The Relationship Among Everyday Empathic Accuracy,Relationship Duration And Marital Satisfaction Of The Couples

With the continuous development of the society, we suffer the big problem—increasing divorce rate. These become increasingly concerned for couples to know about how they dwelt together in harmony and concord, how to avoid divorce, how to improve their marital satisfaction. The current study examined the potential relationship between empathic accuracy and marital satisfaction by discussing the relationship duration moderated the couples’ everyday empathic accuracy and marital satisfaction. The current study enriches the number of research that the influencing factors of marital satisfaction, and provides effective suggestions for husband and wife stay in harmony, so as to promote the concord and stability of the couple, provide theoretical support and advice.We finally recruited 90 heterosexual couples(i.e., 180 persons) from Zhengzhou, Kaifeng and Xuchang in Henan Province by means of convenient sampling. It used the questionnaires of Olson’s ENRICH to explore the marital satisfaction. We used a samrtphone-based, experience-sampling technology to capture empathic judgments in participants’ daily lives. Ultimately, 180 valid questionnaires and experimental dates were analyzed by statistical methods of descriptive statistics, independent sample t-test, one-way analysis of variance, correlation analysis and regression analysis.The following conclusions were found from this study:First, marital satisfactions of the respondents lie in the level of middle up. Couples’ marital satisfactions had remarkable differences in gender, educational background and relationship duration.Secondly, the couples’ everyday empathic accuracy was significantly different in educational background. There was a remarkable negative correlation between everyday empathic accuracy and educational background. Participants with high school educations or less showed higher empathic accuracy than the others. It was the significant difference that was observed between everyday empathic accuracy and relationship duration. When couples married for more than seven years, their empathic accuracy was significantly higher than those, whose length of couples’ relationships was not beyond seven years. However, the empathic accuracy of couples who married for three to seven years was the lowest within the relationship duration groups. Yet no significant gender differences emerged.Thirdly, there was a remarkable negative correlation between empathic accuracy and marital satisfaction. Empathic accuracy and relationship duration had significant positive correlation. Marital satisfaction had noticeable negative correlation with relationship duration.Finally, the relationship duration moderated the couples’ everyday empathic accuracy and marital satisfaction, when couples married for less than three years or more than seven years.