The purpose of this research is to clarify, summarize, and logically integrate all the major premarital and marital determinants of affect (positive or negative) that appeared in research articles of the major journals during the time period 1980-1992. The findings are presented in the form of second-order propositions in chapter four.

There are one-hundred and forty-one second-order propositions synthesizing the findings of two-hundred and ninety-one first-order propositions which constitute the propositional summaries of two-hundred and ninety-one articles. The findings of these articles were considered to be significant and relevant for the present study, and were taken from a total pool of six-hundred and ninety-seven articles.