The Uses of Emotion Maps in Research and Clinical Practice with Families and Couples: Methodological Innovation and Critical Inquiry

We explore how “emotion maps” can be productively used in clinical assessment and clinical practice with families and couples. This graphic participatory method was developed in sociological studies to examine everyday family relationships. Emotion maps enable us to effectively “see” the dynamic experience and emotional repertoires of family life. Through the use of a case example, in this article we illustrate how emotion maps can add to the systemic clinicians’ repertoire of visual methods. For clinicians working with families, couples, and young people, the importance of gaining insight into how lives are lived, at home, cannot be understated. Producing emotion maps can encourage critical personal reflection and expedite change in family practice. Hot spots in the household become visualized, facilitating dialogue on prevailing issues and how these events may be perceived differently by different family members. As emotion maps are not reliant on literacy or language skills they can be equally completed by parents and children alike, enabling children's perspective to be heard. Emotion maps can be used as assessment tools, to demonstrate the process of change within families. Furthermore, emotion maps can be extended to use through technology and hence are well suited particularly to working with young people. We end the article with a wider discussion of the place of emotions and emotion maps within systemic psychotherapy.     

The Effects of Mother Participation in Relationship Education on Coparenting,Parenting, and Child Social Competence: Modeling Spillover Effects for Low‐Income Minority Preschool Children

Although suggestions are that benefits of relationship and marriage education (RME) participation extend from the interparental relationship with parenting and child outcomes, few evaluation studies of RME test these assumptions and the relationship among changes in these areas. This quasi‐experimental study focuses on a parallel process growth model that tests a spillover hypothesis of program effects and finds, in a sample of low‐income minority mothers with a child attending a Head Start program, that increases in mother reports of coparenting agreement for RME participants predict decreases in their reports of punitive parenting behaviors. Although improvements in parenting behaviors did not predict increases in teacher reports of children's social competence, improvements in coparenting agreement were associated with increases in children's social competence over time. In addition, comparative tests of outcomes between parents in the program and parents in a comparison group reveal that RME program participants (n = 171) demonstrate significant improvements compared to nonparticipants (n = 143) on coparenting agreement, parenting practices, and teachers' reports of preschool children's social competence over a 1 year period. The findings are offered as a step forward in better understanding the experiences of low‐resource participants in RME. Implications for future research are discussed.     

Recoupling in Mid‐Life and Beyond: From Love at Last to Not So Fast

Divorce rates have dropped in the United States, except for couples over 50 where they are rising steeply, along with rates of late‐life recoupling. Both stepcouples and their young adult and adult children in new older stepfamilies are often surprised to find themselves facing many of the same challenges that younger stepfamilies do. Some challenges are even intensified by the decades‐long relationships and additional layers of extended family that come with recoupling after mid‐life. Stepfamilies formed in later life must also negotiate decisions about estate planning and elder care among stakeholders who often have sharply divergent agendas before there is time to establish trusting relationships. This article describes the “normal” challenges facing stepcouples who come together over age 50. It provides evidence‐informed guidance for therapists in meeting these challenges on three levels of clinical work: Psychoeducational, Interpersonal, and Intrapsychic/Intergenerational. As in younger stepfamilies, “family therapy” must usually begin in subsystems—often the adult stepcouple and parent–adult child. The article then describes a particularly fraught subgroup of recouplers: over‐50 fathers and their new partners, where the dad's young adult or adult daughter is very unhappy with his new relationship. In these latter stepfamilies, father–daughter repair must precede stepfamily bonding. Stepfamilies that are preceded by a partner's death and those that begin with affairs are also discussed. Finally, some “easy wrong turns” for therapists are described.     

Marital Interactions,Family Intervention,and Disagreements: A Daily Diary Study in a Low‐income Sample

Little research has examined associations between low‐income married couples’ daily interactions and severity of disagreements. Similarly, few researchers have considered how family‐strengthening interventions for low‐income couples may affect the quality of daily interactions and associations between interactions and conflict experiences. This study aims to fill these gaps in the literature by leveraging daily diary data from a random assignment study of a family‐strengthening intervention with low‐income husbands and wives 30 months postenrollment. Married couples randomly assigned to the intervention participated in 10 weeks of relationship education services. Control group couples received no services. Thirty months postrandom assignment, participants reported on the severity of daily marital disagreements over a 15‐day period, as well as their positive and negative emotions during inter‐spousal interactions. Multi‐level models demonstrated associations between reports of emotions in interactions and severity of disagreements. In addition, wives assigned to the family strengthening program reported fewer negative emotions during interactions at follow‐up than wives in the control condition. Finally, negative associations between positive emotions in interactions and severity of disagreements were stronger for wives assigned to the intervention, while positive associations between negative emotions in interactions and severity of disagreements were weaker for wives assigned to the intervention. Implications for future research and intervention development are discussed.     

Enforced Disappearances and Torture Today: A View from Analytical Psychology

Enforced disappearance represents the quintessence of human rights violations with a strong psychological component. Bodies vanishing have a deterrent effect by terrorizing and paralyzing the entire society. However, the absence of those bodies is overly present in the inner experience of the families of the disappeared, who are victims in their turn. A state of severe psychological deterioration affects the relatives of the disappeared: depression, anxiety, powerlessness, guilt, post-traumatic stress disorder, inability to mourn, even suicide are the consequences of the unbearable uncertainty about the fate of the loved one. But the disappeared persons, notwithstanding the absence of their bodies, continue to be more present than ever in the inner experience of those who have loved them. For the families of the disappeared, to regain psychological equilibrium is a fine balance between the need to remember and the necessity to forget. The author affirms that, at a social and political level, to cultivate a collective memory of enforced disappearance is an ethical duty which validates the actual occurrence of the atrocities, helps prevent repetition and alleviates the transgenerational transmission of trauma.     

The early biopsychosocial development of boys and the origins of violence in males

We apply a biopsychosocial approach to introduce early-in-life experiences that explain a significant part of the male preponderance in the perpetration of violence. Early caregiver abuse and neglect, father absence, and exposure to family and neighborhood violence exacerbate boys’ greater risk for aggressive behavior and increase the probability of carrying out violent acts later in life. We examine the development of the psychological self and explore conditions that encourage physical aggression, focusing on the impact on the infant and toddler's emergent mental representation of self, others, and self–other relationships. Boys’ slower developmental timetable in the first years of life may enhance their vulnerability for disorganization in emergent neurobiological networks mediating organization of socioemotional relationships. Emergent attachment and activation relationship systems may differentially affect risk and resilience in boys and girls, particularly in single-parent families. Evidence has suggested that the dramatic increase in single-parent families is especially linked to corresponding increases in behavioral undercontrol, antisocial behavior, and the emergence of violence in boys.     

Longitudinal Effects of Latino Parent Cultural Stress,Depressive Symptoms,and Family Functioning on Youth Emotional Well‐Being and Health Risk Behaviors

U.S. Latino parents can face cultural stressors in the form of acculturative stress, perceived discrimination, and a negative context of reception. It stands to reason that these cultural stressors may negatively impact Latino youth's emotional well‐being and health risk behaviors by increasing parents' depressive symptoms and compromising the overall functioning of the family. To test this possibility, we analyzed data from a six‐wave longitudinal study with 302 recently immigrated (<5 years in the United States) Latino parents (74% mothers, M_age = 41.09 years) and their adolescent children (47% female, M_age = 14.51 years). Results of a cross‐lagged analysis indicated that parent cultural stress predicted greater parent depressive symptoms (and not vice versa). Both parent cultural stress and depressive symptoms, in turn, predicted lower parent‐reported family functioning, which mediated the links from parent cultural stress and depressive symptoms to youth alcohol and cigarette use. Parent cultural stress also predicted lower youth‐reported family functioning, which mediated the link from parent cultural stress to youth self‐esteem. Finally, mediation analyses indicated that parent cultural stress predicted youth alcohol use by a way of parent depressive symptoms and parent‐reported family functioning. Our findings point to parent depressive symptoms and family functioning as key mediators in the links from parent cultural stress to youth emotional well‐being and health risk behaviors. We discuss implications for research and preventive interventions.     

Actor–Partner Interdependence of Compassion toward Others with Qualities of Marital Relationship and Parent–Child Relationships in Chinese Families

Considering the nature of compassion and cultural and times characteristics of Chinese families, individuals' general dispositional compassion toward others may have potential benefits for relationship qualities in Chinese families. In this study, we explored how men's and women's compassion related to their own (actor effects) and the partners' (partner effects) marital relationship and parent–child relationships, respectively, using the Actor–Partner Interdependent Model. Participants were from a cross-sectional sample of 534 Chinese heterosexual married couples (females' mean age = 37.20, SD = 4.28; males' mean age = 40.29, SD = 5.39) whose biological children were pupils (mean age = 9.28, SD = 1.11). Results revealed that: (a) within marital relationships, couple members' actor effects and partner effects were found both significant; but (b) within parent–child relationships, couple members' actor effects were significant, whereas only mothers' partner effect of compassion on father–child relationship was significant. These findings support the benefits of couple members' individual compassion with respect to family relationship quality in contemporary China. Limitations, implications, and future directions are discussed.     

An Exploratory Study of Predictors of Relationship Commitment for Cisgender Female Partners of Transgender Individuals

The current exploratory study investigates which variables predict commitment among cisgender women currently in a relationship with a transgender-identified partner. This study includes variables specific to gender diverse couples such as years in the relationship, amount of prior knowledge about transgender identity, and gender role beliefs. Also included are the general relationship factors of satisfaction, quality of alternatives, investment size, and the outcome variable of commitment, as described in the Investment Model of Commitment. Using convenience sampling from online support groups, the sample was n = 138 cisgender female partners. The findings of the regression analyses indicate one's personal resilience and the number of years in the relationship prior to transition are significantly related to partner commitment, with satisfaction mediating both associations. The longer a participant was in the relationship at the time of a gender transition of a partner, the less satisfaction they report, thus reducing commitment to the relationship. Additionally the more personal resilience a partner endorses, the higher the relationship satisfaction, and in turn, more commitment is reported. The results offer information about the important factors related to staying in relationships during and after a gender transition.     

Community,Context, and Coping: How Social Connections Influence Coping and Well-Being for Military Members and Their Spouses

Military members and their spouses (n = 223 families) were selected from an Active Duty Army installation and assessed with regard to their connections with the military community, their levels of coping with military culture demands, and their reports of individual (depression and life satisfaction) and family well-being. Guided by the contextual model of family stress and the social organization theory of action and change, results from a structural equation model indicated that military community connections, for both military members and their civilian spouses, were related to coping with the military culture and its demands, which in turn was related to both individual and family well-being. Unique actor and partner effects also emerged where both active duty military members' and their civilian spouses' perceptions of military community connections influenced the civilian spouses' satisfaction with military life, but only the active duty military members' community connections influenced their military-specific coping. Additionally, the associations between military-specific coping and individual and family well-being only had actor effects. When examined within the context of important military culture elements, namely rank and extent of military transitions (deployment and relocation), these core findings linking communities to coping and well-being were unchanged. Implications for theory, future research, and practice are shared.