Assessing Intimacy: The Pair Inventory*

PAIR, acronym for Personal Assessment of Intimacy in Relationships, was developed as a tool for educators, researchers and therapists. PAIR provides systematic information on five types of intimacy: emotional, social, sexual, intellectual and recreational. Individuals, married or unmarried, describe their relationship in terms of how they currently perceive it (perceived) and how they would like it to be (expected). PAIR can be used with couples in marital therapy and enrichment groups.     

Working With LGBT Baby Boomers and Older Adults: Factors That Signal a Welcoming Service Environment

Many providers recognize the importance of creating culturally competent services for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) older adults. Although multiple resources list steps to make professional practices more LGBT-welcoming, these resources provide no empirical data to support their recommendations. LGBT older adults (N = 327) were asked to describe what signals that a provider is LGBT-welcoming. Six of the top 10 signals related to provider behavior and suggest the importance of staff training; the balance included display of signage and rainbow flags, use of inclusive language on forms and the presence of LGBT-identified staff. Results provide evidence-based recommendations for working with LGBT older adults.     

Eliminating the U.S. drug lag: Implications for drug safety

An increase in new drugs first launched in the U.S. and shorter lags between first global drug launch and U.S. approval indicate that the U.S. drug lag has declined. This paper examines the impact of these changes on drug safety using adverse drug reaction data for FDA-approved drugs in 1990 to 2004. Results show two different effects. First, drugs having longer U.S. launch lags (more foreign market experience) have fewer post approval drug risks compared to drugs with shorter launch lags. This result implies that foreign market experience prior to U.S. entry provides information to help alleviate drug-related risks for U.S. patients. Second, drugs that are first launched in the U.S. have fewer serious drug reactions compared to those that were first launched abroad. This result is surprising, and may suggest that first U.S. drug launch signals information about unobserved application quality, which translates into lower post approval drug risks.     

Mothers' and Fathers' Use of Internal State Talk with their Young Children

The present study extends previous results demonstrating a relation between maternal discourse and child social understanding to include paternal discourse. Emotion understanding (EU) and theory of mind (ToM) were considered as two distinctive aspects of social understanding. Participants were 106 children (54 boys and 52 girls) studied at 3.5 and 5 years. Discourse measures came from separate parent–child conversations during a picture‐book task; measures of EU and ToM came from children's performance on social cognition tasks. Differences in parental talk translated into important differences in the influence of each parent on children's social‐cognitive understanding. Mothers' references to emotion and emotion causal explanatory language predicted children's concurrent EU. Fathers' use of causal explanatory language referring to desires and emotions predicted children's concurrent and later ToM. These results highlight important differences between mothers and fathers in their use of internal state language and its impact on children's social‐cognitive understanding.     

PREDICTING MARITAL SUCCESS WITH PREPARE: A PREDICTIVE VALIDITY STUDY

In order to determine the predictive validity of the premarital inventory PREPARE, this study assessed the utility of PREPARE inpredicting marital success. A 3-year follow-up study was conducted with 164 couples who took PREPARE during their engagement. As hypothesized, it was found that satisfied couples scored significantly higher on the inventory than dissatisfied couples, divorced couples, and couples who cancelled their marriage. It was also hypothesized and found that dissatisfied married couples did not differ significantly from couples who cancelled their marriage or those who divorced. Using discriminant analysis, it was found that the PREPARE scores from 3 months before marriage could predict with 80–90% accuracy which couples were separated and divorced from those that were happily married. These findings not only demonstrate the predictive validity of PREPARE, but its potential utility in identifying high-risk couples who could benefit from more intensive premarital counseling.     

Baby talk to the babyfaced

The power of an infantile appearance to elicit baby talk was investigated by assessing the use of baby talk in task instructions to four-year-old children, who were portrayed as either relatively babyfaced or maturefaced. Men and women taught two tasks to a randomly selected boy or girl via a telephone conversation after being shown a photograph, which presumably depicted the child whom they were instructing. Paralleling facial differences between babies and adults, babyfaced children had rounder faces, larger eyes, thinner eyebrows, and smaller noses than the maturefaced. As predicted, adults used more baby talk when instructing babyfaced than maturefaced children. This effect was manifested in linguistic indicators of baby talk (slow timing and high clarification, simplification, and attention maintenance), as well as in paralinguistic indicators of baby talk (high pitch and changing intonation). The receipt of linguistic baby talk, in turn, facilitated the child's ability to choose a card which matched the one being described. The fact that facial babyishness influenced baby talk even when baby- and maturefaced children were equated in age, attractiveness, and perceived competence suggests that a small approximation to the craniofacial qualities that distinguish infants from adults may in and of itself be sufficient to elicit this speech register.This research was supported by NIMH grant #BSR5 R01 MH42684 to the first author. The authors would like to express their appreciation to the Brandeis University and Wellesley College Daycare Centers for their cooperation in this research. Thanks are also extended to Stacy Silberman for serving as one of the experimenters and to Becky Gilbert, Katina Lawdis, Sheryl Levy, and Liz Tighe for their help in coding the data.     

Emerging Trends in Treating Relationships

Treating relationships has become the hallmark of increasing numbers of therapists in the last decade. The interest in the field of marriage and and family counseling is also reflected by the mushrooming number of theoretical and empirical publications. This paper reviews some of the conceptual and programmatic trends that are occurring and also highlights several of the trends in evaluation of the effectiveness of treatment.