Resource theory and power in families: life cycle considerations

We begin our discussion by outlining the usefulness of "resource theory" as a theoretical framework for the study of family power. This framework is then used to analyze changes in the balance of power between elderly parents and their middle-age children. With respect to intergenerational power relationships, we argue that the autonomy of elderly parents has increased, but their power and influence over adult children has decreased. This trend is likely to continue in coming decades. Resource theory is then utilized to analyze changes in marital power relationships as couples age. Most studies of power relationships between elderly spouses have an important limitation--they tend to reflect yesterday's definitions of male and female roles. Recent changes in these roles may significantly alter the social meanings of aging for both men and women in coming years.     

Toward an Anthropology of Exchange in Tamil Nadu

This article is an attempt to present the cultural conceptions of exchange that appear in studies of medieval South Indian redistributive processes and the anthropology of Tamil caste, kinship, and marital transactions. As such it does not engage theological understandings of gifts to and from South Indian deities. The approach is sociological, and the argument is that whether the mode is redistributive or donative, Tamil exchanges create social relationships that are embedded in meanings of distinction and precedence. What is handed out is a position in a social order that is first and foremost hierarchical, a rank in a social sequence, so that not merely things and services but social distinctions move through the social landscape.     

Marital closeness, functional disability, and adjustment in late life

Socioemotional selectivity theory (SST) posits that emotionally close relationships are increasingly valued as people perceive constraints on time. Based on SST, this study of 1,532 older married persons hypothesized that emotional dimensions of marriage would more strongly predict adjustment at higher levels of functional disability. High levels of marital closeness were negatively associated with depression and anxiety and positively associated with self-esteem. Consistent with predictions derived from SST, marital closeness moderated the negative psychological effects of high levels of functional disability on depression, anxiety, and self-esteem. Results are discussed in the context of SST and traditional stress-buffering models of social support.     

Find,Remind, and Bind: The Functions of Gratitude in Everyday Relationships

Though interest in the emotion of gratitude has historically focused on its role in social exchange, new evidence suggests a different and more important role for gratitude in social life. The find‐remind‐and‐bind theory of gratitude posits that the positive emotion of gratitude serves the evolutionary function of strengthening a relationship with a responsive interaction partner ( Algoe, Haidt, & Gable, 2008 ). The current article identifies prior, economic models of gratitude, elaborates on unique features of the find‐remind‐and‐bind theory, reviews the accumulating evidence for gratitude in social life in light of this novel perspective, and discusses how the find‐remind‐and‐bind theory is relevant to methodology and hypothesis testing. In sum, within the context of reciprocally‐altruistic relationships, gratitude signals communal relationship norms and may be an evolved mechanism to fuel upward spirals of mutually responsive behaviors between recipient and benefactor. In this way, gratitude is important for forming and maintaining the most important relationships of our lives, those with the people we interact with every day.     

How Do Parents React When Their Children Leave Home? An Integrative Review

The empty nest, which refers to the phase of the family life cycle following the departure of children, has been associated with both positive and negative consequences for parents. This article aims to achieve a better understanding of the complex effects of this transition. It discusses available data and theoretical perspectives on the empty nest, from pioneering works until the most recent studies on the subject. It includes a discussion of conceptualization and methodological issues, as well as a review of determinants of nest leaving. The influence of the departure of children on their parents’ marital quality and psychological well-being, including the potential development of empty-nest syndrome, are then summarized. Studies examining other parental outcome, such as marital instability or relationships with adult children, are also reviewed. It ends with a discussion on boomerang kids and directions for future research. In particular, the need to study the empty-nest period with parents living in a variety of marital situations is acknowledged.     

Perceived organizational support as a mediator between relational exchange and organizational identification

Using cross-level data from 364 supervisor–subordinate dyads, we examined how relational exchange quality, perceived organizational support (POS), and organizational identification interrelate. We found subordinate POS mediates the relationship between leader-member exchange (i.e., LMX) and organizational identification. We also found the relational context matters—namely, the immediate supervisor’s relationship with his or her manager (i.e., leader–leader exchange, LLX). Our findings suggest higher quality LLX creates a spillover of resources and reduces the negative association between lower quality LMX and POS. Our study extends both social exchange and social identity theories. First, we delineate how relational exchange quality associates with one’s identity in the organization—placing POS as an integrative mechanism between exchange and identity. Second, we expand the purview of social exchange theory by including other proximal (and interpersonal) relationships as context for social exchange between the individual and organization. Limitations, future research directions, and practical implications are also discussed.     

Constructing a positive narrative for African sport consumerism

Sport consumerism is a burgeoning field of practice and serves both the utilitarian and behaviouristic goals. The utilitarian aspects are aligned to derivatives of value generated through the sport consumption effort. Behaviourism in the consumer context suggests a communal narrative, informed through observable actions which, in totality, construe social phenomena. This article applied social exchange theory to understand the utilitarian and behavioural functions sub-served by sport consumer psychology in the African context. An evaluation of literature from regional studies is made and the theory is explored with the view of putting forward research themes for the future.     

Wives' and Husbands' Cortisol Reactivity to Proximal and Distal Dimensions of Couple Conflict

Poor marital quality has been linked repeatedly to spouses' health problems, with alterations to physiological stress response systems, such as the hypothalamic‐pituitary‐adrenocortical (HPA) axis, as one putative mechanism. This study assessed wives' and husbands' HPA axis (i.e., cortisol) reactivity to marital criticism during laboratory‐based conflict discussions, in the context of marital aggression experienced during the previous year. Ninety‐five couples provided one saliva sample prior to—and three samples following—a triadic family conflict discussion involving their teenage child. Marital criticism during the conflict discussion was related to heightened HPA reactivity for husbands only. For wives, an interaction emerged between criticism during the conflict and previous‐year marital aggression: only those wives who had experienced high levels of marital aggression demonstrated a positive association between criticism and cortisol output. Husbands thus appeared to be more physiologically reactive to the in‐the‐moment critical behaviors, whereas wives' responses to proximal conflict were related to previous and perhaps more chronic experiences of marital aggression. These findings shed light on ways in which within‐couple processes during family conflicts involving children contribute to individual physiological functioning, enhancing our understanding of the role of family relationships in physical health outcomes.     

Sexual Dissatisfaction in a Sample of Married Iranian Women

This article investigates the sexual relationships of dissatisfied couples from the viewpoint of the female spouse. There are two basic approaches toward sexual dissatisfaction: the first regards sexual dissatisfaction as the cause of marital dissatisfaction; the second asserts that marital dissatisfaction leads to sexual dissatisfaction. This study aims at an understanding of the causes and mechanisms of women’s sexual dissatisfaction and its relationship to marital dissatisfaction. The research was organized using the Grounded theory for a holistic and deep understanding of the phenomenon. Findings drawn from the interviews with 20 severely sexually dissatisfied women indicated a discrepancy between the attitudes of men and women toward sexual relationships. This difference builds a sense of sexual inequality amongst women. This is accompanied by an increased importance of sexual satisfaction compared to the past, or “sexualization” of marital relationships and the resulting sexual dissatisfaction within women. Our study suggests that marital dissatisfaction may precede and cause sexual dissatisfaction and that this link ultimately becomes reciprocal.     

Object Relations Theory and Marital Interaction

SUMMARY

A model of marital communication based on object relations theory is presented, and its utility in integrating and organizing findings from psychological research on marital interaction is described. The model includes context and process components. The context model describes stages of development and lines of development in marriage that jointly influence the sorts of situations that come to the couple's attention. The process model describes a path that leads from situations to each partner's representation of the situation, and then to the acts of communication that form the partners' interaction. The influence of internal object representations on the process of communication is depicted. A feedback loop in the model implies both the possibility of change and also the potential limits on change at several levels of the marital system. Possible paths of unconscious communication are described that reflect the more dynamic aspects of object relations theory. Principal findings from psychological research on marital interaction, marital therapy, and. social cognition are reviewed, and shown to be consistent with the model. Ways that constructs from object relations theory may clarify questions in behavioral models of marital interaction are discussed. The difference between proving the validity of a model and showing its Consistency with the known facts is noted     

Organization structure as a moderator of the relationship between procedural justice,interactional justice,perceived organizational support,and supervisory trust

Organizational justice researchers recognize the important role organization context plays in justice perceptions, yet few studies systematically examine contextual variables. This article examines how 1 aspect of context--organizational structure--affects the relationship between justice perceptions and 2 types of social exchange relationships, organizational and supervisory. The authors suggest that under different structural conditions, procedural and interactional justice will play differentially important roles in determining the quality of organizational social exchange (as evidenced by perceived organizational support [POS]) and supervisory social exchange (as evidenced by supervisory trust). In particular, the authors hypothesized that the relationship between procedural justice and POS would be stronger in mechanistic organizations and that the relationship between interactional justice and supervisory trust would be stronger in organic organizations. The authors' results support these hypotheses.     

Sociocultural Groundings of Battered Women’s Entrapment in Abusive Marital Relationship in Ghana

While social psychological theorizations have contributed to our understanding of why battered women continue to remain in abusive intimate relationships, its apparent exclusive focus on individual victims’ psychological orientation leaves little conceptual space for discovering the subtle ways by which social and cultural norms shape the stay/leave decisions of victims of spousal violence. Drawing upon discursive psychology, this study explores the sociocultural groundings of stay/leave decisions of battered women in Ghana. Semi-structured focus groups and personal interviews were conducted with 32 participants: 16 victims and 16 perpetrators from rural and urban Ghana. Discursive accounts of participants suggest that post-divorce social stigma, remarriage alternatives, and post-divorce child care, as well as privacy framing of marital abuse function in concert to influence battered women’s entrapment in violent marital relationships. The article argues that, rather than individual psychological orientation, the decision to stay in or leave abusive marital relationships in Ghana is socioculturally and structurally grounded. To understand the highly complex nature of spousal violence, one must always go beyond the person and his or her psychological orientations, and seek the origin of battered women’s entrapment also in the external conditions of life, and in the sociocultural and structural forms of human existence.     

Understanding Hypermasculinity in Context: A Theory-Driven Analysis of Urban Adolescent Males' Coping Responses

In this article, we employ Spencer's (1995) Phenomenological variant of ecological systems theory (PVEST) as a framework to examine risk and resilience, with a specific focus on understanding hypermasculine attitudes among low-resource urban, adolescent males. In the article, we highlight the need to understand normative human development processes in context and to consider risk and resilience in conjunction with these processes. We describe findings from a study of risk, social supports, and hypermasculinity. In the discussion, we outline the implications of these findings for theory and practice.     

Matters of the variable heart: respiratory sinus arrhythmia response to marital interaction and associations with marital quality

Maintenance of relationship quality requires self-regulation of emotion and social behavior, and women often display greater effort in this regard than do men. Furthermore, such efforts can deplete the limited capacity for self-regulation. In recent models of self-regulation, resting level of respiratory sinus arrhythmia, quantified as high-frequency heart rate variability (HF-HRV), is an indicator of self-regulatory capacity, whereas transient increases in HF-HRV reflect self-regulatory effort. To test these hypotheses in marriage, 114 young couples completed measures of marital quality and a positive, neutral, or negative initial marital task, preceded and followed by resting baseline assessments of HF-HRV. Couples then discussed a current marital disagreement. Resting HF-HRV was correlated with marital quality, suggesting that capacity for self-regulation is associated with adaptive functioning in close relationships. For women but not men, the negative initial task produced a decrease in resting HF-HRV. This effect was mediated by the husbands' negative affect response to the task and their ratings of wives as controlling and directive. When the subsequent disagreement discussion followed the negative initial task, women displayed increased HF-HRV during the discussion but a decrease when it followed the neutral or positive task. The valence of the initial task had no effect on men's HF-HRV during disagreement. Negative marital interactions can reduce women's resting HF-HRV, with potentially adverse health consequences. Women's reduced health benefit from marriage might reflect the depleting effects on self-regulatory capacity of their greater efforts to manage relationship quality.     

Social influence of a coworker: A test of the effect of employee and coworker exchange ideologies on employees’ exchange qualities

Integrating social comparison and social influence perspective within a social exchange theoretical framework, we examine how the exchange ideologies of employees and their coworkers affect the quality of the employees’ social exchanges. Drawing from social exchange theory, we hypothesize that the exchange ideology of a focal employee has a negative relationship with the quality of his/her social exchange with the organization (i.e., felt obligation) and the quality of his/her social exchange with a leader (i.e., leader–member exchange), both of which are related to task performance. Furthermore, we propose that a coworker close to the employee acts as a social referent and provides cues to exert influence on these relationships. Using data collected from 374 (employee–coworker–manager) triads in Hong Kong, we find support for the aforementioned relationships as well as the moderating roles of a coworker’s exchange ideology.     

Ethical Issues in Marital and Sexual Counselling

RELATE's marital and sexual counselling generates ethical issues relating to the welfare of client couples and to the policy and public profile of the organisation itself. These issues are interactive and create a unique context within which volunteer counsellors work. Clients' private lives and relationships remain the prime focus of that work, but special attention is paid to the private aspects of relationships which impinge on the realities and the obligations of social living.     

Assimilation in American Life: An Empirical Assessment of Milton Gordon’s Multi-dimensional Theory

This study empirically assesses Milton Gordon's theory of interrelated stages of assimilation. I focus on one small but salient religious minority—American Jews—to show how structural assimilation is associated with other dimensions of assimilation: marital, identification, and behavior reception. Findings from multivariate analyses suggest that structural assimilation encourages Jews to marry non-Jews. Such a marriage composition has become a major determinant of identificational assimilation, with non-Jewish social relationships having important if somewhat weaker association with group identification. Social and economic attainments are moderate factors of identificational behavior that may sometimes strengthen, rather than weaken, religio-ethnic identification. The various components of structural assimilation are not significant for reception assimilation. The findings are discussed in relation to the functionalism concept, in connection with the more recent literature on immigration and assimilation and in view of the changing social context of America in the second half of the twentieth century from the dominance of the melting pot ethos to cultural pluralism.     

Marital Therapy Caught Between Person and Public: Christian Traditions on Marriage

This article addresses a crisis in marital therapy caught between concern for individual well-being and marriage as a social institution. Marital therapy would be enriched by conversation with three models of marriage: Roman Catholic subsidiarity theory, Protestant covenant view, and liberation theology and corresponding languages of social goods, covenant, and mutual responsibility. The authors urge therapists to see marriage as private and social at the same time and to help couples explore the meaning of marital commitment, the connection between personal well-being and marriage's wider social goods, and the dynamics of shared power and radical mutuality in marriage.     

Marital Functioning and Physical Health: Implications for Social and Personality Psychology

Marriage – the most important adult relationship in most people’s lives – has been theorized to affect biological processes, physical health, and mortality. This article highlights key findings in marriage and health research, focusing on the interpersonal processes through which marriage has been proposed to affect health. A model of marriage and health is presented that incorporates both main and stress-moderating effects of negative marital experiences –marital strain– and positive marital experiences –marital strength. Although many more studies have investigated marital strain than marital strength, current evidence suggests that both have potent effects on biology and health. The article concludes with a discussion of implications of this research for social and personality psychology, focusing on insights that may be gained from basic relationship science. Examples of three areas of relationship research – intimacy processes, commitment processes, and dyadic analysis – and their potential relevance for marriage and health research are presented.     

Family Secrets:

Family secrets are examined in a two-part article. Part I explores the dynamics of secrets in the relational context. Terminology is proposed for different types of family secrets as well as for different roles within the relational context. Guidelines for identifying family secrets are presented, and typical patterns accompanying or underlying secrets are explored. Different stances toward secrets are discussed, with particular emphasis on ethical issues. Finally, individual and relational consequences of secrets are proposed. Part II extends this discussion to the management of family secrets in marital and family therapy. Ethical and strategic dilemmas facing the therapist are examined as are consequences of secrets in treatment. A particular therapeutic stance is recommended and illustrated with examples of both reparative and preventive applications.