Researchers have studied marriage for decades, but how is the transition to married life actually experienced by the couples involved? From an insider's perspective, this is an examination of married couples' own stories of their relationship. A representative sample of 199 African-American and 177 white married couples were asked to tell the story of their relationship. They provide accounts of courtships, weddings, honeymoons, their adjustment in the early years, and hopes for the future. These stories were first collected a few months after their weddings, and again in the third and...

Providing a theoretical model for conceptualising and understanding the psychology of enjoyment and the processes through which people manage positive emotions, this book is intended for researchers, students, and practitioners interested in positive psychology.

This book is about savoring life-the capacity to attend to the joys, pleasures, and other positive feelings that we experience in our lives. The authors enhance our understanding of what savoring is and the conditions under which it occurs. Savoring provides a new theoretical model for conceptualizing and understanding the psychology of enjoyment and the processes through which people manage positive emotions. The authors review their quantitative research on savoring, as well as the research of others, and provide measurement instruments with scoring instructions for assessing and...