Being satisfied in marriage provides protective stress buffering benefits to various health complications but the causal mechanisms and speed at which this is accomplished is less well understood. Much of the research on health and marriage has conceptualized marital quality in a unidimensional way, with high levels of either positivity or negativity. This conceptualization may not fully capture the nuanced benefits of marital relationships. Pupillometry is an innovative method which captures the effects of marital stress buffering on the body's autonomic nervous system in real time; pupil dilation occurs within 200ms to stress exposure. Additionally, this method records hundreds of readings per second, providing precision and sensitivity. This preregistered experiment aimed to conceptually replicate previous pupillometry stress buffering results and extend the previous findings by including a generalizable, real-life stressor-viewing a horror movie-and multidimensional relationship quality effects. Eighty-three couples (166 participants) were quasi-grouped, based on a self-reported multidimensional relationship quality scale, to either supportive or ambivalent marital relationship conditions. They were then randomly assigned to either a spousal support (i.e., handholding) or non-support (spousal absence) condition and watched clips from both horror and nature movies while pupil dilation was measured. Tonic pupillary response results revealed that the horror video clips elicited a stress response and there were significant differences between the support and non-support conditions, as well as marital relationship quality conditions. These results frame the precision, speed, and sensitivity of pupillometry as a potentially fruitful method to investigate the causal mechanisms linking stress buffering and supportive marital relationships.

中文翻译：

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配偶的情感支持和关系质量缓冲了瞳孔对恐怖电影的反应。

对婚姻感到满意为各种健康并发症提供了保护性的压力缓冲益处，但实现这一点的因果机制和速度鲜为人知。许多关于健康和婚姻的研究都以一维的方式将婚姻质量概念化，无论是积极还是消极的水平都很高。这种概念化可能无法完全体现婚姻关系的细微差别。瞳孔测量法是一种创新方法，可以实时捕捉婚姻压力缓冲对身体自主神经系统的影响；瞳孔扩张在 200 毫秒内发生以强调暴露。此外，该方法每秒可记录数百个读数，从而提供精确度和灵敏度。这个预先注册的实验旨在从概念上复制以前的瞳孔测量压力缓冲结果，并通过包括一个可概括的、现实生活中的压力源——观看恐怖电影和多维关系质量效应来扩展以前的发现。根据自我报告的多维关系质量量表，将 83 对夫妇（166 名参与者）准分组为支持或矛盾的婚姻关系条件。然后他们被随机分配到配偶支持（即手持）或非支持（配偶缺席）条件下，并在测量瞳孔扩张的同时观看恐怖电影和自然电影的剪辑。强直瞳孔反应结果显示，恐怖视频片段引发了压力反应，支持和非支持条件之间存在显着差异，以及婚姻关系质量状况。这些结果将瞳孔测量法的精度、速度和灵敏度定义为一种潜在的卓有成效的方法，用于研究将压力缓冲和支持性婚姻关系联系起来的因果机制。