婚姻承诺与婚姻质量的关系:夫妻牺牲行为的中介作用

婚姻承诺和婚姻质量的关系近年来是婚姻研究领域关注的重要课题。承诺是保持婚姻的意愿,会导致婚姻中牺牲行为的产生。然而,承诺和牺牲对婚姻质量的影响至今并没有得到一致结论。那么,承诺对婚姻质量影响的不一致是否是因为牺牲所起作用的不一致导致?以往研究并没有得到探讨。为此,从北京选取389对夫妻,采用夫妻独立作答的方式,对他们的婚姻承诺,牺牲行为和婚姻质量进行测查,以探讨婚姻承诺、牺牲与婚姻质量的关系,以及牺牲在婚姻承诺和婚姻质量关系间的作用。结果发现:(1)丈夫对婚姻承诺和婚姻质量的感知显著高于妻子;并且丈夫比妻子报告有更多的"行动服务"上的牺牲行为。(2)夫妻的婚姻承诺对自身牺牲频率和婚姻质量均有显著预测作用,同时妻子的婚姻承诺还对丈夫的婚姻质量有显著预测作用。(3)丈夫的牺牲频率在丈夫婚姻承诺对自身婚姻质量的影响中起着完全中介作用。同时,丈夫的牺牲频率也能显著预测妻子感知到的婚姻质量,而妻子的牺牲频率在本身对双方的婚姻质量均无直接或间接的预测作用。说明丈夫的牺牲行为对婚姻关系有非常重要的作用。     

Church Attendance and Marital Commitment Beliefs of Undergraduate Women

Marital commitment between spouses has been found to be an important predictor of successful marriages. Beliefs about marital commitment among never-married young adults are of interest because of their probable influence on subsequent marital behaviors. The current study examined social-cognitive processes; specifically, religiousness, locus-of-control beliefs, and gender role attitudes, in the prediction of marital commitment beliefs among 294 undergraduate never-married women. We found that higher religiousness and lower chance locus of control were significantly correlated with stronger marital commitment beliefs. Multiple regression analyses revealed that religiousness was the best predictor of marital commitment beliefs in this sample. Social learning processes are implicated in the development of marital commitment beliefs. Implications and limitations of the study are discussed.     

Relative Income and Marital Happiness Among Urban Chinese Women: The Moderating Role of Personal Commitment

Compared with the rich knowledge in the West, studies of the impact of wives’ relative income on marital quality during the fast socioeconomic change period in urban China have surprisingly fallen far behind. This study attempted to examine the impact of relative income on marital happiness among urban Chinese women. Using an urban Beijing sample of 763 married women, this study found that a woman married to a husband with lower income tended to be less happy with her marriage, but this effect will be countered if there is more love in the sense of a genuine concern about the well-being of the partner and a willing to make sacrifice for him. The results were interpreted from theoretical verification and possible mechanisms linking personal commitment and marital happiness.     

Affiliative and Instrumental Marital Discord, Mother's Negative Affect, and Children's Negative Interactions with Unfamiliar Peers

Indices of marital discord and mother-child affective processes were used to predict levels of negativity children displayed with unfamiliar peers. Thirty-nine mothers and their 5-year-olds were observed with 5–7 other mother-child dyads during a 30-minute free play session. Mother and child negativity were coded and two types of marital discord were assessed via mother self-report: affiliative discord (e.g., distress due to the lack of affiliative behaviors in the marriage) and instrumental discord (e.g., disagreements about the accomplishment of marital tasks, such as finances, time management, and goal setting). Affiliative discord was found to relate to the child's negativity with unfamiliar peers, but instrumental discord was not. Furthermore, maternal negativity moderated the link between marital discord and child's negativity with peers, such that high levels of affiliative discord combined with heightened maternal negativity was associated with child negativity. Practical implications are discussed.     

Marital Satisfaction,Negative Interaction,and Religiosity: A Comparison of Three Age Groups

This study compared marital satisfaction among three age groups and examined how negative interaction patterns and religiosity relate to marital satisfaction at each age using a sample of Protestants (N = 45,387) diverse in denominations, location, geography, and size. We performed a 1-way ANOVA to compare marital satisfaction among three age groups (younger than 40, 40–59, and 60 and older) and found a U-shape curve with marital satisfaction highest among the youngest group, lowest among middle-age couples, and high among older couples. ANCOVA analysis found negative interaction, age, religiosity, age*negative interaction, and age*religiosity to be predictors of marital satisfaction.     

Marital and Existential Pain: Dialectic in Bergman's "Scenes From a Marriage"

Marital pain and existential pain are discussed in terms of the movie "Scenes From a Marriage" by the Swedish director, Ingmar Bergman.     

Individualism Versus Collectivism: A Comparison of Kenyan and American Self-Concepts

We predicted that individuals from traditional, collectivist Kenyan cultures would have self-concepts with more social components than would those from individuated American culture and that the self-concepts of urbanized and educated Kenyans would be less social than those of traditional Kenyans. Consistent with predictions, the proportion of social category responses to the Twenty Statements Test was 12% for American college students, 17% for Kenyan university students in Nairobi, 58% for Kenyans employed in Nairobi, 80% for Maasai Kenyans, and 84% for Samburu Kenyans. American and Kenyan university students responded primarily with nonsocial categories of psychological and interpersonal style, whereas traditional Kenyans responded with social categories of occupational and kinship roles. Sociocultural factors of urbanization, education, and Westernization appear to correlate with individuated (nonsocial) self-conceptions.     

RAGING WITH THE TRUTH: Condemnation and Concealment in the Poetry of Blake and Hill

An analysis of Geoffrey Hill's lyric poem about William Blake illuminates the relations between art, prophecy, and imperial politics across more than two centuries. Hill's poem responds to David V. Erdman's argument that Blake was resolutely, if ineffectually and sometimes secretly, opposed to war. It also establishes Hill's own cryptic but definite resistance to contemporary war and warmongers, while it mourns poetry's public powerlessness to halt the violent competition for material resources. Ignored by the majority, poetry fails to bring about the ethical social change that poets often envision. The layering of perspectives (Hill the poet and scholar writing about Erdman the scholar, who is explicating Blake the poet and artist) allows for a multidimensional interpretation of the role of poets and prophetic poetry. Despite their fury at society's deafness and greed, and frustration at their own incapacities, poets—because if they are great poets, they are prophets, too—continue to speak to their audiences about the problems of this world and about the better worlds that can be imagined. Hill's text obliquely teaches how the small success of a great poem can provide a minor note of consolation as it objects to terror and tyranny.     

Physiology and Faith: Addressing the "Universal" Gender Difference in Religious Commitment

That men are less religious than women is a generalization that holds around the world and across the centuries. However, there has been virtually no study of this phenomenon because it has seemed so obvious that it is the result of differential sex role socialization. Unfortunately, actual attempts to isolate socialization effects on gender differences in religiousness have failed, as have far more frequent and careful efforts to explain gender differences in crime. There is a growing body of plausible evidence in support of physiological bases for gender differences in crime. Making the assumption that, like crime, irreligiousness is an aspect of a general syndrome of short–sighted, risky behaviors leads to the conclusion that male irreligiousness may also have a physiological basis. If nothing else, this article may prompt creative efforts to salvage the socialization explanation.     

Dyadic Cross-Sectional Associations Between Negative Mood,Marital Idealization,and Relationship Quality

This study aimed to evaluate (a) dyadic associations between relationship quality (RQ) and both depressive and anxious mood (DM and AM), (b) reciprocity hypotheses of negative mood within dyadic interactions, and (c) mediational role of marital idealization between negative mood and relationship quality. Actor-partner interdependence models (APIMs) were performed using data from a sample of 198 dyads. Our results showed that (a) these two facets of negative mood did not have the same weight on RQ and that they had a gender-specific effects pattern, and (b) there was no support for the mood transmission hypothesis. Men's DM displayed direct and indirect (via marital idealization) actor as well as partner effects on RQ, whereas women's DM displayed only a direct actor effect on RQ. There were no significant direct actor effects of AM on RQ, meaning that this link is fully mediated by marital idealization. However, only women's AM showed such indirect effects on RQ.     

TRANSFORMATION AND THE WAKING BODY: A RETURN TO TRUTH VIA OUR BODIES

This article considers the kind of knowledge that is constituted through embodied sensory perception and makes the case for a form of knowledge that is embodied, relational, and potentially transformational. Such knowledge is encountered through our physiological senses and cultivated by reestablishing connections to our bodies. The discussion starts by exploring the literature on sensory perception and interoception and moves on to the role of human agency, which is implicit in the idea of top‐down causation. It is argued that this process can be explained by a top‐down predictive model within which a sense of greater interoceptive accuracy may be cultivated while reducing interoceptive perturbation. The roles of active and perceptual inference are discussed with regard to the regulatory opportunities that these types of attention yield. By being more interoceptively aware, through a practice of contemplation, it is argued, we open ourselves to an encounter with divine presence that is immanent in the world around us.