REDUCED-HOURS JOB-ROLE QUALITY AND LIFE SATISFACTION AMONG MARRIED WOMEN PHYSICIANS WITH CHILDREN

Interest in reduced-hours career options has been sparked by recent studies indicating an increase in the work week, especially among professional and managerial employees, a preference among all employees to reduce work hours substantially, and the perception that the absence of reduced-hours career options is an obstacle to professional advancement. Interest has also been fueled by the growing numbers of dual-earner couples whose ability to manage work/family demands might be facilitated by reduced-hours options. Yet, the belief that part-time work is associated with beneficial health effects has received scant empirical support. Building on prior research with full-time employees, we hypothesized that the quality of the experience of working reduced hours would better predict life satisfaction than would work hours per sc. This hypothesis, which we tested in a sample of female reduced-hours physicians with children in two-earner couples, was supported.     

GENDER AND THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN MARITAL-ROLE QUALITY AND PSYCHOLOGICAL DISTRESS

In this paper, we estimate the association between marital-role quality and psychological distress in a sample of 300 full-time employed women and men in dual-earner couples. We control for such individual-level variables as age, education, occupational prestige, and job-role quality, and for such couple-level variables as length of marriage, parental status, and household income. We then compare the magnitude of this effect for men and for women and for parents and nonparents. Results indicate that in dual-earner couples marital-role quality is signifycantly negatively associated with psychological distress for women as well as men and that the magnitude of the effect depends little, if at all, on gender or on parental status. These findings challenge the view that marital experiences more significantly influence women's mental health states than men's. The results are discussed in the context of identity theory.     

Daylight and darkness: Images of Christians in mixed marriages

Marriage between Christians and non-Christians has generally been regarded with suspicion by the churches, and has at times been severely punished. However, mixed marriage has also sometimes been seen as a means by which the non-Christian partner may be drawn into the faith. In this article I review some of the underlying reasons for these attitudes and the theological concepts of marriage which informed those responsible for its regulation. I focus particularly on the issues and images surrounding religious intermarriage in the early Church and during the medieval period, with special reference to legends and literature.     

Beyond Midlife and Before Retirement: A Short-Term Women’s Group

As women move into the second half of life and towards retirement, they may experience many changes and transitions, including in health, relationships, career choices, and spirituality. Some of those changes can be distressing, such as serious health problems for themselves or their families, increased isolation, multiple losses of important people, feelings of uselessness and lack of a meaningful role, and growing questions or struggles around spirituality. Time is often seen as moving faster and increasingly limited. This short-term group offers an opportunity for women to reflect upon issues of identity, values, choices, desires, and hopes regarding relationships, work and other activities, spirituality, and health to create new visions. We describe an integrated theoretical framework that includes existentialism, mindfulness, adult development, object relations, attachment, and relational cultural therapy. We discuss the group’s underlying assumptions in terms of its short-term and semi-structured nature and its format, and suggest exercises, with examples highlighting important learning and/or group interaction. Finally, we address the need for more intensive psychotherapy, outliers, ensuring participation, and our own responses.     

Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder symptoms in an adult sample: Associations with Cloninger’s temperament and character dimensions

Relationships between C.R. Cloninger’s temperament and character dimensions and the Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) symptoms of inattention (IA) and hyperactivity/impulsivity (HI) were examined in 231 adults from the general population. Regression analyses that predicated overall ADHD, IA and HI by the seven temperament/character dimensions revealed: IA was predicted positively by Harm Avoidance and negatively by Self-Directedness; HI was predicted positively by Persistence; and overall ADHD was predicted negatively by Self-Directedness. These findings are also interpreted in terms of current theories of ADHD, and the related original and revised versions of Gray’s reinforcement sensitivity theory (RST) of personality.     

The role of sleep in changing our minds: a psychologist's discussion of papers on memory reactivation and consolidation in sleep

The group of papers on memory reactivation and consolidation during sleep included in this volume represents cutting edge work in both animals and humans. They support that the two types of sleep serve different necessary functions. The role of slow wave sleep (SWS) is reactivation of the hippocampal-neocortical circuits activated during a waking learning period, while REM sleep is responsible for the consolidation of this new learning into long-term memory. These studies provide further insights into mechanisms involved in brain plasticity. Robeiro has demonstrated the upregulation of an immediate-early gene (IEG zif 268) to waking levels, which occurs only in REM and only in connection with new learning. McNaughton and his group have identified electrical indicators that the hippocampus and neocortex are talking to each other by testing the coactivation of hippocampal sharp wave bursts in SWS and shifts from down to up states of activation in the neocortex. In human studies Smith's group reports work on individual differences such as intelligence and presleep alcohol that affect postsleep performance, and Stickgold and collaborators report that a short nap will improve performance if it contains REM sleep. Payne and Nadel suggest that the recall benefit associated with REM sleep may be due to its association with increased cortisol levels. These papers are important not only in their individual contributions but also in revitalizing the work coordinating waking and sleep. This promises to further the understanding of how our unique capacity to learn from experience and modify our behavior takes place.     

Memory for medical history: Accuracy of recall

Medical diagnosis often depends on the ability of patients to recall and report their medical history. In this study 104 people kept health diaries for 3 months, recording the incidence, frequency, data, duration, and severity of health events (symptoms, illnesses, injuries, visits to health professionals, and medication). Memory for the events recorded was tested immediately after the diary-keeping period or at 1 month or 3 months later. Effects of age, gender, education, health status, anxiety, and retention interval were observed. With a free recall procedure only 47 per cent of health events were recalled. Following the free recall two different kinds of intervention were compared. Use of a recognition checklist yielded recall of 29 per cent of the forgotten events but with a cognitive interview procedure only 6 per cent of the forgotten items were retrieved.     

Adolescent decision-making: Giving weight to age-specific values

Adults who give proxy consent for medical treatment for adolescents must decide how much weight to give to adolescents' own preferences. There is evidence that some adolescents choose treatments different from what adults see as most reasonable. It is argued that adolescents choose according to age-specific values, i.e. values they hold, as adolescents, and which fulfil important developmental needs. Because not fulfilling these needs may do serious psychological damage, it is urged that proxies give weight to these values, up to the limit where it would endanger or profoundly limit future life.A very brief version of this article has been published as Chapter 3 of Forman EN, Ladd RE.Ethical Dilemmas in Pediatrics: A Case Study Approach. New York: Springer-Verlag. 1991, reprinted by University Press of America, 1995.     

Private wishes: Gender similarities and differences

Preference for a variety of “private wishes” were investigated in two studies. In Study 1, two college samples and two samples of pedestrians selected 10 out of a list of 48 wishes. In Study 2, two college samples rated 20 wishes. Although ethnicity data were not gathered, the populations from which the samples were drawn are ethnically diverse. Correlations of preferences between women and men within samples averaged .86 in Study 1 and .85 in Study 2, indicating a great deal of similarity between genders in their overall wish preferences. By far, the largest gender difference was for the wish “To have sex with anyone I choose.” Men consistently preferred this wish across all samples and age groups. These results point to sexuality in its interpersonal context as a primary focus of difference in the inner emotional lives of women and men.     

Forgetting in recognition memory with and without recollective experience

Retention interval was manipulated in two recognition-memory experiments in which subjects indicated when recognizing a word whether its recognition was accompanied by some recollective experience ("remember") or whether it was recognized on the basis of familiarity without any recollective experience ("know"). Experiment 1 showed that between 10 min and 1 week, "remember" responses declined sharply from an initially higher level, whereas "know" responses remained relatively unchanged. Experiment 2 showed that between 1 week and 6 months, both kinds of responses declined at a similar, gradual rate and that despite quite low levels of performance after 6 months, both kinds of responses still gave rise to accurate discrimination between target words and lures. These findings are discussed in relationship to current ideas about multiple memory systems and processing accounts of explicit and implicit measures of retention.