The topography of marital conflict: A sequential analysis of verbal and nonverbal behavior.

from a study of content, affect, and context differences as well as from sequential analyses of the data. Findings show that this coding system made it possible to account for most of the variance in the classification of couples as distressed or nondistressed. Specific findings provided tests of many currently untested hypotheses about good communication in marriages that have been the basis of clinical interventions. The hypotheses which were studied in the present investigation involve the function of metacommunication, the expression of feelings, summarizing self versus other, feeling probes, nonverbal behavior during message delivery, context differences, and positive and negative reciprocity. Functions of messages were assessed by sequential analysis procedures.

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