Divorce rates are at an all-time high. But without a theoretical                  understanding of the processes related to marital stability and dissolution, it is                  difficult to design and evaluate new marriage interventions. The Mathematics of                  Marriage provides the foundation for a scientific theory of marital relations. The                  book does not rely on metaphors, but develops and applies a mathematical model using                  difference equations. The work is the fulfillment of the goal to build a                  mathematical framework for the general system theory of families first suggested by                  Ludwig Von Bertalanffy in the 1960s.The book also presents a complete introduction                  to the mathematics involved in theory building and testing, and details the                  development of experiments and models. In one "marriage experiment," for example,                  the authors explored the effects of lowering or raising a couple?s heart rates.                  Armed with their mathematical model, they were able to do real experiments to                  determine which processes were affected by their interventions.Applying ideas such                  as phase space, null clines, influence functions, inertia, and uninfluenced and                  influenced stable steady states (attractors), the authors show how other researchers                  can use the methods to weigh their own data with positive and negative weights.                  While the focus is on modeling marriage, the techniques can be applied to other                  types of psychological phenomena as well.

The Mathematics of Marriage: Dynamic Nonlinear Models PDF

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