The following is a news item selected by the Hitched editors during the week of September 18, 2014.

A Husband's Happiness Is Tied To His Wife's Satisfaction
It's a common phrase, "Happy wife, happy life." There have been many studies over the years that have demonstrated just how true this is—and now there's another. Vicki Freedman, a research professor at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research along with Rutgers University sociologist, Deborah Carr, co-authored a new study that looks at how a husband and wife's marital appraisal impacts their psychological well-being. The researchers analyzed the data of 394 couples who were part of the ISR Panel Study of Income Dynamics, a national panel study of a representative sample of U.S. families; and isolated couples where at least one spouse was at least 60 years old. On a scale of 0 (not at all) to 6 (very) the couples were asked a variety of questions. On average, husbands rated their marriages more positively than their wives did, but not by much. Overall, both husbands and wives rated their overall life satisfaction about the same, giving it a 5 on average. What's particularly interesting about this study is that a husband's life satisfaction improved—even if he's in an unhappy marriage—if his wife was satisfied with their marriage. The same didn't apply the other way around. "Overall life satisfaction for an unhappily married man depends on how his wife describes their relationship. If she describes their marriage as higher quality, his life satisfaction is buoyed—even if he gives the marriage a less glowing assessment," says Freedman. In a press release on the University of Michigan website, Carr explains a bit why this may be, "Women typically provide more emotional and practical support to husbands than vice-versa,” she said. "So even an unhappily married man may receive benefits from the marriage that enhance his overall well-being."

Live In a Green Neighborhood to Have a Healthier Baby
Having a healthy baby is all any expecting parent wants. Turns out that living in a neighborhood with lots of trees can improve the odds of that happening. Researchers at Oregon State University and the University of British Columbia looked at data of 64,000 births and found that "very pre-term births were 20 percent lower and moderate pre-term births were 13 percent lower for infants whose mothers lived in greener neighborhoods." Mothers who lived in neighborhoods with lots of grass, trees, and other green vegetation were more likely to deliver at full term and their babies were born weighing 45 grams heavier than mothers who lived in urban areas with less foliage around. What the researchers don't know, however, is how much or what type of greenery is most beneficial. They also don't suspect adding a planter or tree to your property will make a significant difference in birth outcomes. In a press release on the Oregon State University website, Perry Hystad, an environmental epidemiologist in the College of Public Health and Human Sciences at Oregon State and lead author of the study says, "We expected the association between greenness and birth outcomes to disappear once we accounted for other environmental exposures such as air pollution and noise. The research really suggests that greenness affects birth outcomes in other ways, such as psychologically or socially."