No abstract

Two studies investigating young adults' recollections of high levels of conflict and violence with a sibling during childhood and adolescence compared the experiences of four groups: those who were violence perpetrators, violence victims, those with reciprocal violence, and a control group. Of college students in the first study, 28% reported high levels of conflict or violence with a sibling. Female Ss and those who were the younger sibling experienced more conflict and violence than did male Ss and older siblings. In the second study, associations of conflict and violence with emotional adjustment revealed that female Ss had more negative emotional outcomes than did male Ss. A positive association was also found among severe violence in the parental and the sibling dyad.

Research shows that people characterized as repressors display inhibited recall for unpleasant memories. In this study, the relationship between repressive coping style and the recall of affect near the time of the experience was compared to delayed recall. An experience sampling technique was used to collect affect data twice daily for 4 weeks. Repressive coping style was found to be related to low levels of average daily unpleasant affect and lowered delayed recall of unpleasant affect. Unlike repressors, high anxious individuals overestimated unpleasant affect during delayed recall. Repressors did not exhibit isolation of the dominant unpleasant affect from nondominant unpleasant affect in daily reporting. The overall pattern of results suggests that the effect of repressive coping style is to diminish the encoding of all unpleasant affect, whereas trait anxiety appears to promote overestimation in the recall of unpleasant affect.

Research on personality and emotion has emphasized individual differences in the amounts of various emotions experienced over time. In this study we take a different approach, one that focuses on individual differences in the structure ot affective lives. In particular, we assess the structural complexity of daily affect ratings for each of our subjects, and then relate individual differences in affective complexity to aspects of personality. Affective complexity is defined as the number of within-subject factors needed to account for a given amount of variance in each subjects' daily mood ratings. Our study expands on the pioneering work of Wessman and Ricks (1966) by studying both males and females, employing a broader range of personality variables, and using measures of emotional lifestyle that are independent from the data which are used to generate the affect complexity score. We found that men and women did not differ in terms of mean levels of affect complexity. However, gender differences did emerge in the correlates of affect complexity. For men, affect complexity is associated with general unhappiness, introversion, neuroticism, and higher levels of psychosomatic complaints. These correlations were insignificant for women. For both men and women affect complexity is related to emotional stability and lowered emotional reactivity. The concepts of gender stereotypes, gender role stress, and feeling rules are employed to discuss our results.

Although individuals differ widely in the typical intensity of their affective experience, the mechanisms that create or maintain these differences are unclear. Larsen, Diener, and Cropanzano (1987) examined the hypothesis that individual differences in affect intensity (AI) are related to how people interpret emotional stimuli. They found that high AI individuals engaged in more personalizing and generalizing cognitions while construing emotional stimuli than low AI individuals. The present study extends these findings by examining cognitive activity during a different task-the generation of information to communicate about life events. Participants provided free-response descriptions of 16 life events. These descriptions were content coded for five informational style variables. It was found that the descriptive information generated by high AI participants contained significantly more references to emotional arousal, more focus on feelings, and more generalization compared to participants low in AI. These results are consistent with the notion that specific cognitive activity may lead to, or at least be associated with, dispositional affect intensity. In addition, the informational style variables identified in this study were stable over time and consistent across situations. Although men and women differ in AI, this difference becomes insignificant after controlling for informational style variation. Overall results are discussed in terms of a model of various psychological mechanisms that may potentially create or maintain individual differences in affect intensity.