Thus, the focus of this studywas more on understanding short-term variability in attri-butions than on linear change in attributions over time.Previous research, however, has found that measures of schematic attributions demonstrate high testretest correla-tions (Fincham & Bradbury, 1987) yet can also change overthe period of a year or longer (Karney & Bradbury, 2000).Thus, schematic attributions may remain relatively stable,especially over short periods of time, yet also show gradualchange over long periods of time.

A third common assumption among theorists is thatevent-dependent cognition is a deliberate, conscious pro-cess, whereas schematic cognition is automatic and oftenoccurs outside of conscious awareness. This issue, however,was not directly addressed in the present study. Both event-dependent and schematic attributions were assessed viaself-report questionnaires, and participants needed to beconsciously aware of their attributions to report them. Thus,it is not clear whether schematic attributions are typicallybased on subconscious priming and spreading activation (assuggested by Smith & Kirby, 2001) and, if so, whether theseattributions are changed when they are made conscious forthe purpose of assessment. It is also possible that schematicattributions are sometimes conscious and deliberate. For

example, a spouse may effectively cope with a relationshipconict by deliberately thinking, We have a good relation-ship, and therefore there must be a good reason for mypartners behavior. The ndings of the present study sug-gest that future work in this area would be promising.

It is important to note that this study focused on under-standing attributions and anger in relatively nondistressed,recently married couples. Thus, it is not clear whether theresults of this study will generalize to older or more dis-tressed relationships. Previous research using a variety of sample types has found that attributions are correlated withboth affect and communication behavior. This includesstudies of recently married couples (Miller & Bradbury,1995; Senchak & Leonard, 1993), studies of couples drawnfrom the community (Fincham & Bradbury, 1992), andstudies including both distressed, clinical couples and non-distressed couples (Bradbury et al., 1996; Bradbury & Fin-cham, 1992; Fincham et al., 1987). Thus, it is common forndings from attributional research to generalize acrossdifferent types of couples. Nevertheless, it remains possiblethat specic ndings regarding event-dependent and sche-matic attributions may be moderated by relationship char-acteristics. For example, it is possible that, over time, attri-butions become increasingly schematic in a relationship.

This study investigated several hypotheses regarding dif-ferences between wives and husbands. In general, event-

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dependent effects were expected to be strongest for wives,whereas schematic effects were expected to be strongest forhusbands. These hypotheses were supported with strikingconsistency. As such, the results are congruent with previ-ous research indicating that husbands cognition tends tofunction at a global level, whereas wives cognition tends to

function at a context-specic level. For example, husbandsmarital attributions tend to spill over into interactions withtheir children, whereas wives marital attributions are morelimited to the marital context (Brody, Arias, & Fincham,1996). In predicting behaviors during specic maritalproblem-solving discussions, wives attributions tend toproduce stronger effects than husbands attributions (Brad-bury et al., 1996; Bradbury & Fincham, 1992; Miller &Bradbury, 1995). Consistent with the results of the presentstudy, husbands behavior is better predicted by their globalsentiment than by their attributions (Bradbury & Fincham,1992). In other research specically using HLM to differ-entiate between event-dependent and schematic effects,Sanford (2003a) found that only wives event-dependent (orproximal) cognitive expectancies predicted behavior duringa problem-solving conversation.

Taken together with these previous ndings, the results of the present study are consistent with the possibility that, incomparison with husbands, wives are more cognizant of relationship processes (Acitelli, 1992) and engage in moremeaningful appraisals of relationship events. This meansthat wives may be most inuenced by the specic context of relationship events, whereas husbands may be most inu-enced by their overall sentiment in the relationship. Thus,wives cognition may be better than husbands cognition inpredicting event-dependent variables, such as emotion for aparticular event or behavior in a particular conversation.

The results of the present study can also provide clues forinterpreting other gender differences reported in maritalresearch. For example, researchers have observed ademandwithdrawal pattern in distressed couples where onepartner (usually the wife) is frequently critical and angry,and the other partner (usually the husband) feels over-whelmed by this criticism and frequently withdrawals fromconict (Heavey, Layne, & Christensen, 1993). Gottman(1994) suggested that this is because husbands are easilyoverwhelmed, or ooded, by negative emotion and thatthis leads to withdrawal from conict. The results of thepresent study suggest that if a husband develops an ex-tremely negative relationship schema, he may respond to allconicts with intense negative emotion. In this case, thehusband may not respond to aspects of the particular contextthat might help him regulate negative emotions. Instead,even trivial incidents may be appraised as being extremelynegative, produce ooding, and lead to withdrawal. This, inturn, could set in motion and/or maintain a demandwithdrawal pattern of interaction.

The results of this study also have implications for cur-rent approaches to couples therapy. For example, it is pos-sible that interventions targeting variables that function atthe event-dependent level, such as wives attributions, willproduce the most immediate change in a relationship. Thisraises the question of how to change event-dependent attri-

butions. The close connection between event-dependent at-tributions and emotion for wives could indicate that wivesattributions reect accurate appraisals of the current context(Bradbury et al., 1996). If it turns out that wives attribu-tions are indeed generally accurate, then the best way tochange an event-dependent attribution would be to change

the context. This suggests that a particularly effective inter-vention might be to teach husbands to behave differentlyand teach wives to make positive attributions for thesechanges. The results of the present study indicate that achange in a wifes attributions would likely correspond to achange in her emotion. These implications for couples ther-apy remain relatively speculative at this point, in part be-cause this study used a relatively nondistressed sample andthe ndings may not generalize to a clinical setting. Theresults of the present study are important in that they dem-onstrate a method for distinguishing between event-dependent and schematic attributions, show how these typesof attributions function differently in wives and husbands,and provide direction for future research regarding clinicalapplications.

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Received August 8, 2003Revision received January 20, 2004

Accepted March 26, 2004

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