The continuance and spillover of everyday tensions in distressed and nondistressed families.

This study compared 38 distressed and 35 nondistressed families on 2 interaction processes: the continuance of tensions involving the same family members and the spillover of tensions from one family subsystem to another. One parent reported perceptions of family tensions and satisfaction ratings each day for 2 weeks. Sequential analyses revealed that distressed, compared with nondistressed, families experienced (a) greater continuance of tensions, particularly tensions that occurred the following day during the same time period, and (b) more spillover, particularly between marital and child-related tensions. Correlations with daily satisfaction ratings indicated that marital dissatisfaction in distressed families is highly related to the occurrence of marital tensions. These data support the importance of examining daily events and multiple family subsystems in order to understand family distress.