About

Thank you for visiting the  UW Couples Lab website! We are dedicated to investigating intimate relationships and daily experiences as critically-important contexts of health and well-being across the lifespan. These are a few of the overarching questions that guide our specific studies:

• What do individuals experience in their daily lives, and how are these experiences linked with people’s feelings or behaviors? Here, our recent work has focused on prescription drug misuse in real-life contexts.
• How do couples handle or discuss relationship differences, or decisions and problems that need to be resolved? And how do the various ways of resolving differences matter to partners in the relationships or to those around them, especially children? Our most recent study in this area collected real-time reports of marital conflict from couples who recently transitioned to the “empty nest” phase of family life.
• Do partners in a romantic dyad, or members within a family, demonstrate particular connections along emotional, behavioral, or physiological responses? If so, what role do these inter-connections hold in the daily lives or broader well-being of individuals, couples, or families?

Our recent research has been funded by awards from the Graduate School and the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a small grant from the National Institute on Aging. In addition, we are grateful to ongoing support provided by the UW-Madison’s School of Human Ecology and Center for Child and Family Well-being. We deeply appreciate the time and commitment of the many individuals and couples who have expressed interest in, or participated in, our research. Please continue to check back for new ways to get involved!