Dyadic relationships and their impact on health and wellbeing

Mother–daughter and intimate partner dyads can create positive or negative emotional climates that impact both members of their family subsystem and can also impact other members of the family. Protective factors, such as developing trust through consistency, words of affirmation, and self-compassion can develop personal resilience to lower or regulate biobehavioral reactivity and prevent negative long-term mental health and disease outcomes. To provide insight into how the relational environment relates to mental health and physical illness, the Biobehavioral Family Model and associated constructs are introduced. These constructs include the dyadic emotional climate, biobehavioral reactivity, and disease activity. In the first study a comprehensive search of the literature focuses on the powerfully influential mother–daughter dyad and asks the important question of what can be done to build a positive emotional climate through protective factors that can be implemented from mother to daughter. In the second study, the BBFM was tested with intimate partner dyads to determine if individual biobehavioral reactivity can mediate the dyadic emotional climate and disease activity.