IANS
 
New York, Jan 5 (mb): Happily married women may be able to beat job stress better than their husbands, a new study of 60 Californian couples shows.

All couples studied by researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) had full time jobs. They had two to three kids and a mortgage.

For four days the husbands and wives kept diaries about their job stress. They also provided saliva samples four times daily and rated their marital satisfaction.

The researchers measured levels of the stress hormone cortisol in the saliva samples. After a stressful day at work, cortisol levels faded fastest in happily married wives, reported the online edition of health magazine WebMD.

The study's findings suggest that it is easier for satisfied wives to unwind from work stress, while women in unhappy marriages don't get as much comfort from coming home.

"Wives in happier marriages may have had greater access to the space, time, and support needed to recuperate after busy days," the researchers write.

Husbands were a different story. After negative social interactions at work, men's cortisol levels stayed high in the evening, even for those in happy marriages.

Researchers said the body's ways of coping with stress might be more sensitive to quality of marriage in women than in men.