1. The authors felt it was important to conduct this study, and write this article, because they wanted to measure whether or not there was a direct link between optimism and the success of a relationship. It seems that there are many studies that contradict the idea of whether or not it is better to be optimistic going into a relationship or not, and the idea of this study was to determine that.
3. The key questions the author is addressing are, is optimism a positive or negative aspect for relationship expectancy? How easily are people’s expectancies in relationships violated? And is this an easy violation to overcome? Does length of relationship play a role in the expectancy? How would you define optimism in a relationship? Is the definition of optimism determined by the physical and emotional relationship? Does the idea of optimism vary in same sex relationships?
4. The methods used to answer their key questions were based off gathering participants by sending out advertisements, and targeting specific bridal stores, as well as sending letters to people who had recently applied for a marriage license in the area. The couples that were selected (a total of 61 couples) than attended a lab session within the first 6 months of being married. After each attending a lab session, the participants were mailed a questionnaire in order to get results on self-reporting within the relationship. After each couple completed the questionnaire, they were asked to attend another lab session, and bring the packets with them. In this lab session, participants were asked to watch a short film, and then answer a discussion question related to the film, usually related to an area of difficulty or a goal within the marriage. After the entire lab session was completed, couples were asked to complete a 12-day daily diary task in order to assess conflict or behavior related to conflict within the marriage. A follow up assessment was done after 6 months, as well as after 1 year to determine where the couple was at after the lab time.
5. The most important information in this article is woman had more satisfaction in initial marital positions than men did. Contrary, woman seemed to express fewer marital problems than men did in the beginning stages of their relationship. In relation to the optimism, men ranked hire in the idea of more relational-specific optimism and both men and woman were tied when it came to dispositional optimism. After completing the follow up information in the lab, researchers found that more men experienced more problems after 1 year of marriage than woman did, and although men and woman were very close and almost tied, researchers found that woman were presented with more marital satisfaction after 1 year of marriage. Therefore, the study was very consistent with the pre and post follow up that these couples participated in and reflected the same data results.
6. The results can be put into context by comparing them to all couples within a relationship. The results showed that about 42% woman are satisfied with their initial marriage, not including the idea of optimism, whereas 49% of men seemed to illustrate that they had problems. It was clear that optimism played a large role in the success of the relationship, because with strong optimism came about 40% satisfactions, and with low optimism came about 54% problems.
7. The main inferences/conclusions in this article are that the effects of the optimism really varied according to level of expectancies the partner had considered. It seemed hard to test whether or not optimism changed anything, because it really depended on the way that people understood the word optimism to be. Due to this high range of expectancies, it was difficult to test. It was clear that spouses who had higher relational optimism experienced more problems over time with marriage, whereas those will low optimism or no expectancies seem to have more success in their relationships. It was also clear that couples who experienced high levels of relationship-specific optimism tended to have a decrease in marital satisfaction versus the other couples after a 1-year period.
8. If we take this line of reasoning seriously, the implications are that depressed people have a better chance of having a successful marriage. This being sad it is clear that happiness is not a complete judge of character for the outcome of marital satisfaction. Another implication is that people in a committed relationship should consider less amounts of optimism for the ultimate success.