Social representations of aggression: Crossing the sex barrier

Controversy over Moscovici's concept of social representations has focused upon the extent to which they can be viewed as enduring cognitive structures characterizing social groups and whether individual members are ‘prisoners’ of their social representations, unable to duplicate the social representations of other social groups. Previous research has established a consistent gender difference in orientation toward aggression with men viewing it as an instrumental act of coercion and women as a temporary loss of self-control. These two social representations, originally recovered from spontaneous conversation, have been measured with a psychometric instrument called Expagg. To examine the mutability of these representations, men and women in the present study were asked to complete the questionnaire either spontaneously or as they believed a member of the opposite sex might respond. Under conditions of same-sex responding the usual significant sex difference appeared. When asked to respond as a member of the opposite sex, men accurately mirrored women's higher expressive total score on the questionnaire but psychometric analysis revealed that there was no similarity in terms of item–total correlations. Women grossly overestimated the degree of men's instrumentality but item–total total correlations revealed a considerable degree of similarity with men's structure. The male representation whether natural or assumed showed higher internal consistency than did the female mode. The results are discussed in terms of differential modes of access to gender-linked representations and the cultural dominance of a masculine and instrumental representation of aggression.     

Distress and aggression during dating conflict: A test of the coercion hypothesis

Research with clinically depressed and maritally discordant couples suggests that women's distressed behaviors function to suppress their partners' subsequent aggressive responses. We applied this coercion hypothesis to a nonclinical sample of dating couples (N = 288). We further examined whether these effects were gender‐specific, and whether distressed and aggressive behaviors differ within physically violent versus nonviolent relationships. Women but not men reported engaging in elevated rates of distress in response to partner aggression during past dating conflicts. However, both women and men expected distressed behavior to suppress partner aggression during future conflicts. Expectations about the functional effects of distressed behavior did not differ for participants with physically violent partners versus nonviolent partners. However, participants in violent relationships reported enacting more distressed behaviors and had greater expectations for partner verbal aggression during future conflicts than did participants in nonviolent relationships. Future research may identify the early onset of dysfunctional interaction patterns in couples and concomitant psychological distress.     

CHEMISTRY AND CONTAINING: THE ANALYST'S USE OF UNAVOIDABLE FAILURES

Certain patients overwhelm the analyst's capacity to contain both the patient and the analyst's own unbearable feelings. Though some such failures of containing may lead fairly quickly to self‐correction and others to clinical impasse, our focus is on an in‐between state in which the analyst's ability to tolerate his inevitable failures and gradually to (re)establish his containing capacities through difficult self‐analytic work can lead to significant change that might not otherwise be possible. The authors argue that this internal psychological work on the analyst's part, which may require considerable time, effort, and suffering, is an important aspect of “good enough” containing. The unique chemistry generated between patient and analyst plays an important role in both establishing and maintaining this kind of productive analytic process.