Abstract
Partners’ lives are intertwined as couples age together. Shared joys can benefit couples’ health and well-being, but partners can also expose one another to health-risky stressors and struggles. This symposium will examine key ways in which partners shape each other’s paths toward healthy aging or decline by integrating perspectives on relationship dynamics, adult development, and psychophysiological processes. Speakers will address the role of age in relationships, both as a meaningful context for couples’ lives and an index of social-emotional development. The first two talks will examine spillover, crossover, and physiological linkage between older partners across timescales. Theresa Pauly will begin by examining daily synchrony in older partners’ cortisol as a function of everyday closeness, and its health correlates. Using data from the Cardiovascular Health Study, Dr. Joan Monin will extend the study of older couples’ interdependence to links between their mental health and cognitive functioning over six years. The final two presentations will consider couples’ dynamics, health, and well-being around marital support, a central interaction context for aging couples. Namely, Ashley Stanford will investigate associations between day-to-day invisible support and the emotional well-being of support providers and recipients, with novel implications for older couples facing the protracted stress of chronic pain. Dr. Stephanie Wilson will examine links between support quality and sympathetic, immune, and neuroendocrine activity among healthy couples of all ages, featuring differences by age and marital satisfaction. Discussant Dr. Karen Rook will close by highlighting cross-cutting themes and identifying ways to advance this scientific initiative.