title: Association of interpersonal cognitive complexity with communication skill in marriage: moderating effects of marital distress.
abstract: 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 subsample of distressed couples than in the subsample of nondistressed couples.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Medicine, Bowman Gray School of Medicine, Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, NC 27157-1087, USA.
authors.forename: W H
authors.initials: WH
authors.lastname: Denton
authors.forename: B R
authors.initials: BR
authors.lastname: Burleson
authors.forename: D H
authors.initials: DH
authors.lastname: Sprenkle
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D003071:Cognition; D003142:Communication; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007398:Interpersonal Relations; D008297:Male; D008393:Marriage / Q000523:psychology* / Q000639:trends; D008875:Middle Aged; D011336:Probability; D012494:Sampling Studies; D012737:Sex Factors; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires