Are two heads better than one? Determining the relationship between spousal synchrony, relationship quality and parenting stress in a neurophysiological context

Parenting is a life-changing, but stressful, experience for couples, and has the potential to influence the eventual satisfaction experienced within the marital relationship. Spouses must work together to overcome parenting stress in order to provide quality care for their infant. However, there is a lack of research regarding how couples can manage parenting stress as a dyad, and how individual resilience could play a role in moderating marital satisfaction and parenting stress. Additionally, traditional physiological methods of assessing interpersonal synchrony have showed conflicting results about synchrony and relationship satisfaction. Thus, by using novel fNIRS technology, this research studies spousal neurophysiological synchrony as a possible moderator of marital satisfaction and parenting stress, and correlates neurophysiological data collected from exposure to various audio stimuli with self-reported questionnaires measuring marital satisfaction, resilience and parenting stress. Audio stimuli included infant cries, which induce parenting stress, as well as infant laughter, adult cry and laughter, and static (control) conditions. 27 pairs of parents were recruited for this study. Results showed that increasing spousal synchrony is associated with higher marital satisfaction in the middle frontal gyrus. On the other hand, decreasing spousal synchrony in the superior frontal gyrus is correlated with an increasing duration of marriage. Additionally, resilience and marital satisfaction show significant correlations with parenting stress respectively, but show no significant correlations with each other. These findings are valuable in outlining possible socioemotional regulatory processes occurring in the prefrontal cortex within the parenting context, and represents the first spousal synchrony research to measure brain activity.Bachelor of Arts in Psycholog