Stress, mood, and social engagement in everyday family life

This dissertation comprises four interrelated papers that address families' everyday social functioning, momentary mood, and physiological stress. The first paper reviews the literature on ambulatory sampling of the stress hormone cortisol. The following papers are all based on adults' salivary cortisol data collected by UCLA's Center for the Everyday Lives of Families, an intensive "week in the life" study of 30 middle-class, dual-income families with children. The second paper, "For Better or Worse? Coregulation of Couples' Cortisol Levels and Mood States," explores correspondences between spouses' cortisol levels and momentary mood. For both husbands and wives, own cortisol level was positively associated with partner's cortisol level, and own negative mood was positively associated with partner's negative mood. Marital satisfaction appeared to weaken the strength of both effects. Within-couple coregulation coefficients were stronger when mood and cortisol was sampled in the early morning and evening, when spouses were together at home, than during the workday. The third paper, "Dual-Income Parents' At-Home Activities Affect Physiological Stress and Recovery," incorporates observational data on spouses' activities during the study week. For women, the most frequently pursued activities at home were chores, communication, and leisure; husbands spent the most time in leisure activities, followed by communications and chores. Couples' evening activities were associated with evening cortisol level and with the drop in cortisol from the afternoon to the evening, with the within-couple ratio of activity observations predicting cortisol patterns more strongly than each spouses' own activity time. Finally, the fourth paper, "No Place Like Home: Home Tours Correlate with Daily Patterns of Mood and Cortisol" uses linguistic analysis software to analyze spouses' self-guided home tours by calculating the frequency of words describing the home environment as stressful or restorative. Wives with higher "stressful home" scores had increased depressed mood over the course of the day and flatter diurnal slopes of cortisol, a profile associated with adverse health outcomes, while women with higher "restorative home" scores had steeper cortisol slopes and decreased depressed mood over the day.