Nonverbal behavior and attitudes toward touch

A measure of comfort with touching was found to predict whether or not subjects would volunteer to participate in an experiment involving hugging strangers of both sexes and also to predict levels of personal space. Among those volunteering to give hugs, subjects reporting greater comfort with touch rated those hugs more positively, but this seemed to reflect a readiness to interpret touch positively rather than any clear differences in the nature of the hug actually given. Earlier findings that women report greater comfort with touch than do men were replicated. It was found that reported touch comfort was directly related to such constructs as satisfaction with life, with oneself, and with one's childhood, as well as to self-confidence, assertiveness, socially acceptable self-presentation, and active rather than passive modes of coping with problems. Touch comfort was inversely related to expressed concerns with touches which might reflect status differentials, homosexuality, or negative affective states. It was concluded that the touch comfort construct reflects the degree of one's openness to expressing intimate behavior, the degree to which one adopts an active, rather than passive, interpersonal style, and the degree to which one's social relationships are satisfactory.     

STRUCTURED MARITAL SEPARATION AS A MARITAL TREATMENT METHOD*

This article describes therapist-structured marital separation for distressed couples during their critical period of deciding whether to divorce or remain married. Characteristics of marital distress appropriate for structured marital separation are identified and discussed; potential benefits are explicated; and the design of the separation contract is specified. Issues addressed in the structure of the separation include the duration of the separation; the frequency of contact between partners; sexual contact between partners; dating; sexual contact with others; privacy; and contact with children.     

Independent social choice correspondences

A fixed agenda social choice correspondence on outcome set X maps each profile of individual preferences into a nonempty subset of X. If satisfies an analogue of Arrow's independence of irrelevant alternatives condition, then either the range of contains exactly two alternatives, or else there is at most one individual whose preferences have any bearing on . This is the case even if is not defined for any proper subset of X.