Tomorrow's Family Reforms: Marriage Course,Marriage Test,Incorporated Families,and Sex Selection Mandate*

Ideas abound for specific new laws and programs to strengthen family life, as evident in the 34 detailed reform proposals hammered out and endorsed by 2000 delegates to the 1980 White House Conference on Families. Looking beyond even these 34 items, however, to valuable reform possibilities still too controversial for the likes of a White House Conference, four in particular stand out. This article discusses these possible reforms.     

Encoding-decoding of nonverbal emotional messages: Sex differences in spontaneous and enacted expressions

Male and female encoding-decoding of spontaneous and enacted nonverbal affective behavior was evaluated using the Buck (1977) slide-viewing paradigm. The eliciting stimuli were carefully selected and evaluated to insure a comparable emotional impact on both sexes, and all subjects received the same decoding task. Consistent with previous research, females were superior decoders overall. Also as predicted, females were superior encoders, principally when reacting spontaneously to the slides. Given no evidence of differential affective arousal, this sex difference for spontaneous encoding is interpreted to reflect differences in male-female display rules. Contrary to several previous findings spontaneous and enacted encoding measures were not strongly related, especially for males, where display rules may modify their spontaneous and enacted expressive behavior in comparison to females. There was no consistent positive or negative relationship between dimensional or category measures of encoding-decoding for either sex. Future investigations should separately evaluate encoding-decoding phenomena for each sex, employing more precise methods to evaluate the specific nonverbal behaviors actually important to the encoding-decoding communication process.     

A Use of Social Exchange Theory in Family Crisis Intervention*

This paper explores the practical application of social exchange theory in conceptualizing a working hypothesis in family crisis intervention. It is hypothesized that the range of exchange content in a family crisis situation is proportional to the frequency of negative communication. The contention is made that offering specific behavioral exchange equivalents to family members based on need-response patterns allows for resolution of the family conflict. A case example illustrates support for the hypothesis and implications for future empirical research in family crisis studies are noted.