Parental marital conflict and divorce,parent–child relationships,and social support among Latino‐American young adults

Based on research documenting the harmful consequences of parental conflict and divorce, this self‐report study examined parental conflict, divorce, and social outcomes of Latino‐American young adults. Undergraduate students (N = 431) from divorced and intact families completed measures of parental conflict, quality of parent–adult child relationships, and perceptions of social support. As hypothesized, conflict was associated with poorer parent–adult child relationships, divorce was associated with poorer father–adult child relationships and higher quality mother–adult child relationships, and quality of relationships with parents was positively related to perceived social support. Contrary to expectations, perceptions of social support were not related to parental conflict. Results are discussed in terms of features of Latino families, including extended family networks as important sources of social support.     

PERSONALITY MEASURES AND BIODATA: EVIDENCE REGARDING THEIR INCREMENTAL PREDICTIVE VALUE IN THE LIFE INSURANCE INDUSTRY

This study examines the extent to which a theoretically based set of personality measures can add incremental validity to an existing biodata instrument in terms of predicting both traditional (task) and expanded (contextual) dimensions of performance in the life insurance industry. Four of the Big Five measures of personality predicted contextual performance while just the Extraversion scale predicted task performance. This study demonstrates that personality measures can provide significant incremental prediction of contextual performance over biodata, and vice versa.     

Reported Practices of Creative Problem Solving Facilitators

This study reviews the distinguishing characteristics of successful creative problem solving (CPS) facilitators and provides advice on ways to develop these characteristics. Thirty-seven facilitators were interviewed about their successful use of creative problem solving. These individuals include full-time employees of organizations as well as consultants that were hired by a variety of organizations. The data colleced contained self-reports of effectiveness. No attempt was made to verify the facilitators claims of “success” in facilitation. From the interviews, the characteristics were identified and categorized by logical analysis. These findings were then researched in the literature. The final product was organized around the acronym FACILITATOR. Several synonyms were used to describe characteristics, but the content was not changed for the sake of organization.     

Levels of Meaning in Family Stress Theory

Major stressful life events, particularly those that have chronic hardships, create a crisis for families that often leads to reorganization in the family's style of functioning. A major factor in this reorganization is the meaning the family gives to the stressful event. Often the meaning extends beyond the event itself and leads to a changed view of the family system and even to a changed view of the world. Building on other family stress models, we elaborate the family's definition of the stressor into three levels of family meanings: (1) situational meanings, (2) family identity, and (3) family world view. Examples from clinical work and studies of families adapting to chronic illness are used to illustrate the relationship between these three levels of meaning, particularly as they change in response to crisis. Implications for clinical and empirical work are discussed.     

Perceived benefits and costs of romantic relationships for women and men: Implications for exchange theory

This investigation examined the perceived benefits and costs of romantic (i.e., reciprocal dating) relationships. In Study 1, subjects provided open-ended reports regarding the benefits and costs associated with romantic involvement. Different groups of subjects ranked (Study 2) and rated (Study 3) these benefits and costs for importance. Companionship, happiness, and feeling loved or loving another were among the most important benefits accompanying romantic involvement. The most serious costs included stress and worry about the relationship, social and nonsocial sacrifices, and increased dependence on the partner. Compared to males, females regarded intimacy, self-growth, self-understanding, and positive self-esteem as more important benefits, and regarded loss of identity and innocence about relationships and love as more important costs Alternatively, males regarded sexual gratification as a more important benefit, and monetary losses as a more serious cost than did females Implications for exchange theory are highlighted.     

Chuck Warnath: Visionary Gadfly of Professional Counseling

Charles F. “Chuck” Warnath, professor emeritus and former university counseling center director, was interviewed about his personal life, early training with Donald Super, counseling center experiences, convictions about professional counseling, dedication to issues of equality, and current struggles with the progressive effects of retinitis pigmentosa.     

Social cliques as mental models

The present research investigates how a mental model derived from patterns of sentiment relations (mental clique model) interacts with social background information (membership in social categories). Testing memory for a set of sentiment relations, the data support the assumption that a strongly polarizing categorization interferes with a mental clique model derived from the learning of these sentiment relations. Such interference was claimed to occur whenever sentiment implications from the social categorization would contradict information contained in the mental clique model. In line with this reasoning, balanced triads were selectively impaired in memory as opposed to relations from unbalanced triads which did not allow construction of any clique model and which were not influenced by category interference.     

On the difficulty of distinguishing “good” and “poor” perceivers: A social relations analysis of empathic accuracy data

Two studies were conducted to explore the reasons why replicable individual‐difference correlates of empathic accuracy have proved so difficult to find. In Study 1, we examined sources of variance in empathic accuracy data using the Social Relations Model (Kenny, 1988, 1994; Kenny & Albright, 1987; Malloy & Kenny, 1986). The results revealed substantial perceiver variance only in the type of research design in which a relatively large set of individual perceivers inferred the thoughts and feelings of the same set of target persons. In Study 2, we found evidence that even in this apparently optimal type of research design, the significant individual‐difference correlates of empathic accuracy were fewer and subject to more unexpected qualifications than the results of Davis and Kraus's (1997) meta‐analysis would suggest. So far, the “best candidate” predictor of empathic accuracy appears to be verbal intelligence, but it remains to be seen whether it and two other recently proposed predictors of interpersonal accuracy will survive the test of replicability.