Hello and welcome to Speaking of Psychology, a podcast produced by the American Psychological Association.

I'm your host, Caitlin Luna.

I'm joined by Dr. Benjamin Carney, a professor of social psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and co-director of the UCLA Marriage Lab.

Dr. Carney is a leading scholar of social relationships and marriage

who studies change and stability in intimate relationships with a particular emphasis on minority

populations, including low-income couples and military families. Welcome, Dr. Carney. Oh, thanks for

having me. Happy to have you here today. So you're a co-author of a study that was recently published by the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology that examined what's known as demand-withdraw behavior.

And so to summarize that, that means one partner in a relationship asks the other to change something.

And the partner who's asked to make that change basically shuts down and withdraws.

And in this study,

you looked at how that behavior is impacted based, impacts the couple's relationship satisfaction

based on their income levels. So what did, can you explain what you found? Sure. What we're

building off of is an existing literature on the negative implications of the demand withdrawal pattern.

So there's been a lot of research on marriage that shows that when one partner seeks change

and the other partner is invested in the status quo, you get this negative cycle where the person

who wants change has to turn up the volume and ask more and ask more.

And the person who loves the status quo, which is often the male partner, but not always, has to withdraw to maintain the status quo.

And then that means that the person who wants change has to get louder and louder.

The person who withdraws has to get worse and worse.

And a lot of research that's been done shows that this pattern has negative implications for marriage. But couples that fall into this sort of negative cycle of demanding

and withdrawing, experience lower marital satisfaction, experience declines in marital

satisfaction, experience higher rates of divorce. So that's the conventional wisdom. The limits, the problem with

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