Book review; Wendy Farley,Eros for the Other: Retaining Truth in a Pluralistic World.

International Journal for Philosophy of Religion -     

Parent–offspring similarity in personality and adolescents' problem behaviour

Similarity in personality between adolescents and their parents may have considerable implications for adolescent well‐being. We studied how the similarity in personality between 288 adolescents and their parents is linked to adolescent problem behaviour, and whether this link is mediated by warmth and control in the parent–child relationship and moderated by the personality type of the adolescent. Similarity in personality between adolescents and their parents was negatively related to internalizing and externalizing problem behaviour, both concurrently and over time. This relation was not mediated by the parent–child relationship. The effects were present for overcontrolled but not for resilient or undercontrolled adolescents. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The role of maltreatment experience in children's understanding of the antecedents of emotion

The ability to understand the causes and likely triggers of emotions has important consequences for children's adaptation to their social environment. Yet, little is currently known about the processes that contribute to the development of emotion understanding. To assess how well children understood the antecedents of emotional reactions in others, we presented children with a variety of emotional situations that varied in outcome and equivocality. Children were told the emotional outcome and asked to rate whether a situation was a likely cause of such an outcome. We tested the effects of maltreatment experience on children's ability to map emotions to their eliciting events and their understanding of emotion–situation pairings. The present data suggest that typically developing children are able to distinguish between common elicitors of negative and positive events. In contrast, children who develop within maltreating contexts, where emotions are extreme and inconsistent, interpret positive, equivocal, and negative events as being equally plausible causes of sadness and anger. This difference in maltreated children's reasoning about emotions suggests a critical role of experience in aiding children's mastery of the structure of interpersonal discourse.