IARR Mini-Conference 2023

Forging Resilience: Dyadic Coping Across the Lifespan from Young Adults to Older Couples

Silvia Donato

Abstract: Current models of resilience moved away from an idea of resilience as an individual characteristic that one possesses despite adversities, to conceptualize it as something that is shaped through the experience of adversity and is relationally based in our interdependence with others. Thus, resilience is forged through managing stressful life challenges by reaching out to significant others to give and receive support. In forging couples’ resilience, therefore, dyadic coping (i.e., partners’ process of coping together against stress) plays a central role. Couples, moreover, are transactional systems evolving over the life course and across generations. Patterns that were functional in earlier life phases may no longer fit in later phases. A developmental perspective is therefore needed to view the couples’ ability to manage stress together in relation to the evolving needs and priorities of partners and to their sociocultural and temporal contexts. In particular, along with their (longer and longer) life cycle, partners face numerous stressful events and life transitions, both normative and nonnormative, that require mutual support and re-negotiations of one’s identities. The way partners engage in dyadic coping and the mutual understanding of their dyadic coping efforts may be means to respond to these fundamental needs for support and self-validation during challenging periods. In line with these premises, this contribution is aimed at presenting research findings on the role of dyadic coping for couples’ wellbeing, with special attention to the stage of the couple’s life cycle. In particular, this contribution will present studies on the role of dyadic coping from young adult couples to older ones as well as on how partners’ interpersonal perceptions of dyadic coping may serve different purposes for couples in different stages of their life cycle.

External Stress in Romantic Relationships: Considering Risk and Resilience

Amie Gordon

Abstract: With rising stress levels across the globe, external stress is a common part of couples' everyday lives. In this keynote address, Dr. Gordon considers the role of external stress in shaping individual and relationship well-being. She draws upon results from multiple studies using a variety of methods and measurement approaches, including dyadic daily experience, experimental, observational, and physiological. In particular, she explores whether there are differences when stress is experienced by one partner (nonconcurrent stress) versus both partners (concurrent stress). She also asks whether external stress may actually strengthen the relationships of some couples; and if so, when and for whom external stress promotes resilience rather than risk. 

Cultivating Intergenerational Resilience in Urban Communities

Alycia de Mesa

Abstract: Alycia de Mesa's lineage is as a fourth generation of Arizona and a mixed-race American of Mexican, Apache of Chihuahua, MX, Japanese, British-German descent. At ASU, she is the Assistant Director of Digital Equity & Social Impact at Enterprise Technology, a Senior Global Futures Scholar for the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory, faculty instructor, and doctoral student in the College of Global Futures. Raised by first-generation American grandparents in a historically-conservative city, Alycia will share her life experiences regarding questions of identity and belonging in Western society and the academy, and her journey as a single mother to two sons, wife, harpist, consultant, and scholar-activist. Her talk will touch on how current generations living in urban communities can find support, wellbeing, and resilience through the care and cultivation of past generations' knowledge, land, nature, cultural and language practices.