Engineered pavements cover a large fraction of cities and offer significant potential for urban heat island mitigation. Though rapidly increasing research efforts have been devoted to the study of pavement materials, thermal interactions between buildings and the ambient environment are mostly neglected. In this study, numerical models featuring a realistic representation of building-environment thermal interactions, were applied to quantify the effect of pavements on the urban thermal environment at multiple scales. It was found that performance of pavements inside the canyon was largely determined by the canyon geometry. In a high-density residential area, modifying pavements had insignificant effect on the wall temperature and building energy consumption. At a regional scale, various pavement types were also found to have a limited cooling effect on land surface temperature and 2-m air temperature for metropolitan Phoenix. In the context of global climate change, the effect of pavement was evaluated in terms of the equivalent CO2 emission. Equivalent CO2 emission offset by reflective pavements in urban canyons was only about 13.9e46.6% of that without building canopies, depending on the canyon geometry. This study revealed the importance of building-environment thermal interactions in determining thermal conditions inside the urban canopy.

People experience challenges and conflicts in their romantic relationships. Such difficulties yield different outcomes: these events can make us into better partners and strengthen our romantic relationships, or they can weaken us and threaten those relationships. Thus, some conflicts might be positive for couples in the long-term despite short-term stress. The current study sought to address this possibility. Across two studies (total N = 600), I found three main components that were related to perceptions of strength outcomes across couple conflict types. First, conflict between romantic partners involving commitment, sex, trust, infidelity, and controlling behavior were generally associated with perceptions of less positive outcomes than other conflicts. On the other hand, conflict between romantic partners involving addiction, finance, grief, family stress, illness, or jobs and education were associated with perceptions of relatively more positive outcomes. Additionally, I find communication is associated with conflicts that were related to long-distance, household chores, and sex. The nature of this work is exploratory, and other research is needed to confirm these results. Nonetheless, our study demonstrates differences in how people characterize the difficulties and conflicts that occur in romantic relationships.