No abstract

Research on the relationship between life stress and illness has focused largely on stress caused by change. The present study examines a relatively neglected source of stress: everyday problems, defined as ongoing, often chronic situations, which are stressful for a substantial period of time. An inventory of everyday problems was developed, designed to minimize as much as possible potential confounds present in earlier work. It was administered to 281 undergraduate women along with a life events inventory, the Hopkins Symptom Checklist, and a social support scale, which measured family and nonfamily sources of support. Stepwise regression analyses indicated that everyday problems were more effective than life events in predicting psychological symptoms. Everyday problems were significant predictors of symptoms even after statistically controlling for life events, whereas life events had no predictive ability beyond that attributed to everyday problems. In addition, a significant interaction between everyday problems and life events was found. Multiple regression analyses also showed an interaction between everyday problems and nonfamily social support, as predicted by the buffering hypothesis. Within the methodological limitations of this study, these findings are interpreted as supporting the importance of everyday problems as a significant source of stress.

Research is reviewed which provides support for the thesis that, within certain boundary conditions, the association of punishment with a goal response during learning adds to the persistence of the response during extinction beyond the effects of reward-only during learning. Some theoretical considerations are offered to account for this phenomenon which make use of the constructs of anticipatory punishment responses, r p -s p , and anticipatory reward responses, r p -s r .

The literature on behavioral approaches to marriage therapy is reviewed. First, theories regarding the nature, etiology, and maintenance of marital problems are presented; second, behavioral approaches to treatment are described; and third, attempts to assess the efficacy of these treatments are evaluated. Although there is some highly suggestive evidence that behavioral interventions are effective, conclusive demonstrations have not been forthcoming. A series of suggestions are offered regarding future research.

This study investigated how marital relationship difficulties might be transmitted from parents to their late adolescent children's romantic relationships. Measures of perceived interparent conflict, styles of subject-parent conflict behaviors, and styles of subject-boyfriend/girlfriend conflict behaviors as well as a measure of general relationship difficulties were obtained from samples of 144 female and 79 male 18-19-year old college students. Subjects tend to use the same styles of conflict behavior with their boyfriends/girlfriends as with their parents. Path analyses showed that perceived interparent conflict is associated with avoidant, verbally aggressive, and for females, physically aggressive styles of conflict behavior with parents, and that some of these subject-parent conflict behavior styles are related to general relationship difficulties. The avoidance style is especially important in mediating between interparent conflict and the son's or daughter's relationship difficulties.