Effects of statements of gratitude and praise and the limitation of criticism on self-reported marital satisfaction

There is a pressing need to find effective interventions to increase marital satisfaction to further prevent the deleterious effects of a distressed and/or disrupted marital relationship. This applied dissertation was designed to investigate how self-scripted positive daily communication in the form of expressed gratitudes and praise affects relationship satisfaction as measured by Snyder's (1998) Marital Satisfaction Inventory - Revised. The research was an extension of DeMoss's 2004 investigation that showed a significant difference in changes in overall MSI-R scores. For this study, twelve married, heterosexual couples in metro Atlanta participated in a 28-day field experiment in which they were randomly assigned to an intervention group or comparison group. The couples in the intervention group were instructed to provide their partners with five statements of praise and/or gratitude (positive communication) and no more than one statement of criticism (negative communication) per day. DeMoss's control couples "experienced nothing but the passage of time during the 21-day period" (DeMoss, 2004, p. 22). In this investigation, however, the comparison group was also instructed to log statements of praise and/or gratitude, as well as statements of criticism. The purpose of this modification was to control for demand characteristics, which seemed rather significant when evaluating DeMoss's methodology. Analysis revealed that positive daily communication in the form of expressed gratitudes did not improve relationship satisfaction. That is, an individual's marital satisfaction score did not increase relative to the positivity of statements received from his/her spouse. However, controlling for demand characteristics by asking the comparison group to record positive statements as they naturally occur did decrease the effect size between the comparison group and the intervention group as compared to DeMoss's 2004 investigation.