Gay and Lesbian Couples in Italy: Comparisons with Heterosexual Couples

Assessing couple relationships across diverse languages and cultures has important implications for both clinical intervention and prevention. This is especially true for nontraditional relationships potentially subject to various expressions of negative societal evaluation or bias. Few empirically validated measures of relationship functioning have been developed for cross‐cultural applications, and none have been examined for their psychometric sufficiency for evaluating same‐sex couples across different languages and cultures. The current study examined the psychometric properties of an Italian translation of the Marital Satisfaction Inventory – Revised (MSI‐R), a 150‐item 13‐scale measure of couple relationship functioning, for its use in assessing the intimate relationships of gay and lesbian couples in Italy. Results for these couples were compared to data from heterosexual married and unmarried cohabiting couples from the same geographical region, as well as to previously published data for gay, lesbian, and unmarried heterosexual couples from the United States. Findings suggest that, despite unique societal pressures confronting Italian same‐sex couples, these relationships appear resilient and fare well both overall and in specific domains of functioning compared to heterosexual couples both in Italy and the United States.     

Evaluación de patrones de aprendizaje como cambio

Resumen

Como resumen de este artículo queremos manifestar que no son frecuentes las publicaciones que pretenden una armonización entre conceptualizaciones-reconceptualizaciones de contenidos de cambio, diseños de recogida de datos y métodos de tratamiento de datos. Menos frecuentes todavía son las publicaciones orientadas a conectar tipos y clases de diseños de recogida de datos con instrumentos de medida, a causa del hecho histórico de que, mientras que los diseños de recogida de datos han sido dominio casi exclusivo de los experimentalistas, los psicómetras se han centrado en los instrumentos de medida.

También queremos manifestar que el fin de este artículo es el de contribuir a esta armonización desde el contexto del método científico como marco de referencia de los distintos componentes que entran en juego.     

Enhancing parental reflective functioning: A special tribute to the life and work of Nancy E. Suchman,PhD

Nancy E. Suchman's contributions to the fields of infant mental health, maternal reflective functioning, and attachment-based intervention will have long-lasting impacts. In particular, through the development and dissemination of her intervention program, Mothering from the Inside Out (MIO), she innovated a way of working with mothers with substance use disorders that represented a paradigm shift within the field of addiction. In this introduction to the special issue, written to honor her life and work, we review Nancy's background and briefly describe her academic accomplishments. The special issue contains nine qualitative and quantitative research reports written by Nancy's colleagues and their collaborators. All nine papers pertain to the theme of understanding, measuring, and promoting parents’ capacity for reflective functioning. Four provide findings that advance our understanding of parental reflective functioning. The other five highlight insights from continuing evaluations of MIO, including new adaptations of the model. To introduce the special issue, we provide an overview of the scope of the work done within these projects. Finally, the special issue concludes with two commentaries contributed by Linda Mayes and Arietta Slade, leading scholars within the field who were also Nancy's close colleagues. Both provide insight into Nancy's impact on the field.     

Self-reported reflective functioning and father–child interactions in a sample of fathers who have used intimate partner violence

Reflective functioning (RF) has been found to be associated with mother–child interactions, but less is known about the association of fathers’ self and child-focused RF and father–child relationships.  Fathers who have histories of intimate partner violence (IPV) are known to have poor RF, which may impact their father–child interactions.  The current study was designed to examine how types of RF are associated with father–child relationships.  Pretreatment assessments and recorded, coded father–child play interactions were used to examine associations among fathers’ history of adverse childhood experiences (ACES), RF and coded father-child play interactions in a sample of 47 fathers with a history of IPV use in the last 6 months with their coparent.  Fathers’ ACES and their child's mental states (CM) were associated with father-child dyadic play interactions.  Fathers with greater ACES and higher scores on CM had the most dyadic tension and constriction during play interactions.  Those with high ACES but low CM had scores similar to those with low ACES and low CM.  These results indicate that fathers who have used IPV and have a history of significant adversity may benefit from interventions to increase their child-focused RF and further improve their interactions with their children.     

Introducing the Expectations and Preference Scales for Couple Therapy (EPSCT): Development,Psychometric Evaluation,and Suggested Use in Practice and Research

While it is known that client factors account for the largest proportion of outcome variance across treatment modalities, little is known about how clients’ characteristics affect the process and effectiveness of couple therapy. To further knowledge in this area, we created a brief, practice‐friendly measure, the Expectation and Preference Scales for Couple Therapy (EPSCT). Three self‐report scales assess clients’ Outcome expectations (e.g., I expect our relationship to improve as a result of couple therapy) and role expectations for Self (e.g., I expect to listen to my partner's concerns) and Partner (e.g., I expect my partner to blame me). Three Cognitive‐Behavioral, Emotionally Focused, and Family Systems preference scales use a forced‐choice format to measure the comparative strength of respondents’ preferences for interventions broadly reflective of each approach. A large item pool was developed from relevant literature and clinical experience and refined based on face and content analyses with two panels of experienced couple therapists and researchers. Across four studies with 1,175 participants, the scales’ internal consistency reliabilities were similar and their construct validity was supported with confirmatory factor analyses and significant correlations with several established measures, including expectation measures developed for individual psychotherapy and measures of attitudes toward professional help seeking and valuing personal growth. Across all studies, participants had stronger role expectations for themselves than their partners, although gender effects differed by sample. We discuss how to use the 15‐item EPSCT in clinical practice and in future research as a predictor of couple therapy processes and outcomes.     

Intimacies: An Integrative Multicultural Framework for Couple Therapy

Implicitly or explicitly, our ideas about intimacy are the most fundamental notions giving direction to the process of couple therapy. Yet, as a field, we have spent little time conceptualizing intimacy and even less time considering the diversity of priorities and meanings couples bring to our offices. In Part One, Varieties of Intimacy, I describe a kaleidoscope of contexts—socio‐historical, cultural, gender, life cycle, and developmental—that inform our ideas and expectations for intimacy in couples’ relationships. I highlight different spheres in which intimacy may take place such as the emotional, sexual, intellectual, or familial. I propose a starting point in which the therapist, in a collaborative manner, helps the partners articulate their yearnings and priorities in order to negotiate a shared vision. In Part Two, Conceptualizing Intimacy, I suggest an experiential definition that gives room for each partner's subjective meanings, yet consider diverse relational processes that may need to be addressed for a resilient ebb and flow of intimate experiences. In Part Three , Sexual Intimacy, I outline conditions in which sex is more likely to be experienced as intimate rather than nonintimate. Finally, in Part Four, I describe Therapeutic Principles to guide the therapist in taking couples from reactivity to dialogue to negotiations of intimacy. The integrative framework proposed here discourages monolithic a priori notions of intimacy and highlights instead: nuanced meanings, relational processes to be considered differentially, present and past emotional blocks, and a flexible clinical approach to foster conditions for the creation and resilience of intimate experiences.     

African American Couples in the 21st Century: Using Integrative Systemic Therapy (IST) to Translate Science into Practice

The complexity of the African American community in the United States continues to evolve. The growing number of professional African Americans who grew up in the postcivil rights era combined with the persistent reminders of inequity paints a complex backdrop for understanding African American relationships. The majority of our knowledge about African American couples disproportionately comes from nonclinical social science fields such as sociology and demography. Unfortunately, the scholarly literature on how to work with African American couples is relatively scant. This paper seeks to add to this limited literature by providing clinicians and scholars with a proposed set of issues to consider when conceptualizing and treating African American couples. In particular, the complexity and nuance needed to work with African American couples are best done by using an integrative model. Thus, this paper will discuss how the Integrative Systemic Therapy (IST) model is particularly well suited for working with African American couples. This paper will summarize the science on African American marriages with a focus on salient factors such as gender, SES, and trust, which will then be translated into clinical practice by utilizing a case example. The case example will be of a middle‐class couple in order to delineate the challenges and the growing heterogeneity of African Americans. The article will conclude with a commentary on the evolving heterogeneity of African Americans, which sheds light on how an integrative perspective is important for disentangling and embracing the growing complexity of African American couples.     

Parents as Partners: A U.K. Trial of a U.S. Couples‐Based Parenting Intervention For At‐Risk Low‐Income Families

Despite the well‐established links between couple relationship quality and healthy family functioning, and burgeoning evidence from the international intervention field, there is little or no evidence of the efficacy of couples‐based interventions from the United Kingdom (U.K.). This study explored whether the Parents as Partners (PasP) program, a group‐based intervention developed in the United States, brought about the same benefits in the U.K. The evaluation is based on 97 couples with children from communities with high levels of need, recruited to PasP because they are at high risk for parent and child psychopathology. Both mothers and fathers completed self‐report questionnaires assessing parents’ psychological distress, parenting stress, couple relationship quality and conflict, fathers’ involvement in child care and, importantly, children's adjustment. Multilevel modeling analysis comparing parents’ responses pre‐ and postintervention not only showed substantial improvements for both parents on multiple measures of couple relationship quality, but also improvements in parent and child psychopathology. Analyses also indicated most substantial benefits for couples displaying poorest functioning at baseline. The findings provide initial evidence for the successful implementation of PasP, an American‐origin program, in the U.K., and add support for the concept of the couple relationship as a resource by which to strengthen families.     

The latency complex: the dead hand of anti‐development

It is common knowledge that the same phenomena can be viewed in a variety of ways. This paper considers the implications of a constellation observed in some adult patients who have increasingly reminded the author of some of the children of latency age with whom he has also worked. In the literature these patients may also have been thought about in terms of ‘defences of the self’ (Fordham), patients who are ‘difficult to reach’ (Joseph), ‘psychic retreats’ (Steiner), and those who make ‘attacks on linking’ (Bion). They may equally be considered in terms of schizoid, narcissistic or borderline personalities, or as showing features on the autistic spectrum, such as mindlessness and extreme obsessionality. Writers such as Helene Deutsch with her concept of an ‘as‐if personality’, Winnicott with his ‘false self’, and Rosenfeld, discussing the split‐off parts of the personality in narcissistic patients, have also offered much to think about in their consideration of some of these phenomena. This paper proposes yet another vertex – the author's own imaginative conjecture – that is by no means mutually exclusive of any of these others.