Communication,conflict, and commitment: insights on the foundations of relationship success from a national survey

The key relationship dynamics of communication, conflict, and commitment were investigated using data from a randomly sampled, nationwide phone survey of adults in married, engaged, and cohabiting relationships. Findings on communication and conflict generally replicated those of studies using more indepth or objective measurement strategies. Negative interaction between partners was negatively associated with numerous measures of relationship quality and positively correlated with divorce potential (thinking or talking about divorce). Withdrawal during conflict by either or both partners, though quite common, was associated with more negativity and less positive connection in relationships. The most frequently reported issue that couples argue about in first marriages was money, and in re-marriages it was conflict about children. Overall, how couples argue was more related to divorce potential than was what they argue about, although couples who argue most about money tended to have higher levels of negative communication and conflict than other couples. Further, while the male divorce potential was more strongly linked to levels of negative interaction, the female was more strongly linked to lower positive connection in the relationship. Consistent with the commitment literature, higher reported commitment was associated with less alternative monitoring, less feeling trapped in the relationship, and greater relationship satisfaction.     

‘You Could Call It Magic’: What Parents and Siblings Tell Preschoolers About Unobservable Entities

How can we explain children's understanding of the unseen world? Young children are generally able to distinguish between real unobservable entities and fantastical ones, but they attribute different characteristics to and show less confidence in their decisions about fantastical entities generally endorsed by adults, such as Santa Claus. One explanation for these conceptual differences is that the testimony children hear from others about unobservable entities varies in meaningful ways. Although this theory has some experimental support, its viability in actual conversation has yet to be investigated. Study 1 sought to examine this question in parent–child conversation and showed that parents provide similar types of content information when talking to children about both real entities and entities that they generally endorse. However, parents use different pragmatic cues when they communicate about endorsed entities than they do when talking about real ones. Study 2 showed that older siblings used discourse strategies similar to those used by parents when talking to young children about unobservable entities. These studies indicate that the types of cues children use to form their conceptions of unobservable entities are present in naturalistic conversations with others, supporting a role for testimony in children's early beliefs.     

Children's language acquisition

Child language acquisition has only recently become an important research topic for developmental psychologists, although the universal appearance of language during the second year of life has long fascinated philosophers. For normally developing children, language emerges spontaneously as a means of talking about what they know so that they can accomplish social goals important to them. Some children, however, need to be taught. This article reviews current issues in child language acquisition and suggests a research agenda for helping those children who have difficulty mastering the fundamentals of language.     

Alcohol and social behavior I: The psychology of drunken excess

Drinking alcohol clearly has important effect on social behaviors, such as increasing aggression, self-disclosure, sexual adventuresomeness, and so on. Research has shown that these effects can stem from beliefs we hold about alcohol effects. Less is known about how alcohol itself affects these behaviors. A cognitive explanation, that alcohol impairs the information processing needed to inhibit response impulses--the abilities to foresee negative consequences of the response, to recall inhibiting standards, and so on--has begun to emerge. We hypothesize that alcohol impairment will make a social response more extreme or excessive when the response is pressured by both inhibiting and instigating cues--in our terms, when it is under inhibitory response conflict. In that case, alcohol's damage to inhibitory processing allows instigating pressures more sway over the response, increasing its extremeness. In the present meta-analysis, each published test of alcohol's effect on a social, or socially significant behavior was rated (validated against independent judges) as to whether it was under high or low inhibitory conflict. Over low-conflict tests, intoxicated subjects behaved only a tenth of a standard deviation more extremely than their sober controls, whereas over high-conflict tests they were a full standard deviation more extreme. The effect of conflict increased with alcohol dosage, was shown not to be mediated by drinking expectancies, and generalized with few exceptions across the 34 studies and 12 social behaviors included in this analysis.     

Overt and covert parental conflict and adolescent problems: observed marital interaction in clinic and nonclinic families.

When adolescents behave in socially unacceptable ways, overt interparental conflict is widely held to be the cause. Empirical studies, however, have been inconsistent in supporting this assumption. Some researchers therefore have speculated that covert conflict also plays a role. In the current observational study, evidence was found that both overt parental conflict and some forms of covert conflict play roles. During problem-solving family discussions, parents of adolescents whom they had brought into an outpatient clinic for treatment overtly disagreed with each other significantly more often than did parents with adolescents who did not require treatment. Families of clinic adolescents also exhibited significantly more silence during their discussions, and mothers spent significantly less time talking than did their nonclinic counterparts. The implications that both the overt and covert conflict may have for adolescent behavior are discussed.     

注意缺陷多动障碍儿童在不同加工阶段的干扰控制

采用刺激－刺激和刺激－反应相容性任务范式,将信息加工在知觉和反应阶段的冲突效应分离开来,考察注意缺陷多动障碍（Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder,简称ADHD）儿童在知觉和反应阶段冲突控制的模式和时间轨迹。结果发现,在反应阶段,ADHD儿童的干扰控制能力明显弱于正常对照组儿童,混合型ADHD儿童的能力更弱于注意缺陷型ADHD儿童;在知觉阶段,ADHD儿童没有明显的干扰抑制缺损,两组ADHD儿童（注意缺陷型和混合型）的表现模式相似;儿童抑制冲突干扰所遵循的时间轨迹在知觉和反应阶段有所不同：与知觉阶段相比,反应阶段需要更长的时间才能抑制冲突干扰。但ADHD儿童和正常儿童之间的表现模式相似     

Intergenerational Transmission of Conflict-Related Trauma in Northern Ireland: A Behavior Analytic Approach

Intergenerational transmission of trauma describes the impact that traumatic events experienced by one generation have for the subsequent generation. In Northern Ireland, violent conflict raged between 1969 and 1998, when a peace process begun. This study explored to what extent (if any) parents’ experiences of the conflict influenced how children perceived life in this society. Parents completed a questionnaire, and their children drew 2 pictures, depicting Northern Ireland now and before they were born. Children’s behaviors and awareness of the conflict were influenced by their parents’ experiences and narratives, their age, gender, and school. Parental narrative about the violence was influenced by individual learning history, the child’s age and gender, and present circumstances. A behavior analytic approach is offered.     

How language acquisition builds on cognitive development

When children acquire a first language, they build on what they know--conceptual information that discriminates and helps create categories for the objects, relations and events they experience. This provides the starting point for language from the age of 12 months on. So children first set up conceptual representations, then add linguistic representations for talking about experience. Do they then discard earlier conceptual representations in favour of linguistic ones, or do they retain them? Recent research on the coping strategies that young children (and adults) rely on when they are unable to draw on language suggest that they retain both types of representations for use as needed.     

Peer play,emotion understanding,and socio‐moral explanation: The role of gender

Engagement in peer play is an important factor in young children's adjustment as they make the transition to school. We evaluated individual differences in peer play within a sample of 58 children aged 4–5 years. Among boys, but not among girls, emotion understanding and verbal ability independently served as positive predictors of interactive peer play and negative predictors of disconnected play. Among girls, but not among boys, interactive peer play and socio‐moral reasoning about peer conflict situations independently predicted sociometric most‐like nominations. The results provide a foundation for further research on divergence in the early peer play of girls and boys.     

Silence and survival: Working with strategies of denial in families of traumatized pre-school children

Silence and denial about previous traumatic experiences are common features in families exposed to organized violence. Mutual protection between family members, and especially between parents and children, is seen as the fundament for the silencing of traumatic experiences. This strategy is suggested to have adaptive advantages in dangerous situations in general, where it serves the function of saving the child's internal representations of his/her parents as secure bases. If, however, the dangerous situation escalates and a psychic trauma cannot be avoided, the strategy of mutual silence concerning the event(s) becomes an obstacle for giving traumatized children parental support and professional treatment. It is argued that clinicians need to take seriously the strong reasons families have for upholding their strategy of denial, if they want to help traumatized families to a better functioning. A case presentation is made to illustrate how it is possible to use refugee children's re-enacting play as a source of information about past traumatic events in order to change destructive post-traumatic family dynamics and improve parental support to the child.     

Revisiting the Concept of Time: Archaic Perplexity in Bergson and Heidegger

Though the claims they make about temporality are markedly different, Henri Bergson and Martin Heidegger agree that time is a philosophically foundational phenomenon; indeed, they agree that time is, in certain respects, the basis for all discursively representable beings. This paper focuses not so much on their theories of temporality (i.e., their respective answers to the question “what is time?” and their justifications for these answers) but rather on the challenges involved in talking about this phenomenon at all. Both thinkers are highly sensitive to these challenges and to the problems involved in any attempt to represent time in a discursively straightforward manner. I will show that: (1) Bergson’s and Heidegger’s respective claims about time can be fully understood only if we keep this sensitivity in view and carefully note what they are—and aren’t—doing in “talking about time”; and (2) what is ultimately at stake in their analyses is not just the phenomenon of time but what it means to engage in rigorous philosophical praxis.     

Mothers of Children with Complex Trauma: Occupations Viewed through Photovoice

Abstract

Research in complex trauma has focused on the experiences of children, with less written about their non-offending parents’ occupations. This study utilized photovoice to explore occupations of six mothers of children with complex trauma. Mothers related great difficulty considering their own experiences, rather than their children’s, as they took photos, attended group meetings, and wrote narratives about their photos. Data were analyzed with a modified framework analysis. Themes reflected unrelenting responsibilities for others, identity and aspiration, transformation and empowerment, and belonging within supportive communities. Mothers described their growth and the value of their study participation and they recommended future actions.     

Social competence and conduct problems in young children: issues in assessment

Examined the differences in various facets of social competence in 2 groups of young children (ages 4-7 years)--a clinic-referred group of aggressive children (N = 60) diagnosed with oppositional defiant disorder or conduct problems and a matched comparison group of typically developing children (N = 60). Four aspects of social competence were assessed: social information processing, actual observations of conflict management skills and social play interactions during peer interactions, positive social interactions with mothers and fathers at home, and teacher reports of social competence. The social information processing assessed included problem-solving skills (hypothetical skills as demonstrated on a social problem-solving test), self-perceptions (child's awareness of his or her own social self and feelings of loneliness), perceptions of others (attributions), and perceptions of others' attitudes toward oneself. To determine the construct validity of various means of assessing child social competence, we correlated children's social information processing measures with parent and teacher reports of social adjustment and with actual observations of interactions during peer play and at home with parents. Results comparing the 2 groups suggest that young children with conduct problems have deficits in their social information processing awareness or interpretation of social cues--they overestimate their own social competence and misattribute hostile intent to others. Tests of cognitive problem solving and observations of peer play interactions indicated that the children with conduct problems had significantly fewer positive problem-solving strategies and positive social skills, more negative conflict management strategies, and delayed play skills with peers than the comparison children. Correlation analyses indicated significant correlations between children's negative attributions and the ratio of positive to negative problem-solving strategies with observations of peer play interactions.     

Effects of participation in a longitudinal study of dating

Participation in interviews has the potential to change beliefs about dating relationships. Changes in beliefs should vary as a function of how much participants think and talk about their relationships. Participants (N= 464) were randomly selected for an interview study from households in a large Southwestern U.S. city. Participation should have positive effects on beliefs when thinking or talking is high and negative effects when thinking or talking is low. As predicted, talking moderates the association between participation and conflict, and thinking moderates the effects of participation on satisfaction and friendship‐based love. Results differed for men and women. Under conditions of low talk and high thinking, participation has negative effects. Implications of the effects of participation are discussed.     

Young children infer causal strength from probabilities and interventions

We examine the interaction of two cues that children use to make judgments about cause-effect relations: probabilities and interventions. Children were shown a "detector" that lit up and played music when a block was placed on its surface. We varied the probabilistic effectiveness of the block, as well as whether the experimenter or the child was performing the interventions. In Experiment 1, we found that children can use probabilistic evidence to make inferences about causal strength. However, when the results of their own interventions are in conflict with the overall frequencies, preschoolers favor the results of their own interventions. In Experiment 2, children used probabilistic evidence to infer a hidden causal mechanism. Though they again gave preference to their own interventions, they did not do so when their interventions were explicitly confounded by an alternative cause.     

Time Points: A Gestural Study of the Development of Space–Time Mappings

Human languages typically employ a variety of spatial metaphors for time (e.g., “I'm looking forward to the weekend”). The metaphorical grounding of time in space is also evident in gesture. The gestures that are performed when talking about time bolster the view that people sometimes think about regions of time as if they were locations in space. However, almost nothing is known about the development of metaphorical gestures for time, despite keen interest in the origins of space–time metaphors. In this study, we examined the gestures that English‐speaking 6‐to‐7‐year‐olds, 9‐to‐11‐year‐olds, 13‐to‐15‐year‐olds, and adults produced when talking about time. Participants were asked to explain the difference between pairs of temporal adverbs (e.g., “tomorrow” versus “yesterday”) and to use their hands while doing so. There was a gradual increase across age groups in the propensity to produce spatial metaphorical gestures when talking about time. However, even a substantial majority of 6‐to‐7‐year‐old children produced a spatial gesture on at least one occasion. Overall, participants produced fewer gestures in the sagittal (front‐back) axis than in the lateral (left‐right) axis, and this was particularly true for the youngest children and adolescents. Gestures that were incongruent with the prevailing norms of space–time mappings among English speakers (leftward and backward for past; rightward and forward for future) gradually decreased with increasing age. This was true for both the lateral and sagittal axis. This study highlights the importance of metaphoricity in children's understanding of time. It also suggests that, by 6 to 7 years of age, culturally determined representations of time have a strong influence on children's spatial metaphorical gestures.     

Perceptions of Hospitalization by Children with Chronic Illnesses and Siblings

Understanding children’s perceptions of their illnesses and functioning when they are undergoing medical procedures remains an important area for research. Further research about siblings’ perceptions will also provide knowledge about how they are coping with a brother or sister’s chronic illness. The current study examined the perceptions of children with illnesses and their siblings using a play interview. Themes in the data indicated resilience in child functioning for both patients and siblings. Children with chronic illnesses could experience pain, which often related to fears and other negative feelings about hospitalization and potentially doctors or nurses, if they were administering painful procedures. Distraction and prayer were coping tools for patients. However, most patients believed their illness and recovery would be a “long journey.” Brothers and sisters of children with chronic illnesses could experience loneliness. A more common report was a strong desire to help and be a support for a brother or sister with an illness. Support from parents was critical for both patients and siblings and both typically enjoyed child life activities. A member-checking process, with a different group of children with illnesses and siblings, was used to audit themes discovered after reviewing play interviews. The audit process supported the positive and negative themes in the data. In the future, examining the impact of magical thinking on outcomes and conducting studies after the children have gained distance from medical trauma will be important. Moreover, increasing a focus on resilience as a hallmark of children’s functioning remains another area for further research.     

Distinct conflict resolution deficits related to different facets of Schizophrenia

An important issue in understanding the nature of conflict processing is whether it is a unitary or multidimensional construct. One way to examine this is to study whether people with impaired conflict processing exhibit a general pattern of deficits or whether they exhibit impairments in distinct aspects of conflict processing. One group who might exhibit conflict deficits are people with schizophrenia. Schizophrenia is a heterogeneous disorder, with one way to break down the heterogeneity of schizophrenia is to examine specific symptoms. Previous research has found that specific symptoms of schizophrenia are associated with specific deficits in conflict processing. In particular, disorganization is associated with increased response conflict, alogia is associated with increased retrieval conflict, and anhedonia is associated with increased emotional conflict. Moreover, there is evidence that different types of conflict processing are unassociated with each other. This evidence suggests that conflict processing is a multidimensional construct and that different aspects of schizophrenia are associated with impairments in processing different types of conflict.