Book Review: Lost Boys: Why Our Sons Turn Violent and How We Can Save Them,by James Garbarino,Anchor Books, 1999, 274 pp.

The American Journal of Psychoanalysis -     

Seeing bad does good: Relational benefits of accuracy regarding partners’ negative moods

When would greater empathic accuracy (EA) be an asset and when would it not? In two studies of romantic couples (both employing daily diaries, the second also involving a lab-based video-recall paradigm), we explored the associations between EA (at the day-level, person-level, and in the lab) and an important relationship outcome: negative relationship feelings. Our results show that accuracy is tied more strongly to this relational outcome when negative (vs. positive) moods are the target of empathic judgments. The association between accuracy and (better) feelings was true for both perceivers and targets. Importantly, these associations emerged only in diary-based accuracy scores, and not in the lab-based ones. These results further support the importance of everyday empathic accuracy. They also highlight the need to consider such accuracy as multi-faceted, and in particular, to recognize the differential role of attending to our partners’ negative versus positive moods in daily life.     

Contextual Effects on the Gendered Division of Housework: A Cross-Country and Cross-Time Analysis

Individuals who espouse an egalitarian gender ideology as well as economically independent women benefit from a more egalitarian division of housework. Although these two individual-level characteristics affect the gender division of housework, each suggests a different mechanism; the former is anchored within an economic logic and the latter within a cultural one. Using data of 25 countries from the 2002 and 2012 “Family and Changing Gender Roles” modules of the International Social Survey Program, we examine whether a country’s mean gender ideology and women’s labor force participation (WLFP) rate have a distinct contextual effect beyond these individual-level effects. We predict that the division of housework between married or cohabitating partners will be more egalitarian in countries with higher WLFP rates and in countries with more egalitarian attitudes, even after controlling for the two variables at the individual level. Given the cross-country convergence in WLFP, but not in gender ideology, we expect the effect of WLFP to decline over time and the effect of gender ideology to remain salient. Indeed, our multi-level analysis indicates that the net effect of WLFP, which was evident in 2002, had disappeared by 2012. By contrast, the net contextual effect of gender ideology, which was not significant in 2002, had become an important determinant of housework division by 2012. We conclude that further changes will depend on a country’s prevalent gender ideology because the equalizing effect of WLFP on the division of housework may have reached its limit.

     

Centrality and Individual Differences In the Meaning of Dally Hassles

In this study we introduce the concept of centrality in an attempt to assess individual differences in the meaning underlying daily hassles. Central hassles are defined as those which reflect important ongoing themes or problems in the person's life. The characteristics of central hassles, and their role in psychological and somatic health, were assessed in a sample of 150 community-residing men and women. The results indicate that central hassles vary in content from person to person and touch more on problems with personal needs and deficits in coping skills compared to noncentral hassles. The dimension of centrality was found to play a significant role in the prediction of psychological symptoms. Although the empirical case for the importance of centrality in the stress-illness relationship is inconclusive due to problems of confounding and a cross-sectional rather than longitudinal design, the ideas presented appear promising and provide a basis for further research on psychological vulnerability to stress.     

The impact of daily stress on health and mood: psychological and social resources as mediators

This study examined daily stress processes among 75 married couples across 20 assessments during a 6-month period. The somatic and psychological effects of common everyday hassles were investigated. Overall, there was a significant relationship between daily stress and the occurrence of both concurrent and subsequent health problems such as flu, sore throat, headaches, and backaches. The relationship of daily stress to mood disturbance was more complex. The negative effects of stress on mood were limited to a single day, with the following day characterized by mood scores that were better than usual. Furthermore, striking individual differences were found in the extent to which daily stress was associated with health and mood across time. Participants with unsupportive social relationships and low self-esteem were more likely to experience an increase in psychological and somatic problems both on and following stressful days than were participants high in self-esteem and social support. These data suggest that persons with low psychosocial resources are vulnerable to illness and mood disturbance when their stress levels increase, even if they generally have little stress in their lives.     

Transactional theory and research on emotions and coping

In this article we examine the fundamental premises of our cognitive-relational theory of emotion and coping and assess our progress in examining them through 10 years of programmatic empirical research. Our discussion involves the metatheoretical topics of transaction and relationship, process, and emotion as a system. The person-environment relationship is mediated by two key processess: cognitive appraisal and coping. We evaluate the findings of our research on these processes, their dynamic interplay, their antecedents, and their short-term and long-term outcomes. In the final section we highlight major substantive and methodological issues that need to be addressed. These include issues surrounding the theory and measurement of appraisal, functional and dysfunctional coping, causal inference, microanalytic vs macroanalytic research strategies, objective vs subjective approaches and confounding, and the problem of method variance.     

Stress processes and the misuse of drugs in older adults

There is increasing concern about the misuse of drugs among the elderly. We assessed misuse, including drug usage, drug interactions across pharmacologic classes, and multiple drugs in the same pharmacologic class, in a community sample of 65 to 74-year-olds, and evaluated its relation to stress and coping processes and psychological and somatic health. Assessments were made repeatedly over a 6-month period. Results indicated that misuse was multidimensional and widespread. Misusers did not differ from nonmisusers on antecedent psychosocial variables, nor did they report more hassles or cope differently than nonmisusers. However, misusers and nonmisusers differed on their subjective experience of stressful encounters; misusers experienced their hassles as more intense, and they experienced more threat emotions and more dissatisfaction with their coping than did nonmisusers. Misuse was also associated with long-term psychological satisfaction, psychological symptoms, and somatic health.     

Age differences in stress and coping processes

The dramatic increase in the numbers of people who are living into old age has been accompanied by a growing interest among psychologists and health care professionals in their sources of stress and how they cope with them. Despite this interest, little is known about normative stress and coping patterns and the ways in which these patterns differ in older and younger people. This study, which draws on stress and coping theory, compares younger and older community-dwelling adults in daily hassles and eight kinds of coping. Two interpretations of age differences are evaluated: a developmental interpretation, which says that there are inherent, stage-related changes in the ways people cope as they age, and a contextual interpretation, which says that age differences in coping result from changes in what people must cope with. The findings indicate that there are clear age differences in hassles and coping. Overall, the findings tend to support the developmental interpretation, although the contextual interpretation also applies.