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Association of Interpersonal Cognitive Complexity with Communication Skill in Marriage: Moderating Effects of Marital Distress
Author(s) -
DENTON WAYNE H.,
BURLESON BRANT R.,
SPRENKLE DOUGLAS H.
Publication year - 1995
Publication title -
family process
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.011
H-Index - 74
eISSN - 1545-5300
pISSN - 0014-7370
DOI - 10.1111/j.1545-5300.1995.00101.x
Subject(s) - association (psychology) , interpersonal communication , psychology , distress , cognition , moderation , interpersonal relationship , clinical psychology , developmental psychology , social psychology , psychotherapist , psychiatry
Little research has examined the influence of social cognition on communicative behaviors that spouses exhibit in conversational interactions. The present study examined the associations between interpersonal cognitive complexity and three marital communication skills: communication effectiveness (generating messages that have the desired outcome), predictive accuracy (anticipating accurately the effects of a message on a receiver), and perceptual accuracy (correctly inferring the intent of a message source). The study also evaluated whether marital distress moderated associations between cognitive complexity and communication skills. Participants (60 couples) discussed a problem from their own marriage and a vignette from the Inventory of Marital Conflicts (Olson & Ryder, 1970) using the communication box. Cognitive complexity was moderately associated with perceptual accuracy, weakly associated with communication effectiveness, and not associated with predictive accuracy. Subsidiary analyses revealed that associations between cognitive complexity and the communication skills were generally stronger in the sub‐sample of distressed couples than in the subsample of nondistressed couples.