The division of labor in close relationships: An asymmetrical conflict issue

This research addresses couples’reports of their (hypothetical) attempts to maintain or change a gendered division of labor through conflict interactions. Two experiments in which spouses responded to scenarios showed that spouses reported more conflict over the division of housework than conflict over paid work and child care, and that wives more often than husbands desired a change in their spouses’contribution. Spouses reported more wife‐demand/husband‐withdraw than husband‐demand/wife‐withdraw interaction during hypothetical conflict over the division of labor, but only when the wife desired a change in her spouse's contribution. Together, the data imply that wife‐demand/husband‐withdraw interaction is a likely response to the asymmetrically structured conflict situation in which the wife is discontent with her husband's contribution to housework, while her husband wants to maintain the status quo. We further showed that defenders of the status quo were more likely expected to reach their goal than complainants. In the role of complainant, wives were more likely expected to reach their goal than were their husbands, but only when the conflict issue concerned their own gender stereotypical domain (i.e., family work).     

INDUSTRIAL PSYCHOLOGY IN FRANCE

The current status of French industrial psychology is evaluated. Within the social and economic context of contemporary France, varying ideologies and scarce resources have created a gap between applied and academic industrial psychology. Personnel practices and systems and organizational research are noted.     

Need metaphoric comprehension take longer than literal comprehension?

To determine if metaphoric comprehension necessarily depends upon a more complex process than literal comprehension, 120 subjects in six different experiments were asked to code a series of sentences into one of the following logical sentence categories: analytic, synthetic, contradictory, anomalous, and metaphoric. Prior to this task, all subjects were given practice in learning to code examples of each of the various categories. Results of the present set of experiments revealed few systematic differences among the various categories in RT and a high degree of consistency in coding patterns across both the learning and RT phases of the experiments. Although procedural variations introduced for purposes of control produced clear and easily understandable changes in RT, coding patterns were essentially unchanged across the various experiments, suggesting that none of the categories could be considered as logically more basic than any other. The results were discussed in terms of contemporary semantic theory, where it was suggested that metaphoric recognition need not be conceptualized as depending on a more inferential level of semantic processing than literal recognition and that future theories must be more context-sensitive than those currently in fashion.