THE PROCESS OF INTIMACY: SIMILARITY, UNDERSTANDING AND GENDER

This study examined gender and three aspects of marital intimacy using a method to establish both objective and subjective indices of intimacy. Fifty couples answered the Personal Assessment of Intimate Relationships (Schaefer & Olson, 1981) twice: once as a self-report and once to respond as they predicted their spouses would answer. Couples who were less accurate in predicting each other's responses also diverged in their experience of intimacy and reported lower intimacy. Results suggest that high intimacy is based on both understanding and similarity of intimate experience. Women reported significantly higher levels of intimacy and were also better than men in predicting their partners' feelings. These findings suggest that women may be more attuned to intimacy or that definitions and assessment of intimacy are gender biased or both.     

Long-term effects of teaching behavioral strategies for managing persistent auditory hallucinations in schizophrenia

1. Attendance at a 10-week class designed to teach behavioral management strategies to people with schizophrenia was effective in reducing some of the negative characteristics of auditory hallucinations for 12 months and in reducing anxiety for 9 months after completion of the class. 2. The sustained improvement experienced by class participants was characterized by their voices being less frequent and more mumbled and the participants feeling more in control, less distractible, and less anxious. 3. Participants recommended that other mental health consumers take similar classes to learn how to better manage their voices. 4. Monthly support groups may help participants maintain gains lost during the follow-up period.     

The ARCH(2) model: Pseudo-maximum estimation and asymptotic results under dependent innovations

This paper investigates the pseudo-maximum likelihood (PML) estimation of an ARCH(2) model when the innovations' law belongs to the quadratic exponential family. In addition, the error terms are conditionally independent, but not necessarily dependent. The consistency and asymptotic normality of the PML estimator are obtained by means of martingale techniques.