The purpose of this study was to code the communication behaviour of married couples asked to have a pleasant conversation with one another. Fifty-one couples participated in this experiment. These couples were categorised into one of five basic marriage patterns: Traditionals, Independents, Separates, Separate/Traditionals and Mixed type couples. The middle four minutes of their interaction was coded using the Verbal Response Modes (Stiles, 1978a). The casual interaction styles of these couples differed from one another on an utterance by utterance basis as well as in reference to the three major interpersonal roles: acquiescence, presumptuousness and attentiveness.
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