Divorced Fathers Describe Their Former Wives: Devaluation and Contrast

by David Schuldberg and Shan Guisinger

Taken from Journal of Divorce & Remarriage Vol 14, Nos 3-4, pp 61-87.
© 1991 by the Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved.

Summary

Contents of This Page

Introduction
Methods: Subjects
The Adjective Check List
Results
Discussion
Notes
References
Appendices

Introduction

Back to Contents

This paper investigates a pattern of devaluation of women by their former husbands. This pattern is remarkable because the devaluation is extreme and occurs in a non-clinical population of remarried fathers. It is of concern because there is strong evidence that interparental hostility is detrimental to children both in intact marriages and when the hostility continues into the post-divorce co-parenting relationship (Emery, 1982).

When a divorced father remarries, he must negotiate a number of relationships unique to remarriage and for which there are few social guidelines (Cherlin, 1978; Messinger, 1985; Sager et al., 1983; Wald, 1981). Perhaps most delicate, the new couple must work out a co-parenting relationship with the husband's wife. Yet, for many divorcing couples, hostility continues long after the official divorce (Wallerstein & Blakeslee, 1989). Weiss (1975) has noted: "Murderous phantasies in which the wife is the victim do not seem especially rare...shared parenting of the children provides a convenient vehicle for the expression of post-marital malice." Remarriage theories would benefit from our knowing the form of this "malice", yet little is known about parents' typical post-divorce relationship (Ahrons, 1981). Interviews with remarried fathers and their new wives suggested that a normal population of newly remarried individuals held a highly jaundiced view of the husband's former wife.

The question arises as to the extent that this hostile picture is a result of accurate perceptions of the spouse's behavior, or if it includes misperceptions and misattributions regarding the former partner. The fact that people are not objective perceivers of others or themselves is a central theme in the literature on person perception (Bender & Hastorf, 1950; Hastorf & Bender, 1952). Along with actual degree of similarity (Buss, 1985; Byrne & Nelson, 1965) and the presence of certain generally valued traits (Palmer & Byrne, 1970), accuracy in perception and in making predictions about the partner (Arias & O'Leary, 1985; Christensen & Wallace, 1976; Murstein & Beck, 1972), perceived similarity (Arias & O'Leary, 1985; Byrne & Blalock, 1963; Murstein & Beck, 1972) and types of attribution about a partner's behavior (eg., Weiss, 1980; Jacobson et al., 1985) all contribute to marital satisfaction. Buss (1984) found generally positive correlations between spouses' traits across self-report, spouse ratings, and independent interviewers' ratings of the partners' personalities, as well as between preferences for mate characteristics (Buss & Barnes, 1986). Terman and Buttenwieser (1935) found that self-report responses of husbands and wives to a number of attitude and personality test items tend to be positively correlated, while these correlations are generally moderately negative for unhappy and divorced couples.

Despite research on person perception and marriage, no recent study has examined the perceptions of the formerly married of each other. Clinical observations suggest that comparison and contrast in two different relationships might contribute to a husband's negative view of the former wife. First, the husband might contrast himself and his former wife, with the former wife generally being seen as all bad: "I really tried to make the marriage work; she was just too self-centered for the give and take of marriage." A contrast between two others occurs when the former wife is perceived as very different from the present wife: "They are as unlike as night and day; my first wife was a real witch; my second wife is an angel." Both of these contrasts between spouses could result from the defense mechanism of splitting, a psychological process generally attributed to disturbed individuals and observed less frequently in normal adult populations. Splitting represents a failure to achieve integration of both good and bad aspects of a person (Fairbairn, 1961; Kernberg, 1980; Kohut, 1984) and generally involves contrasting two individuals (or the self and an other), with one being devalued while the other is simultaneously over-valued or idealized. This paper presents data indicating that some, but not all, of these processes operate in husbands' relationships with their former wives.

This research uses the Adjective Check List (ACL; Gough & Heilbrun, 1980) to examine the pattern of remarried husbands' perceptions of their former wives, their present wives, and themselves. We examine four hypotheses:

First, we expect that because of the need for amicable co-parenting of their children, divorced fathers' descriptions of their former wives will be only moderately negative, and will become less negative over the course of the remarriage.

Secondly, when it occurs, devaluation of the former wife will occur as part of the defense mechanism of splitting, and will thus be accompanied by an idealization of either the present wife or the husband himself.

Third, extreme devaluation of the former wife will be symptomatic of the husband's intrapersonal difficulties involving self-worth, and will be correlated with his low self-esteem.

Finally, the husband's perceptions of the former wife will be dissimilar from and contrast with their descriptions of themselves and their present wives. Dissimilarity refers to how far apart two different personality profiles are. Contrast occurs when one person is rated as low on a particular trait while another person is described as high. In this case the two descriptions are polarized; for example, the husbands may use the present wife or themselves as a reference point for describing the former wife, and rate one as high on a particular trait and the other as low, and vice versa.

Methods

Subjects

Back to Contents

Couples were recruited primarily from the marriage license records recorded in 1979, 1980 and 1983 in four counties in the San Francisco Bay area of California. Participants were also recruited through referrals from subjects, informal contacts, newspaper advertisements, and contacting stepparent organizations.

The men had been married an average of 1.9 years (SD = 1.5), after having been divorced an average of 4.7 years (SD = 3.0). Their mean age was 36.0 years (SD = 5.0). Most were college graduates, white, and middle to upper middle class, with an average of 16 years of education (SD = 3.0) and a mean annual income of $40,246 (SD = $1,880) in 1981-83. They had an average of 1.6 children (SD = .6). As a group these fathers reported a great deal of involvement with their children as compared with national statistics (Furstenberg & Nord, 1985), spending an average of 12.5 days per month (SD = 9.8) with them. Eleven and one-half percent of the fathers had sole custody of their children, and 46% were involved in joint custody arrangements. Thirty-eight percent of the new wives also had children from a previous marriage. At the time the data were collected, eight of the fathers (13%) had had a child with the new wife. This sample, of course, is not a representative one due to the selection procedures employed, the families' high income, and the fathers' high degree of involvement with their children. Nevertheless, a highly-functioning sample can provide useful information if the subjects exhibit behavior that is more deviant than expected.

In most cases, data were gathered in the course of a home visit that included an interview and the completion of a number of other questionnaires. Usually both members of the couple were present, and they were instructed not to look at the partner's responses or discuss the instrument.²

The Adjective Check List

Back to Contents

Overall description of the former wife. A composite adjectival description of the former wife provides a qualitative picture of the husbands' perceptions of and relationships with the former wives. Then, three ACL modus operandi scales are examined for the husbands' ACL descriptions of the former wife. These scales, Favorable adjectives, Unfavorable adjectives, and Communality (a measure of the usualness of the adjectives checked), allow a comparison of the overall favorability and degree of deviance in the husbands' descriptions of the former wives. T-tests are used to examine the degree to which the husbands' evaluations of the former former wife differ on these scales for men remarried for different lengths of time.

Idealization of the self or present wife. To test the hypothesis that a negative evaluation of the former wife is accompanied by an idealization of either the self or the present wife, the husbands' self-descriptions and descriptions of the present wife are compared to the ACL norms for the three modus operandi scales to determine whether these ACL descriptions reflect idealized or devalued descriptions.

Husbands' devaluation of the former wife and low self-esteem. A measure of self-esteem based on self-ideal congruence was calculated as the reflected sum of absolute differences between the husbands' ACL self-descriptions and descriptions of the Ideal self on eight ACL scales (Gough, Fioravanti, & Lazzari, 1983). Self-esteem is correlated with the husbands' descriptions of the former wife on Favorable adjectives, Unfavorable adjectives, and Communality to assess the degree to which a negative evaluation of the former wife is associated with the husband's own intrapersonal difficulties measured by low self-esteem.

Dissimilarity and contrast in descriptions of the former wife, present wife, and self. Differences between descriptions of the former wife, the present wife, and self are examined in two ways. To test the hypothesis that the husbands' perceptions of the former wife are dissimilar from their perceptions of present wife and self, the differences in profile elevation between descriptions of the former wives, the present wives, and the husbands' self-descriptions are examined. Multivariate Analysis of Variance (MANOVA) is used to determine whether pairs of profiles differ overall on the thirty-seven ACL scales, with t-tests used to examine individual scale differences between descriptions. Cronbach and Gleser's (1953) D statistic is also computed for pairs of descriptions for each subject and used as an index of the mean distance or dissimilarity between pairs of descriptions.⁴ The ACL Likability index (Gough & Heilbrun, 1980, p. 43), a ratio of Favorable adjectives to Favorable plus Unfavorable adjectives, is also compared for the present and former wives.

Secondly, the scale by scale correlations between pairs of ACL descriptions are used to provide indices of attributional contrast.⁵. If devaluing of the former wives occurs as the result of polarization, comparison, and contrast in the husbands' attributions, then the adjectival descriptions of the contrasted individuals should be negatively correlated on particular salient traits. In addition, the husbands' ACL descriptions of the Ideal self are examined for contrast between the negatively evaluated ex-wife and the husbands' Ideal self.

Results

Back to Contents

Overall Description of the Former Wife

At three years of remarriage, the men (n = 37)⁶ most frequently chose these adjectives to describe their former wives: attractive (70%), capable (68%), defensive (68%), emotional (57%), healthy (57%), intelligent (57%), demanding (54%), dissatisfied (54%), good-looking (54%), stubborn (54%), hard-headed (51%), self-centered (51%), friendly (49%), headstrong (49%), resentful (49%), argumentative (46%), and assertive (46%).⁷

While these composite descriptions do include some positive adjectives, overall scores on the ACL scales are extremely negative. The mean descriptions of the former wife on the modus operandi Scales Favorable, Unfavorable, and Communality are from 1.9 to 2.5 standard deviations from the standardization sample mean in the negative direction, and the mean profile for the former wives is strikingly deviant on a large number of scales. These negative evaluations are extremely unusual in research using the ACL.⁸

Figure 1 shows the mean ACL scale elevations for husbands' descriptions of the current and former wife, and the husbands' self-descriptions. Appendix 1 contains the mean scale scores for each of these three descriptions, along with the results of univariate tests of scale differences. Since the subjects in this study are drawn from a non-clinical population and since these negative evaluations are extreme in relation to the ACL literature, it is likely that these perceptions of the former wife are indeed unrealistic, although no direct data were gathered on the personalities or behavior of the former wives themselves.

Contrary to the first hypothesis, descriptions of the former wife do not become significantly less negative on the modus operandi scales in the third year of remarriage, although there is a non-significant trend toward a more positive view, also found in the present wives' descriptions of the ex-wife, and much more apparent in interviews with the couple (Guisinger, Cowan & Schuldberg, 1989).⁹

FIGURE 1: Husbands' descriptions of themselves and their present and former wives: Mean Adjective Check List profiles. Reproduced by special permission of the publisher, Consulting Psychologists Press, Inc., from the Manual for the Adjective Check List, by Harrison Gough, PhD, and Alfred Heilbrun, PhD, copyright 1980.

Are the Men Splitting?

The husbands' descriptions of the present wife are positive but not extreme, and as a group the present wives were rated slightly below the standardization sample mean on Communality. The current wife does not appear to be idealized, nor do the husbands ten to describe themselves in an inflated manner. This means that technically, in the group as a whole, splitting is not responsible for the devaluation of the former wife.

Is a Negative Evaluation of the Former Wife Related to Husbands' Low Self-Esteem?

Do Husbands' Perceptions of Former Wives
Differ from or Contrast with
Their Perceptions of Self and the Present Wife?

Contrast in the husbands' perceptions of pairs of individuals in the self, present wife, and former wife triad. On the whole, scale score correlations across pairs of descriptions of self, partner, former wife, and Ideal self tend to be positive in this study. This may reflect a general tendency for people to use the same adjectives in different descriptions and is expected in a repeated measures situation.¹³ When negative correlations occur, they are in contrast to this trend. Over the 37 ACL scales, husbands' descriptions of themselves tend to be positively correlated with their descriptions of their present wives. Husbands' self-descriptions and descriptions of the former wife are also correlated for a number of scales. Only the scale for Dominance is negatively correlated across descriptions of self and former wife.¹⁴

Evidence for contrast and polarization appears for husbands' descriptions of their present and former wives. The scales of Dominance, Exhibitionism, Autonomy, Aggression, Abasement, Deference, Self Control, and Masculine attributes are negatively correlated at the .05 level or better for descriptions of the present and former wife. ¹⁵ Appendix 2 contains the correlations between husbands' ACL descriptions of themselves and their present wives, themselves and their former wives, and their present and former wives.

Discussion

Back to Contents

The evidence is weak for a relationship between devaluation of the former wife and low self-esteem in the men; there is a non-significant trend for men with higher self-esteem to devalue the former wife less, and scores on the ACL Likability index indicate that men who "like themselves more" (in terms of the positive vs Negative adjectives in their self descriptions) also tend to like the former wife more (r = .24, p = .03, one-tailed test). The small magnitude of these correlations tends to normalize and minimize the compensatory or defensive aspects of the negative evaluations made by these remarried husbands.

However, the descriptions of the former wife are strikingly dissimilar and quantitatively very different from the husbands' views of themselves, the present wife, or their Ideal self. The degree to which the former wife is viewed as deviant is unusual in the literature on ACL descriptions. It is not clear from these data whether this is a reflection of the former wives' actual traits or behavior, or rather represents a consistent misperception on the part of the husbands. The study does find evidence for a process of contrast in the husbands' perceptions of their past and present marital relationships, but no such contrast involving self-perceptions. Husbands tend to describe the former wife as low on certain traits when they describe the present partner as high on the trait, and vice versa. This attributional contrast is virtually unique to the husbands' perceptions of the present and former souse and is distinct from the findings of Terman and Buttenwieser (1935) and Buss (1984). The eight ACL scales where this contrast occurs shed light on the personality traits that are salient in the process of comparison and polarization of perceptions of the present and former wife. The lack of a correlation on the Likability index for the present and former wife (r = .09, p > 0.10) indicates that the contrast is not simply global devaluation, but rather involves specific traits. The negatively correlated scales suggest that the husbands contrast the two women in the salient areas of power (as evidenced by negative correlations for Dominance, Abasement, Deference, Autonomy, and Masculine attributes), expressiveness and responsibility (Exhibitionism), and the control of hostile and angry impulses (Aggression and Self-control).

Explanations for Negative Evaluations of the Former Wife

Conversely, a strong negative evaluation of the former wife could indicate that the current marriage is in trouble and that scapegoating of the former wife is occurring. We have found that those couple who were relatively more negative in their evaluation of the former wife tended to be less satisfied with their new marriages, data suggestive of this second hypothesis (Guisinger, Cowan & Schuldberg, 1989).¹⁶ Additional explanations for this hostility toward the former wife can be made in terms of displaced anger toward the husband's children or in terms of cognitive dissonance (Festinger, 1957).

The findings of very negative perceptions of the former wife which do not moderate significantly in the first three to five years of remarriage are troubling because these former spouses are also parents and, for their children's sake, need to negotiate an effective co-parenting relationship. Interparental hostility has negative implications for child adjustment in general (Emery, 1982) and contributes to lessened contact with the non-custodial parent in divorcing families (Wallerstein & Kelly, 1980; Wallerstein & Blakeslee, 1989). The present data indicate that interventions with divorcing families and their children need to address attributions and perceptions, as well as the interpersonal, behavioral, and social aspects of the relationship between former spouses.

Notes

Back to Contents

References

Back to Contents

Ahrons, C. (1981) `The continuing coparental relationship between divorced spouses, American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 5, pp 415-428.
Arias, H & O'Leary, K D (1985) 'Semantic and perceptual discrepancies in discordant and nondiscordant marriages', Cognitive Therapy and Research, 9, pp 51-61.
Bender, I E & Hastorf, A H (1950) `The perception of person: Forecasting another person's responses on three personality scales', Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 45, pp 557-561.
Buss, D M (1984) 'Marital assortment for personality dispositions: Assessment with three different data sources', Behavior Genetics, 14, pp 111-123.
Buss, D (1985) `Human mate selection', American Scientist, 73, pp 47-51.
Buss, D M & Barnes, M (1986) `Preferences in human mate selection', Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 50, pp 559-570.
Byrne, D (1963) The attraction paradigm, N Y: Academic.
Byrne, D & Blalock, B (1963) `Similarity and assumed similarity of attitudes between husbands and wives', Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 67, pp 636-640.
Byrne, D & Nelson, D (1965) `Attraction as a linear function of positive reinforcements', Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1, pp 659-663.
Cherlin, A (1978) `Remarriage as an incomplete institution', American Journal of Sociology, 84, pp 634-650.
Christensen, L & Wallace, L (1976) `Perceptual accuracy as a variable in marital adjustment', Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy, 2, pp 130-136.
Cronbach, L J & Gleser, G C (1953) `Assessing similarity between profiles', Psychological Bulletin, 50, pp 456-473.
Emery, R (1982) `Interparental conflict and the children of discord and divorce', Psychological Bulletin, 92, pp 310-330.
Fairbairn, W R D (1952) An Object Relations Theory of Personality, NY: Basic.
Festinger, L (1957) A theory of cognitive dissonance, Evanston, Ill: Row-Peterson.
Furstenberg, F F & Nord, C W (1985) `Parenting apart: Patterns of childrearing after marital disruption', Journal of Marriage and the Family, 47, pp 893-904.
Gage, N L, & Cronbach, L J (1955) `Conceptual and methodological problems in interpersonal perception', Psychological Review, 62, pp 411-422.
Gough, H G, Fioravanti, M & Lazzari, R (1983) `Some implications of self versus ideal congruence on the revised Adjective Check List', Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 44, pp 1214-1220.
Gough, H & Heilbrun, A (1980) The Adjective Check List manual, Palo Alto: Consulting Psychologists Press.
Guisinger, S (1984) `The first years of the second marriage: Changing parental and couple relations in the remarried family' (Doctoral dissertation, University of California, Berkeley).
Guisinger, S, Cowan, P A & Schuldberg, D (1989) 'Changing parent and spouse relations in the first years of remarriage of divorced fathers', Journal of Marriage and the Family, 51, pp 445-456.
Hastorf, A H & Bender, I E (1952) `A caution respecting the measurement of empathic ability' Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 47, pp 574-576.
Huntington, D S (1982) `Attachment, loss and divorce: a reconsideration of the concepts' In L Messinger (ed.), Therapy with remarriage families, Rockville, Md: Aspen Publications.
Jacobson, N S, McDonald, D W, Follette, W C & Berley, R F (1985) `Attributional processes in distressed and nondistressed married couples', Cognitive Therapy and Research, 9, pp 35-50.
Jacobson, N S, Follette, W C & McDonald D W (1982) 'Reactivity to positive and negative behavior in distressed and non-distressed couples', Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 50, pp 706-714.
Kernberg, O (1980) Internal world and external reality: Object Relations theory applied NY: Aronson.
Kitson, G (1982) `Attachment to the spouse and divorce: A scale and its application', Journal of Marriage and the Family, 44, pp 379-393.
Kohut, H (1984) How does analysis cure? Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Messinger, L (1985) Remarriage, New York: Plenum.
Murray, H A (1938) Explorations in personality, NY: Oxford University Press.
Murstein, B I & Beck, G D (1972) `Person perception, marriage adjustment, and social desirability', Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 39, pp 396-403.
Palmer, J & Byrne, D (1970) `Attraction toward dominant and submissive strangers: similarity vs complementarity', Journal of Experimental Research in Personality, 4, pp 108-115.
Sager, C J, Walker, E, Brown, H S, Crohn, H & Rodstein, E (1983) Treating the remarried family, NY: Brunner/Mazel.
Spanier, G R & Casto, R (1979) `Adjustment to separation and divorce: Analysis of 50 case studies', Journal of Divorce, 2, pp 241-252.
Terman, L M & Buttenwieser, P (1935) `Personality factors in marital compatibility: II', Journal of Social Psychology, 6, pp 267-289.
Wald, E (1981) The remarried family: Challenge and promise, New York: Family Service Agency of America.
Wallerstein, J S & Blakeslee, S (1989) Second chances: Men, women and children a decade after divorce, N Y: Ticknor and Fields.
Wallerstein, J & Kelly, J (1979) Surviving the breakup: How children and parents cope with divorce NY: Brunner/Mazel.
Wallerstein, J & Kelly, J (1980) `Effects of divorce on the visiting father-child relationship', American Journal of Psychiatry, 137, pp 1534-1539.
Weiss, R (1975) Marital Separation New York: Basic Books.
Weiss, R L (1980) `Strategic behavioral marital therapy: Toward a model for assessment and intervention' In S P Vincent (ed), Advances in family intervention, assessment, and theory (Vol 1) pp 229-271. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press.
Welsh, G S (1975) Creativity and intelligence: A personality approach Chapel Hill, NC: Institute for Research in Social Science.
Williams, K B & Williams, J E (1980) `The assessment of transactional analysis ego states via the Adjective Check List', Journal of Personality Assessment, 44, pp 120-129.

Appendices

Back to Contents

Back

Notes For each column of correlations, less than two correlations out of 37 are expected to be significant at the .05 level or better under chance conditions. Thus, it is unlikely that the patterns of similarity and contrast in this table are due to chance.