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).     

INTERRATER CORRELATIONS DO NOT ESTIMATE THE RELIABILITY OF JOB PERFORMANCE RATINGS

Interrater correlations are widely interpreted as estimates of the reliability of supervisory performance ratings, and are frequently used to correct the correlations between ratings and other measures (e.g., test scores) for attenuation. These interrater correlations do provide some useful information, but they are not reliability coefficients. There is clear evidence of systematic rater effects in performance appraisal, and variance associated with raters is not a source of random measurement error. We use generalizability theory to show why rater variance is not properly interpreted as measurement error, and show how such systematic rater effects can influence both reliability estimates and validity coefficients. We show conditions under which interrater correlations can either overestimate or underestimate reliability coefficients, and discuss reasons other than random measurement error for low interrater correlations.     

The Given Regained. Reflections on the Sensuous Content of Experience

The major part of our beliefs and our knowledge of the world is based on, or grounded in, sensory experience. But, how is it that we can have perceptual beliefs that things are thus and so, and, moreover, be justified in having them? What conditions must experience satisfy to rationally warrant, and not merely to cause, our beliefs? Against the currently very popular contention that experience itself already has to be propositionally and conceptually structured, I will rehabilitate the claim that there is given element in experience which is independent of thought and which is possessed of a distinctive nonpropositional and nonconceptual content. Further, I will argue that this given element is indeed fit to play a significant evidential role in the justification of our beliefs about the world.     

Psychoanalysis and change: Between curiosity and faith1

The IPA recently announced that it now recognized three sessions per week as a valid frequency for psychoanalytic treatment. From the debate that has ensued over the problems this decision is expected to cause, important insights can be gained into the current crisis of identity affl icting psychoanalysis. Technical aspects of therapy that were once considered peripheral have gradually acquired the status of core theoretical parameters. Freud was a man of science who was concerned with universal human phenomena. His disagreements with followers such as Jung and Adler centred on the major theoretical issues of the sexual nature of the libido and the existence of the unconscious. It is also interesting to note that Freud never distinguished between psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy. Where he did make a distinction, it was between psychoanalysis and the consciousness‐based psychotherapies, or those that used suggestion as a major tool. When the point has been reached where the frequency of sessions or the use of a couch is used to defi ne whether a treatment is psychoanalytic, some consideration of whether the right direction is being pursued is called for. A serious risk is being run of sacrifi cing our spirit of curiosity for the sake of tradition, becoming more concerned with repeating the formal aspects of practice than with the real purpose of psychoanalysis, the investigation of the most profound workings of human nature.