Your Sadness, My Sorrow: Negative Emotion Concordance Within Married Couples in China 1. Introduction
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Your Sadness, My Sorrow: Negative Emotion Concordance within Married Couples in China Wanru Xiong Office of Population Research Princeton University Abstract: This paper finds significant evidence for negative emotion concordance within married couples age 45 and above in China using CHARLS data. To understand the mechanism of such concordance and test the hypothesis of emotional contagion effect, I applied instrument variable method, structure equation model and fixed effect model in this dyadic relation context. The results confirm the effect of spouse’s negative emotion on the respondent’s and support the emotional contagion effect hypothesis. In general, wives tend to be more sensitive to the emotional condition of their husband. Keywords: dyadic relation; negative emotion; concordance; emotional contagion effect 1. Introduction “I will laugh with you and cry with you ... in sickness and in health, till death do us apart.” Couples mean it when they take their wedding vows. There is evidence of health concordance within married couples, which means couples’ health conditions, both physical and mental, tend to converge after marriage (Meyler, Stimpson and Peek, 2007). This phenomenon of health concordance within couples is drawing increasing research interests. Published findings of physical health concordance within couples include concordance in blood pressure (Beresford, 1976; Speers et al., 1986; Peek and Markides, 2003; Stimpson and Peek, 2005), chronic conditions (Cheraskin et al., 1968; Bookwala and Schulz, 1996; Ubeda, 1998; Stimpson and Peek, 2005) and obesity (Inoue et al., 1996; Knuiman et al., 1996). Among the growing number of papers on health concordance within couples, studies on depressive symptoms and distress are the most prevalent (Meyler, Stimpson and Peek, 2007). According to the comprehensive literature review by Meyler, Stimpson, and Peek (2007), there is overwhelming evidence for concordance of depressive symptoms and distress within couples (Tower and Kasl, 1995; Siegel et al., 2004; Kouros and Cummings, 2010). Nevertheless, there are still debates about the underlying mechanisms, among which emotional contagion is a candidate hypothesis. By far, none hypothesis has won the consensus among researchers (Meyler, Stimpson and Peek, 2007). Other researchers focusing on ethnicity and cultural factors in depression concordance reveal ethnic and cultural difference (Peek et al., 2006). However, more than half of these findings are based on small-scale clinical samples, therefore may be subject to sample selection bias and sample size limitations. Besides, as far as I know, there is no published research on this topic in China. This paper aims to answer the following questions: Are there depression concordance within middle-aged or elderly married couples in China? Is such concordance the result of emotional contagion? If it is, is there a gender difference in the contagion effect? In this paper, I use “China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS)” data to study depression contagion within married couples aged 45 1 and above. I first review and summarize sociological and psychological literature about the empirical findings and the potential theoretical mechanisms of depression concordance within couples, with emphasis on emotional contagion hypothesis. Then I document the depression concordance phenomena using both cross-sectional and panel data from CHARLS. To further investigate these phenomena, I use instrumental variable (IV) methods, structural equation model (SEM) and fixed effect model to identify the emotional contagion effect in this dyadic relation context. I find that depression concordance within married couples aged above 45 in China is significant. The models support the hypothesis of emotional contagion and show gender differences in such contagion effect. The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 reviews the empirical findings and theoretical hypotheses from related literature. Section 3 gives details on sample data and variables. Section 4 shows evidence for depression concordance within spouse. Section 5 sets up a contagion model and tests the emotional contagion hypothesis. Empirical findings are presented along with their interpretations. Section 6 finishes with discussions and concluding remarks. 2. Depression concordance within couples 2.1. Depression concordance Psychologist and sociologist have reported evidence of mental health concordance within couples. Among 58 published papers on mental health concordance articles reviewed by Meyler et al. (2007), only three studies did not find concordance. Evidence of depression concordance is particularly strong. Though concordance involves both parties, wives’ mental health tends to be more “relationship related” than that of their husbands (Meyler, Stimpson, and Peek, 2007; Moffitt, Spence and Goldney, 1986; Peek et al., 2006). The explanation for depression concordance is still unclear, though emotional contagion hypothesis is more frequently suggested. Among mental health concordance literature, most studies rely on cross-sectional clinical data, and half of them have sample size less than 100 (Meyler, Stimpson and Peek, 2007). Before regression analysis is applied, earlier researchers use variance analysis and t-test. The Recent development of structural equation model is gaining attention from concordance researchers (Meyler, Stimpson and Peek, 2007). Some researchers regard it as a necessary tool to deal with the simultaneous process of mutual convergence (Peek et al., 2006). 2.2. Possible mechanisms and hypotheses There are four major theories explaining health concordance within couples. All of them fit into the context of depression concordance. According to the comprehensive review by Meyler et al. (2007), few studies have explicitly tested these theories, mainly due to insufficient data. 2.2.1. Assortative mating Assortative mating is the term used to describe “any systematic departure from random mating” (Vandenberg, 1972. pp.2) Usually, individuals are more likely to marry someone who is similar to themselves, such as in age (Rele, 1965; Lutz, 1918), ethnic group (Kennedy, 1944), education (Lewis and Oppenheimer, 2000) and socioeconomic status (Kalmijn, 1994). 2 There are two potential ways in which assortative mating would lead to depression concordance within couples. First, if assortative mating happens concerning health and mental health in particular, then individuals who are vulnerable to depression are likely to marry a similar spouse. As a result, in survey data, we might observe depression concordance. The other case in which assortative mating might play a role happens when depression is related to factors such as ethnicity and education. To illustrate, assume that Ph.D. students are more vulnerable to depression while they tend to marry another Ph.D., then we would observe highly concordant depression within Ph.D. couples. Empirically it is hard to identify the above direct and indirect effect of assortative mating. Several studies using longitudinal data supported the assortative mating hypothesis (Eagles et al., 1987; Siegle et al., 2004). The idea in this paper is that if there is evidence that depression concordance varies with the increase of marital duration, then we could treat assortative mating as fixed effect and test other hypotheses in the process of depression concordance. 2.2.2. Shared resource hypothesis While assortative mating hypothesis emphasizes on the pre-marriage condition, shared resource hypothesis focuses on the shared environment and experiences after marriage. After their wedding, married couples might go through ups and downs, through rich and poor, instead of living happily ever after. All these experiences would translate into shared health risk and fuses for negative emotion (Rose, Mirowsky, and Goldsteen, 1990; Smith and Zick, 1994; Waite, 1995). One difficulty in testing this hypothesis is that the relations between married couples are so close that it 's hard to tell whether an event is private or shared. 2.2.3. Caregiving Caregiving might not be pleasant. According to Schulz et al. (2001), there is clear evidence that providing informal care can lead to negative emotion and detrimental physical health effects on elderly spousal caregivers. Even stronger effect is found among intense caregivers (Majerovitz, 1995; Sansoni et al. 2004) and female spousal caregivers (Harwood et al., 1998; Thompson et al., 2004) Given there is connection between one spouse’s health condition and the other’s mood, adding that one’s happiness is positively related to physical health condition, we would probably notice depression concordance within couples via the mechanism of caregiving effect. 2.2.4. Emotion contagion Emotions are contagious (Darwin, 1872; Hatfield, Cacioppo and Rapson, 1994; Joiner, 1994; Katz, Beach and Joiner, 1999; Barsade, 2002). The metaphor “you are my sunshine” well catches the essence of happiness eradiation. Psychologists refer to the phenomenon that one individual's mood converges to the other's after exposure to his/her mood state as emotional contagion (Gonzales, Castillo, and Swinkels, 2002; Hatfield, Cacioppo and Rapson, 1994). Hatfield et al. (1994) pointed out that emotional contagion is multilevel: “The precipitating stimuli arise from one individual, act upon one or more other individuals, and yield corresponding or complementary emotions.” (pp.5) The emotional and behavioral synchrony as the result of emotional contagion has adaptive