Authoritarianism and arranged marriage in Bangladesh and Korea

The relationships between authoritarianism and attitudes about arranged marriage were studied in Bangladesh and Korea. According to regression analyses (N = 417), authoritarianism was positively related to support for arranged marriages in closed-ended and open-ended responses. Authoritarianism was also negatively related to open-ended discussions about the importance of love in selecting a partner and in the importance of emotional connection in establishing a relationship. Replicating prior results from the US on women, authoritarianism was related to desires to marry individuals who were gender-typed, traditional, and with narrow interests. Despite some differences in patterns of relationships due to gender and country of origin, the findings support the general hypothesis that authoritarians are invested in maintaining the traditions of their culture.     

Understanding marital conflict 7 years later from prenatal representations of marriage

We examine how representations of marriage, assessed prenatally, predict different types of marital conflict (cooperation, avoidance/capitulation, stonewalling, and child involvement in parental conflict) at 7 years postpartum (N=132 individuals). We assessed representations of marriage prenatally by interviewing spouses about their own parents' marriage, and then rated the content and insightfulness of their memories. Results show that marital representations characterized by higher insight predict higher cooperation and lower child involvement in parental conflict, whereas content of marital representations was not a significant predictor of marital conflict. Further, individuals who remember negative memories from their parents' marriage with high insight were lowest on child involvement in parental conflict, whereas those who remember negative memories with low insight were highest on child involvement in parental conflict. Finally, women who remember negative content with high insight report the highest cooperation, whereas women who remember negative content with low insight report the lowest cooperation. For men, however, marital representations were less effective in predicting later cooperation. We conclude that marital representations, even when assessed prenatally, influence certain types of marital conflict 7 years later. Using such findings, therapists could help spouses gain insight into how the memories of their parents' marriage relate to the use of specific conflict strategies in their marriage.     

Changes in attachment orientations across the transition to parenthood

According to attachment theory, individuals should experience changes in attachment orientations (styles) if they encounter experiences or events that strongly reinforce or directly contradict the major concerns of their existing orientations. Systematic changes should be most evident across stressful life transitions. Wives and husbands expecting their first child completed scales measuring their attachment orientations along with perceptions of themselves, their spouses, and their marriage both 6 weeks before and 6 months after childbirth. As predicted, women became more ambivalent across the transition if they entered parenthood perceiving less spousal support and more spousal anger, with perceptions of anger having stronger impact. Women who entered parenthood seeking less spousal support and those whose husbands were higher in avoidance became more avoidant across the transition. Men who perceived themselves as providing more prenatal support to their wives became less avoidant. These results extend attachment theory and research in novel directions.     

Forgiveness and Religious Faith in Roman Catholic Married Couples

Roman Catholic couples (130 couples, ages 24–84), at three churches in a suburban town in the southern U.S., completed a section of the Family Forgiveness Scale and the Santa Clara Strength of Religious Faith Questionnaire. The factor structure and loadings of forgiveness items differed from those previously reported. Levels of faith and forgiveness were similar between husbands and wives. Faith was correlated with most forgiveness dimensions, and faith and some aspects of forgiveness were related to duration of marriage.     

Who is having more and better sex? The Big Five as predictors of sex in marriage

Prior research has been somewhat inconsistent in demonstrating links between personality and sexual functioning. We pooled the data from three independent daily-diary studies of newlywed couples to examine the association between individuals’ Big Five traits and the probability of sex on a given day; we also pooled the data from the two studies that assessed satisfaction with sex to examine the association between these traits and individuals’ satisfaction with sex when it occurred. Couples with wives high in agreeableness engaged in more frequent sex. Husbands low in openness or neuroticism and wives low in neuroticism reported increased satisfaction with sex when it occurred. Partner personality was unrelated to satisfaction with sex when it occurred.     

Can Spouses Provide Knowledge of Each Other's Communication Patterns? A Study of Self‐Reports,Spouses' Reports,and Observational Coding

The purposes of this study were (1) to assess individuals' self-reports of communication and their reports about their spouses' communication in order to examine the congruence of spousal views and (2) to investigate whether each report provided unique information about observed marital interactions. These associations were evaluated in a sample of 119 longtime married couples. The Verbal Aggression and Cooperation subscales from the Conflicts and Problem-Solving Scales were used as measures of negative and positive aspects of communication. The findings indicated that self-reports of both verbal aggression and cooperation were strongly associated with the same individual's report of his or her spouse's verbal aggression and cooperation. Conversely, self-reports were only moderately associated with reports made by spouses (e.g., the husband's report of his wife's communication). Hence, within-reporter agreement was higher than between-reporter agreement about marital communication. When entered into regression models, reports made by spouses, but not self-reports, explained unique variance in observations of marital hostility and affection. There was one exception: Wife self-report of verbal aggression explained unique variance in coders' ratings of wife hostility, controlling for husband report of wife verbal aggression. Findings indicate the importance of assessing partners' views of one another's communication for the most accurate portrayal of marital interactions. Implications for research and clinical work are discussed.     

Reflexivity in life design interventions: Comments on life and career design dialogues

Papers published in the Symposium on Reflexivity in Life Design Interventions show that narrative innovation develops from a focus on structuring the past to increased engagement in projecting some future prospects. Counselees are energized by the interventions: They become more self-determining. All operations involved in the interventions (basically: telling someone about different life elements identified by the person as important because they are emotionally invested) allows a passage from emotion to cognition (or more precisely: a passage from a felt - emotional - temporal continuity to an expressed temporal continuity), which determines a meaning of life for the concerned person (or a meaning of a fraction of his/her life). The dialogic interactions at work in counseling interventions appear to be the fundamental factor that fostered reflexivity and led to these changes: the situation of dialogical counseling - because of its specific characteristics - stimulates the use of cognitive processes of interpretation, which appear to be the key factor determining the changes.     

Couples Work in Cultural Context: Te Ao Māori and Poststucturalist Practices Informing Counselor Training in Aotearoa New Zealand

This article outlines key themes that appear in the teaching of poststructuralist ideas and practices for couples counseling within the Postgraduate Diploma in Counseling Program at Unitec Institute of Technology in Auckland, New Zealand, and it explores the congruence of this pedagogical approach with Māori (indigenous) understandings of relationality, collaboration, and partnership. The diploma program's curriculum includes narrative therapy and relational language‐making. Themes explored in this article include: understanding (heterosexual) couple relationships as contextualized entities, deconstructing dominant discourses of coupledom, and the positioning of counselors/teachers as nonexpert. Taking each theme in turn, the authors, one of them Māori and two Pākehā (European), articulate points of alignment with Māori cultural concepts and practices.     

Perspectives actuelles du conseil psychologique en orientation

The relation between psychology as a discipline and career counseling has always been difficult to precisely define in France. Sometimes they are considered as very close; sometimes they are seen as independent. The history of career counseling is full of this ambivalent relationship. Nowadays, current transformations in organizations and in the world of work, together with an increasing number of counseling demands, bring practitioners and researchers to reconsider this relationship. The present article explores the conditions of a psychological perspective of career counseling in France. The comparison with English speaking contexts serves as a starting point. Practical, theoretical and epistemological issues are explored in order to define propositions concerning a psychological perspective of career counseling in the French context. The strategic professional role of the psychologist is presented as a core competence in the practice of interviews. A holistic perspective, centered on the interaction between the context and the individual, from the point of view of an ecological development of well-being, is described and discussed.