Abstract
The coupling of uniaxial ferromagnets whose easy directions are not parallel is studied. It is shown that field-dependent effective high-order anisotropies may be produced, and that as the coupling is weakened increasingly high-order anisotropies will become detectable. These results are applied to uniaxial thin films with anisotropy dispersion. It is shown that treating such films as having complex uniaxial and biaxial anisotropy is somewhat oversimplified.