Dyadic Reports of Men’s and Women’s Adverse Childhood Experiences, Current Relational Risk, and Couple Relationship Communication: A Latent Profile Analysis

Communication between partners is a highly important aspect of couple relationships serving as an adaptive process to promote positive relational outcomes. However, couple communication can be undermined by relational risk factors such as mental health and stress which may be predicted by each partner’s adverse childhood experiences (ACEs). Framed by the vulnerability-stress-adaptation (VSA) model, the current study utilized latent profile analysis (LPA) to identify different profiles of relational risk in couples based on partners’ anxiety, depression, and stress, whether each partner’s ACEs predicted different profiles of dyadic relational risk, and whether profiles of relational risk predicted the quality of four types of couple communication. Reporting four or more ACEs was associated with higher relational risk profile membership which was thenassociated with poorer communication skills across all communication types. These results suggest that examining partners’ ACEs may aid in identifying those couples at greater risk for poor relational outcomes.