Assistant Professor
Department of Psychology
University of Utah
Web: http://www.psych.utah.edu/brianbaucom

My program of research investigates emotional and behavioral processes in romantic relationships and their potentially dysregulating impact on the psychological health of individual partners and the overall functioning of their relationship. Within this broader scope, my research focuses on three related aims: 1) identifying dysfunctional processes during couple conflict, 2) studying interventions designed to reduce risk for engaging in dysfunctional processes, and 3) developing new analytic methods for assessing and characterizing couple interaction processes. Our collaborative work on these aims uses a combination of standard observational coding methods for measuring enacted behavior as well as applied signal methods. This interdisciplinary approach has allowed us to come up with solutions to long unsolved problems by examining them in new ways. For example, we recently proposed a new theoretical model of the emotional underpinnings of the demand/withdraw interaction pattern (a maladaptive pattern of behavior associated with increased risk for depression, intimate partner violence, infidelity, and divorce) that resolves multiple failed tests of the previous model of emotional arousal and demand/withdraw behavior that had stood for almost 30 years. Likewise, identification of pre-treatment variables that are consistently associated with treatment outcomes in couple therapy and pre-treatment variables that are associated with differential response to behaviorally based couple therapies have been incredibly rare. Our work on vocally encoded emotional arousal shows that it is not only a predictor of treatment outcomes in clinical trials in both the United States and Germany but also that different combinations of pre-treatment relationship distress and vocally encoded emotional arousal are associated with differential response to treatment. Finally, our most recent and on-going work uses signal processing facilitated methods to study the intersection of behavior, emotion, psychophysiology, and relationship functioning during real life.