The Relationship between Power Perception and Couple's Conflict Management Strategy

Interpersonal conflict is integral to intimate spousal relationships, and while potentially destructive, it can also enhance sharing of feelings and thoughts and the sense of being loved. Its positive or negative effects partly rely on how partners deal with it. This study was conducted in Israel with 160 participants. All participants were Jewish and involved in long-term heterosexual intimate relationships (married/in a serious relationship). The study examines a model that suggests that perceived socioemotional and materialistic power of a couple predicts their conflict management strategies. In addition, we tested whether this relationship is mediated by perceived quality of spousal relationship. The perceived socioemotional power was found to predict only cooperative conflict management stratagies and only for women. It was also found that this correlation is mediated by the perceived quality of the relationship. This study enhances our understanding of the way individuals grapple with spousal conflicts and reveals the positive power that can be nurtured and embodied within the spousal relationship. In addition, this study reveals that the effect of power perception differs between men and women. Clinical and research implications for couple and family therapists are discussed, and suggestions for effective clinical practice in addressing marital power are given.     

方差分析的统计检验力和效果大小的常用方法比较

本文对用方差分析统计检验力和效果大小进行估计的几种不同方法作了简要的介绍和比较。     

决策权力和社会角色对混合动机冲突决策的影响

以最后报价谈判问题为实验材料,考察了混合动机冲突情境中决策权力和社会角色的影响。结果表明:(1)决策权力对决策者的决定有显著影响。拥有分配权的决策者倾向于采取竞争策略,拥有要求权的决策者倾向于采取平均分配策略,拥有否决权的决策者倾向于采取合作策略。(2)社会角色对决策者的决定有显著影响。与陌生人角色相比,担任好朋友角色的决策者决定得到的点数明显地更低。     

Stories of Relative Privilege: Power and Social Change in Feminist Community Psychology

Stories about community work in New Zealand and Scotland are presented to describe and reflect on issues central to feminist community psychology. Organizing a lesbian festival, Ingrid Huygens describes feminist processes used to equalize resources across Maori (indigenous) and Pakeha (white) groups. Heather Hamerton presents her experiences as a researcher using collective memory work to reflect on adolescent experiences related to gender, ethnicity, and class. Sharon Cahill chronicles dilemmas and insights from focus groups about anger with women living in public housing in Scotland. Each story chronicles experiences related to oppression and privilege, and describes the author's emotions and reflections. Individually and collectively, the stories illustrate the potential offered by narrative methods and participatory processes for challenging inequalities and encouraging social justice.     

Power,Freedom, and Individuality: Foucault and Sexual Difference

This paper offers a detailed account of Foucaults ethical and political notion of individuality as presented in his late work, and discusses its relationship to the feminist project of the theory of sexual difference. I argue that Foucaults elaboration of the classical ethos of care for the self opens the way for regarding the I-woman as an ethical, political and aesthetic self-creation. However, it has significant limitations that cannot be ignored. I elaborate on two aspects of Foucaults avoidance of sexual difference as a relevant category for an account of political and ethical individuality, which thus implicitly associates individual agency with men. I argue that Foucault implicitly assumes the existence of an ontological desire to become engaged in political self-creation. However, the ethical position of self-knowledge and desire should be understood as a contingent option that depends on material and historical conditions for its realization. Hence, I argue that a feminist reworking of Foucaults notion of political individuality should add a substantial ethical condition to the imperative of self-knowledge and self-creation – making possible the desiring woman subject.     

Healthy high-hostiles evidence low-alpha power (7.5-9.5Hz) changes during negative affective learning

The present experiment was designed to better understand the impact of positive and negative emotional processing among low- and high-hostile individuals. Based on previous research which found increased sympathovagal balance among low-hostiles to the negative version of the Affective Auditory Verbal Learning Test (AAVL), it was hypothesized that low-hostiles would experience increased cortical arousal to this stimulus whereas their high-hostile counterparts would not. As expected, low-hostiles experienced significantly reduced low-alpha power (7.5-9.5Hz) relative to high-hostiles during the presentation of the negative AAVL. In a replication of prior research, significant primacy and recency effects were noted for the negative and positive word lists, respectively. Results are discussed in terms of cerebral activation theory and the potential impact of emotional processing among high-hostile individuals and their likelihood to develop coronary heart disease.     

Principles for Designing Randomized Preventive Trials in Mental Health: An Emerging Developmental Epidemiology Paradigm

An emerging population-based paradigm is now being used to guide the design of preventive trials used to test developmental models. We discuss elements of the designs of several ongoing randomized preventive trials involving reduction of risk for children of divorce, for children who exhibit behavioral or learning problems, and for children whose parents are being treated for depression. To test developmental models using this paradigm, we introduce three classes of design issues: design for prerandomization, design for intervention, and design for postintervention. For each of these areas, we present quantitative results from power calculations. Both scientific and cost implications of these power calculations are discussed in terms of variation among subjects on preintervention measures, unit of intervention, assignment, balancing, number of pretest and posttest measures, and the examination of moderation effects.     

The (HI)Stories We Live by: Power/Knowledge and Family Therapy in Africa

There is a need to Africanise family therapy so as to serve the interest of local communities. Western approaches to family therapy have been accused of being irrelevant to African contexts. They are seen as forming part of a dominant scientific knowledge which invalidates local folk and cultural psychologies and thereby continuing a historical tradition of oppressive colonial power relations. This paper aims at archaeologising and evaluating such criticism by situating family therapy within different fields of knowledge that have emerged historically and are currently co-existing in Africa. The advantages and disadvantages of dominant family therapy approaches in African contexts are explored by focussing on power relations between different knowledges in Africa. It is argued that many global narratives of family therapy offer congenial companionship to many local African narratives, but that family therapists should pay more attention to local spiritual and political narratives so as to attain more legitimacy and validation by local communities.     

The Freedom-based Account of Solidarity and Basic Income

Real-libertarianism, as it is expressed in Philippe Van Parijs' recent monograph Real Freedom for All is characteristically committed to both self-ownership and 'solidarity’ with the infirm or handicapped. In this article it is argued that the conception of (real) freedom that is used to endorse self-ownership is inconsistent with the conception of (social) freedom or opportunity that is used to justify transfer payments to those with no or low earning capacity. The problem turns around the question whether one's freedom consists in the access one has to a share of the social product or in the measure of economic self-sufficiency one enjoys. Accordingly the role of private property in external resources as a condition for freedom is unclear: is it the basis of people's capacity for self-determination or is it the basis of people's bargaining power? Van Parijs' commitment to self-ownership suggests the former, his commitment to solidarity suggests the latter. A similar ambivalence is pointed out in his argument for a universal basic income, for which Real Freedom for All is so well-known.