Narratives are an important component of culture and play a central role in transmitting social values. Little is known, however, about how the brain of a listener/reader processes narratives. A receiver's response to narration is influenced by the narrator's framing and appeal to values. Narratives that appeal to "protected values," including core personal, national, or religious values, may be particularly effective at influencing receivers. Protected values resist compromise and are tied with identity, affective value, moral decision-making, and other aspects of social cognition. Here, we investigated the neural mechanisms underlying reactions to protected values in narratives. During fMRI scanning, we presented 78 American, Chinese, and Iranian participants with real-life stories distilled from a corpus of over 20 million weblogs. Reading these stories engaged the posterior medial, medial prefrontal, and temporo-parietal cortices. When participants believed that the protagonist was appealing to a protected value, signal in these regions was increased compared with when no protected value was perceived, possibly reflecting the intensive and iterative search required to process this material. The effect strength also varied across groups, potentially reflecting cultural differences in the degree of concern for protected values.

The Revised Conflict Tactics Scales (CTS2) is frequently used to assess intimate partner violence (IPV), but consistently yields low to moderate interpartner concordance of reports. Interpartner concordance on an alternative measure, the Event History Calendar Interview (EHCI), is largely unknown. We observed limited interpartner concordance of IPV reports on the CTS2 and EHCI, with wives generally reporting more IPV than husbands. Compared with the CTS2, the EHCI detected more cases of IPV, but not differential behavior counts. Partners’ posttraumatic stress disorder severity, a common respondent characteristic and focus of IPV research, was associated with low interpartner concordance of reports on the CTS2, but not the EHCI. Additionally, husbands’ posttraumatic stress disorder severity was associated with wives reporting more husband-perpetrated IPV on the CTS2 than the EHCI. Overall, the EHCI appears to mitigate some of the problems associated with the CTS2 as a measure of IPV, particularly among more highly traumatized samples.

The high rates of intimate partner aggression (IPA) among new parents may be partly due to changes in couples' division of household labor and childcare, which disproportionately negatively impact women. This is the first study to examine the association between division of labor dissatisfaction and IPA perpetration across genders while also examining whether such dissatisfaction is specifically associated with IPA during conflicts about division of labor issues. Quarterly for 1 year, 109 women and 94 men from 111 couples with a first-born child approximately 32 months of age at study commencement described each incident of IPA that occurred during the quarter, including conflict topics and number of aggressive acts perpetrated. Division of labor and childcare comprised the largest portion (30%) of IPA conflict topics. Division of labor dissatisfaction at child age 24 months was positively associated with women's, but not men's, IPA perpetration during conflicts about division of labor issues, but not other topics. A similar pattern of results emerged in the examination of division of childcare dissatisfaction and conflicts about childcare versus other topics. The discovery that the impact of division of labor and childcare dissatisfaction on IPA perpetration is context-and gender-specific suggests that, among women, a history of dissatisfaction may impair appropriate conflict resolution skills specifically when addressing domains of dissatisfaction. These findings support prevention of women's IPA via nonaggressive strategies for addressing division of labor concerns and promotion of equal opportunities for women and men at home and in the workplace during the early parenting years.