Individual mental health and couple functioning following couple relationship education participation: Exploring prospective cross-lagged influences among changes.

Limited research on couple relationship education (CRE) programs explores the relationships among potential outcomes over time. This study conducted tests of processes of change in CRE participants' mental health and couple functioning, based on previous evidence of concurrent benefit in these domains following CRE participation. Using a diverse sample of 926 men and women we first tested the stress generation model (Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 1991, 100(4), 555-561) assumptions that individual functioning influences relational functioning. We found support for immediate changes in mental health predicting changes in couple functioning 6 months later. However, a full cross-lagged prospective model comparatively testing the stress generation model and the marital discord model (Depression in marriage: A model for etiology and treatment. Guilford, 1990), which emphasizes relational functioning impacts on individual well-being over time, revealed the stronger directional link for both men and women was from immediate changes in couple functioning to later changes in individual mental health. Practical implications and future research directions are suggested.