Dr. Williamson was recently awarded the Early Career Contributions to Couple Relationships Award by the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies Couples Special Interest Group, which was presented (in absentia) at the ABCT annual conference in Seattle last week. Congratulations!

Dr. Williamson has a new paper in press at the Journal of Marriage and Family which discusses methods that family science researchers can use to improve the samples they use in their research. This manuscript was an invited contribution to JMF's Mid-Decade Special Issue on Theory and Methods, which will be released in Feb 2025.

This past weekend Dr. Williamson attended the Fulbright Mediterranean Research Seminar in Alicante, Spain.  Fulbright Scholars who are conducting research in Mediterranean countries across all disciplines were in attendance. Dr. Williamson presented preliminary results from research conducted in collaboration with colleagues at the Universidad de Granada examining the impact of close relationships on health and well-being in Spain and the U.S.

The Williamson Lab has a new paper in press at the journal Family Relations which examines whether treatment outcomes for relationship education differ by level of pre-treatment relationship functioning. Using data from ~1600 low-income couples who participated in an RCT of relationship education, we first used latent class analysis (LCA) to identify distinct sub-groups based upon their pre-treatment reports of their relationship happiness, commitment, perceived partner commitment, and thoughts that the relationship was in trouble. Four classes of pre-treatment relationship functioning emerged: Happy, Stable (44%), Moderately Distressed (39%), Highly Distressed Women (10%), and Highly Distressed Men (7%).

We next tested for treatment effects (compared to the no treatment control condition) within each LCA group. Significant 12-month treatment effects were found only for women in the Happy, Stable group. Thus, we find that a large number of distressed couples enroll in relationship education programs (56% of couples in this sample), but do not benefit from the intervention. We suggest that in order to ensure that all couples receive an intervention that is effective for them, changes to the current delivery of community-based relationship educaiton programs is needed. Couples should be screened for their level of relationship functioning and assigned to an intervention that is appropriate for their needs. To accomplish this, relationship education curricula may need to be adapted to address the needs of distressed couples, or relationship education providers may need to partner with agencies delivering more intensive treatment (such as couple therapy).

Post-doc Betul Urganci and PhD student Nick Chen are authors on this manuscript, and both will be presenting this work at conferences in the coming weeks. Nick will present at NCFR in Orlando on Nov 9 and Betul will present at ABCT in Seattle on Nov 17.

In an article newly published in the journal Social and Personality Psychology Compass we use the context of the COVID-19 pandemic to test a classic theory about how different levels of stress impact relationships. Tesser and Beach originally raised the possibility that moderate levels of stress are the most harmful for relationships in a 1998 study in which they found that the association between stress and individual well-being was linear, whereas the association with relational well-being was non-linear. The current study sought to conceptually replicate this study within the context of the COVID-19 pandemic by examining associations between stress and individual versus relational well-being, using a sample of 654 individuals who were in a committed relationship in the early weeks of the pandemic. Results were somewhat consistent with those of the original study: the association between stress and depression was linear, but the association between stress and relationship satisfaction was non-linear. However, the form of the association between stress and relationship satisfaction was different than observed in the original study. These results point toward the need to better understand how the severity of a stressor impacts relational outcomes, including the characteristics of stress that lead to stress spillover and the circumstances under which relational outcomes are resilient to high levels of stress.

Congratulations to Dr. Williamson, who has received a Fulbright Fellowship to Spain. She will spend the 2023/2024 academic year as a visiting scholar at the Universidad de Granada, where she will be hosted by Dr. Inmaculada Valor-Segura, Professor of Psychology. Dr. Williamson’s Fulbright project focuses on diversifying and globalizing the scientific study of close relationships. An important step toward studying the family relationships of people who have been historically underrepresented in research is to ensure that the field has the necessary tools to do. Dr. Williamson will work to validate Spanish-language versions of multiple commonly used self-report instruments to ensure that they are valid and reliable for use with Spanish-speakers in the U.S. and abroad. She will also conduct a novel study of the buffering effect of close relationships on the link between socioeconomic status and well-being in the United States and Spain, two countries with high levels of income inequality.