The role of stressful events in the relationship between positive and negative affects: evidence from field and experimental studies

Three studies are presented that examine the effects of stress on the relationship between positive and negative affective states. In the first study, recently bereaved and disabled older adults were compared to matched control groups without these recent stressors. Negative affect was inversely correlated with positive affect to a significantly greater extent for the highly stressed groups compared with controls. In a second study, older adults were exposed to a laboratory stressor, and their positive and negative affective reactions recorded. Immediately following a speech stressor task, the inverse correlation between positive and negative affect was significantly greater than in pre- and postassessments of affects. The third study was an attempt to replicate and extend the findings from Study 2 with a mid-aged sample of women. The speech stressor had the same effects as in Study 2. A second stressor, which induced pain through immersion of an arm into cold water, had no effects on the correlation between affective states. Alternative explanations for these effects and the implications for cognitive interventions are discussed.     

A brief report of women's expectations of men's behaviour in the transition to parenthood: Contradictions and conflicts for counselling psychology practice

Couples often seek counselling in the first year following the birth of a baby. The role and image of active fatherhood has affected women's expectations that their male partners will engage in baby/child care and other domestic activities. This pilot study of women undergoing the transition to motherhood within a heterosexual couple relationship indicates that women's expectations and men's ‘promises' and media images of fatherhood do not coincide with behaviour and that this causes and amplifies stress in the relationship. Counselling psychologists often focus upon the woman's involvement with the baby or lack of partner support as the main problematic dimension in the couple's well-being. It is suggested here, from the findings summarized, that more research needs to be done on the mismatch between changing attitudes to fathering and the impact of the consequent, apparently false expectations of men's behaviour in the early years of parenthood.     

Is domestic violence a gender issue? Views from a British city1

Domestic violence involves the abuse, whether emotional, physical, sexual and/or economic, of one or more family (or ex‐family) members by another family member within the home or wider domestic context. It is typically associated with increasing entrapment, injury, medical complaints, psycho‐social problems and (sometimes) unsuccessful help‐seeking. Research evidence demonstrates that domestic abuse is prolific, prolonged, impacts physically, emotionally and economically upon women and children in particular, over the long‐term including well after they are ‘safe’ from the perpetrator. Furthermore, such abuse is widespread and happens all over the world. The findings reported here are from an observational population survey conducted in one British city to assess awareness of domestic violence. While there appears to be a broadly held and well‐informed definition of what actions constitute domestic violence and why it occurs, there are striking differences in perspective concerning public awareness of the frequency of domestic violence and knowledge of its importance as a safety issue indicating that it is still not seen generally as a serious social problem. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Counselling women with post natal depression: Implications from recent qualitative research

This paper explores the role of the counselling psychologist with women who experience post natal depression. Traditionally post natal depression has been identified as a clinical condition, and the woman referred for psychiatric assessment; or it is seen as the result of stressful childbirth and associated events, and the woman is offered treatment by her GP or referred to a post natal support group. A recent study suggests that some degree of depression following childbirth is ‘normal’, and that far from being a clinical condition, its origins appear to be located in the context of problematic relationships (in both domestic and obstetric settings) as well as in women's expectations and inadequate preparation for childbirth and early motherhood. These expectations seem to be embedded in female psychology and wider cultural values. Women appear to be prepared for the fact that they will bear and mother children, but not the experience of motherhood itself, and consequent changes in identity and relationships are rarely made explicit. This study suggests that childbirth and the early months of motherhood (even for second and third children) are likely to precipitate some degree of depression in most women, and that this depression appears to be reactive rather than determined by individual pathology. Further, the experience of becoming a mother (each time) equates with a model of loss and bereavement, suggesting a very specific role for the counselling psychologist.     

Automaticity: a new framework for dyslexia research?

The performance of a group of 23 13-year-old dyslexic children was compared with that of same-age controls on a battery of tests of motor balance. A dual-task paradigm was used--subjects performed each test twice, once as a single task, and once as a dual task concurrently with a secondary task. Two alternative secondary tasks were used, the classic counting-backwards task and an auditory choice reaction task. Both secondary tasks were calibrated for each subject to ensure that their performance on the secondary task alone fell between pre-specified performance criteria. In all single-task conditions there was no difference between the performance of the two groups. By contrast, in 19 out of the 20 tests performed under dual-task conditions, the dyslexic group were significantly impaired, whereas the controls showed no impairment, thus resulting in significantly better performance by the control group than the dyslexic group. The sole exception was that the dyslexic children were not impaired on the easiest balance condition with the choice reaction task. Under the dual-task conditions the dyslexic children also performed worse than the controls on the secondary task. It is very hard to accommodate the findings within the traditional framework of a deficit specific to lexical skills. One plausible explanation of the results is that, unlike the controls, the dyslexic children need to invest significant conscious resources for monitoring balance, and thus their performance is adversely affected by any secondary task which serves to distract attention from the primary task. This need for "conscious compensation" suggests that for dyslexic children the skill of motor balance is poorly automatized. It is possible, therefore, that many of the reading deficits of dyslexic children are merely symptoms of a more general learning deficit--the failure to fully automatize skills.     

Automatisation deficits in balance for dyslexic children.

Traditional theories of dyslexia have focused on components of the reading process. The Dyslexic Automatisation Deficit hypothesis takes a broader view, attributing deficits to an inability to become completely fluent in cognitive and motor skills. A series of experiments compared the balance of 15-yr.-old and 11-yr.-old groups of dyslexic children and normal children matched for age and IQ under single-task and dual-task conditions. There were no group differences in the single-task conditions. However, introduction of a concurrent secondary task led to a dissociation in that, whereas the balance of normal children was unaffected, the dyslexic children's balance was significantly impaired. It was concluded that the normal children balanced automatically whereas the dyslexic children did not. These results directly support the proposed framework.     

Evaluation of a brief multiple-stimulus preference assessment in a naturalistic context

We evaluated a brief multiple-stimulus preference assessment within the context of an early intervention program for 3 children who had been diagnosed with autism. Subsequent curriculum-based reinforcer evaluations confirmed the predictions of the preference assessments. In addition, eight additional preference assessments that were conducted over a period of 1 month indicated generally stable preferences for 2 of the 3 participants.     

Changes in affect interrelations as a function of stressful events

This paper examines the proposition that stress shrinks affective space, increasing the inverse correlation between positive affect (PA) and negative affect (NA). The experience sampling method was used to record the levels of PA and NA and stress reported by white-collar employees 10 times a day for 5 days. These data were subjected to hierarchical linear modelling to determine whether the relationship between affective states becomes increasingly inverse as a function of stress, as predicted by Zautra, Potter, and Reich (1997). Caution was taken to address measurement issues that have been raised in recent debates over the independence of PA and NA, and a contingency analysis was also used to supplement the linear modelling approach. Both types of analyses revealed evidence consistent with the hypothesis that the degree to which PA and NA are inversely related varies with the level of stress.