Marital Intimacy and Mood States in a Nonclinical Sample

Abstract

Abstract Sixty-nine nonclinical couples completed the Waring Intimacy Questionnaire and Profile of Mood States in order to assess the empirical generality of the theory of family psychopathology. Of 48 possible correlations for husbands and wives, between the eight intimacy content scales and six mood scales, only three for husbands were in the nonhypothesized direction but were not significant. For husbands all mood scales and only six intimacy scales, and for wives all mood scales and only seven intimacy scales were responsible for these relationships. The first canonical correlation between moods and intimacy was .66 for husbands and .69 for wives, each equivalent to the canonical partial correlations with desirability controlled for. Intimacy accounted for 17 percent of the variance in moods for husbands and 28 percent for wives, but moods accounted for a substantially smaller amount of intimacy variance in both groups. The results were interpreted as providing empirical support for the theory of family psychopathology.