Depression and Aggression in Family interaction

Gerald R. Patterson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781134738014
• Topic: Psicologia
• Subtopic: Psicologia clinica

This collection updates research on family processes relating to aggression and depression. It contains state-of-the-art information and such recent methodological innovations as time series, sequential analysis, and method problems in the application of a structural equation modeling. An ideal supplementary text and reference for graduate students and professionals in clinical, social, environmental, and health psychology, family counseling, psychotherapy, and behavioral medicine.

1

The Family Research Consortium: At the Crest of a Major Wave?

David Reiss

George Washington University Medical Center

Joy Schulterbrandt

National Institution of Mental Health

The Family Research Consortium can be viewed as itself a small-scale group interaction experiment; when this experiment has run its course it may help to answer four questions:

1. Is it possible for a group of working family scientists to define, accurately and contemporaneously, the major ebbs and flows of their own field. In particular, can they spot a significant wave of scientific advance before it crests.

2. Is it possible for such a group to position its work in relationship to that crest, drawing on the wave’s increasing momentum and directing and accelerating it further?

3. Is it possible for a group to sustain work of this kind even though it is dispersed to the four corners of a large continent?

4. If work of this kind is possible, what are the social structures, within the group, which work best?

This very brief essay on the Consortium is, perhaps, a fitting opening for the report of the Consortium’s first annual Summer Institute. The Institute itself, including the publication of its proceedings, constitutes one of the social structures sustaining the work of the Consortium; part of the group interaction experiment. The Institute was designed to serve two functions simultaneously. First, as intended in the original blueprint for the Consortium, it is an opportunity for the Consortium and its scientific colleagues to contribute to and benefit from an intense week of continuing education in the field of family studies. Second, it is an opportunity for the Consortium and its colleagues to reflect on the progress of the Consortium itself. In fact, these are, presumably, synergistic efforts: the teaching function of the Institute is enhanced by appreciating the larger aims of the Consortium it was designed to serve.

Development of the Consortium

The Consortium developed partly by design and, in almost equal measure, partly by accident. Its progenitor was convened, in 1983, by Joy Schulterbrandt, then Chief of the Section on Family Process and Mental Health in the National Institute of Mental Health. It was convened as an advisory group to the Section, which itself was a new enterprise; it was the first administrative unit in the NIMH extramural program, the component responsible for giving research grants, to focus exclusively on the family and its relevance for mental health.

Schulterbrandt had three aims in mind for her advisory group. First, she needed advice on priorities in the field of family studies: What were the most promising areas likely to have a clear yield for mental health? Second, she needed to enhance the liaison between her program and the field of family studies. Here, the short term objective was to increase the flow of high quality grant applications but, beyond that, to enhance both programmatic research and training in the field of family studies. Finally, she needed to demonstrate for NIMH skeptics that it was possible to fill a small size conference room with family researchers who were also scientists: who understood, practiced and discussed sound research design.

The skepticism, it is worth pausing to note, was itself born of two important background issues. First, was the rapid emergence of the neurosciences in mental health research. By the time the little family working group was convened, many inside and outside the Institute were looking to the neurosciences as the king of the intellectual disciplines in mental health research, at long last a hard-nosed science which promised to have the biggest payoff for diagnosis and treatment of the major mental disorders. Equally important, family studies was attached to no discipline and had no independent credentials. In contrast, for example, cognitive science was squarely within the scientifically sturdy traditions of experimental psychology; hence, their practitioners were, at least, assumed to have met the basic requirements for a doctoral degree in the behavioral sciences. Who were these practitioners of family studies? Were they professional castoffs who didn’t know a chi-square from a centrifuge?

Thus, the group that convened initially was picked with certain criteria in mind. First, with one exception, they all held major NIMH research and/or training grants. Thus, they would know something of the NIMH system and would also have passed muster in front of scientific peers recognized by the NIMH. Second, again with one exception, they were all, shall we say, enjoying the fruits of midlife. They were laboratory or program directors who, in that capacity, represented a number of more junior colleagues, had experience with research training and were well known in the field. Third, they covered a broad-but not, presumably, too broad—spectrum of disciplines: developmental psychology, clinical psychology, psychiatric epidemiology and clinical psychiatry. Notably absent were sociology, history, ethology and animal studies, and anthropology. Fourth, again with one exception, all were heavily engaged in the direct observation and precise measurement of family interaction. As a group they were enthralled by the unanticipated and arresting patterns of interaction behavior when members of the same family were observed together. Fifth, their work centered squarely on mental illness and mental health. More than half were active and committed clinicians and all were doing research on disorders of individuals or relationships of conspicuous clinical relevance.

In 1983, when the group was convened, it would have been possible to fill several small conference rooms with men and women who met these criteria, particularly if the criterion of funded NIMH applications was relaxed. Thus, the Consortium was—in a very important sense—an interesting accident rather than an august, duly constituted college. Moreover, although Schulterbrandt had some hopes from the first, it was also an accident that the group became self-perpetuating. Efforts at self-perpetuation arose from three discoveries the group made about itself as it worked. First, its members were learning from each other and no other group was serving a similar continuing education function for them in this country or abroad. Second, as it surveyed the field, it recognized that many other investigators, were they also in the group, would experience the same thing. Most were self-taught family researchers and had obtained their degrees in some other field. A few academic settings had groups of sophisticated, senior researchers but many more family researchers worked in relative isolation in their institutions—mainly with their own junior colleagues and students. Thus, there was a genuine task to be done: to afford to other investigators some measure of the collective self-education the fledgling Consortium was beginning to enjoy. Third, and most important, the group thought they detected a major confluence of intellectual themes in family studies, the cresting of an intellectual wave. Research and research training could, they predicted, benefit immensely if this confluence could be encouraged. There seemed to be no other agency tending precisely to this chore; thus began the little social experiment of the Consortium. It developed two simultaneous objectives: (1) to identify some of the most promising themes in family research, particularly in relationship to mental health, and encourage their confluence in strong, programmatic research, and (2) to design and maintain novel social forms to achieve those objectives; its first two social experiments are the Summer Institutes and a ten-site, 3-year postdoctoral training program in family process and mental health. Each of these initiatives are currently supported by NIMH grants.

The Confluence of Intellectual Themes

As it surveyed the family field, the fledgling Consortium thought it detected several emerging themes. These themes seemed always to have both a methodological and theoretical aspect and either or both could be emphasized.

Perhaps the most central was to recognize that the field of family studies, and those who watched it from outside, had been energized by several findings of enormous theoretical and practical relevance. The first was the growing recognition that the clinical course of some major mental disorders were intimately linked to specific, measurable, and contemporaneous family process. For example, hospitalizations of adults with schizophrenia were closely linked to hostile and intrusive interaction patterns in their families and severe conduct disorders in school age boys were tied, with equal closeness, to patterns of coercive relationships among all members of their families. These data were leading to a reconceptualization of mental illness as not simply a disorder under the skin of single individuals but also as a public reflection of more secluded patterns within the interior of the family group.

These intimate and important associations were buttressed by major advances in the measurement of family interaction process. These advances, in turn, led to the recognition that family interaction processes were intimately tied not only to major psychopathological syndromes but also to variations in normal human development as well. For example, in this country and abroad, a series of detailed studies of marital interaction patterns was particularly fruitful. For example, using precise, direct observations of marital interaction, patterns specific to unhappy marriages were observed: Unhappy marriages were unable to damp down reciprocal, negative exchanges of feelings in the service of efficient information exchange, mutual support and problem solving. These patterns had significant impact on the development of the marital relationship as well as on the psychological and physical well-being of the marital partners themselves.

These major findings suggested both the vitality and importance of the family research field. It encouraged us to conduct an informal survey of this field. We asked, what are the important new intellectual themes and research methods and what further advances would be possible if these underlying developments were identified and encouraged? Four major themes, which can only be alluded to in this brief essay, seemed especially promising: life-span development in concentric family and community contexts; social and family learning; the temporal form of family relationships, and the evolution of social reality in families.

Life-Span Development in Concentric Family and Community Contexts

The Consortium recognized, along with many of its colleagues in the field, that family studies were contributing to a radically new concept of human development. This new concept could be broken down into three components.

First, human development could no longer be seen as being driven simply by some internal engine which prompted the unfolding of human potential in critical phases of childhood and adulthood. Rather, both child and adult development was deeply embedded in contemporaneous family processes. Indeed the family could be understood as a confluence and regulator of simultaneous developmental trajectories of all its members. For example, family-oriented studies of early infancy were recognizing that infancy not only initiates a cascade of developmental process in the newborn family member. Simultaneously the parents’ relationships with each other, with their other children, with their own parents, with their friends and places of employment also shifts. The infant’s own development remains highly sensitive to major shifts or transformations in any of these other relationships in this broad social context. Furthermore, studies of difficult or disabled infants demonstrated that all, these other relationship systems—and the development of individuals within them—are responsive to the vicissitudes of the infant’s own development.

A second component of this concept was to recognize that families, as coherent entities, have their own developmental trajectories. They go through expectable developmental crises and changes during the formation and solidification of marriage, through child rearing, and through death and dissolution. Further, important intergenerational processes, linking development in older and younger generations within the same family, could be mapped with increasing precision. More recently, family developmental processes in response to unanticipated events such as divorce and fatal illness could be defined. Recognizable phases of premonitory stress, severe crisis and a kind of family wound healing could be observed. More important, significant maladaptive variations in these sequences of crisis and wound healing, with major implications for mental health, could be measured with increasing precision. An intriguing concept emerging from these studies is that one set of factors may initiate transitions and crises in families and another set shape the family’s longer term responses.

Finally, it became increasingly evident that these coordinated processes of development, regulated and mediated within the family, are shaped in major ways by the communities in which families live together. A new discipline of community/family epidemiology was deploying powerful techniques of sampling, measurement and analysis to map variation in family form and functioning within well-defined communities. Data emerging from these studies clarified at least two forms of community influence. First were the impact of variations within the community on development in the family. For example, even within the same community dramatic variations in structure and discipline among schools and class rooms play major roles in shaping the lives of children within families. Second, variation among communities had equally important impacts. For example, variation in community structure, including levels of employment, have been shown to have a major impact on the control of violence within the family.

Social and Family Learning

A second major theme, noted by the new Consortium, was strong evidence suggesting that the family was a central agency of learning. The powerful techniques of behavioral analyses and learning theory had their origins in laboratory studies of the links between animal behavior and inanimate, reinforcing stimuli. A major transformation of the field occurred when social stimuli—behavior of other individuals—were recognized as reinforcing. This perspective has become expanded and transformed in the study of the family most notably in the study of childhood and adolescent psychopathology and marital conflict. New techniques of laboratory and in-home observation have mapped repetitive sequences of social behavior which serve to both positively and negative reinforce problem behaviors such as destructive aggression. Perhaps the central finding in this tradition is that sequences of family behavior include reinforcers such that a reaction subsequent in the chain serves to reinforce the prior response. In this way behavioral cycles, often quite destructive, become firmly embedded in the texture of family life.

One of the most intriguing mechanisms, emerging from many family studies, is an analog in families of the well-known escape-conditioning learning process. Family members, often through aversive or violent behavior, “escape” from unpleasant social stimuli from others by reducing the frequency of those negative social stimuli. Violence in one member, for example, often leads to appeasement in the other. This “escape” enhances or reinforces the aversive or violent behavior in conspicuously effective ways; extinction becomes most unlikely.

Because of the precision of this behavioral analysis of family process it has been possible to design equally precise interventions to interrupt these destructive behavioral cycles. The therapeutic benefit of many of these programs has already been clearly demonstrated. Perhaps of greater importance, the family learning perspective has generated the greatest impetus for using precisely tailored interventions as true experimental tests of models of family process.

The Temporal Form of Family Relationships

As techniques for microscopic analyses of family behavior have rapidly improved a new conception of family relationships has been shaped. This conception relates changes in the family which unfold on a second-to-second basis with those changes which occur over a span of months or even years.

Three interrelated developments in methods are critical here. First, has been the development of new techniques for measuring communicative intent and affect in family members. These techniques permit careful measurement of the feelings and interpersonal strategies inherent in even very brief interactions. Second have been techniques which permit simultaneous measurement of the autonomic nervous system, as well as other physiological control mechanisms, alongside measures of family interaction. The third advance has been statistical and computer methods for storing large amounts of data and examining the physiological and communication data for its sequential patterns.

These powerful new tools have yielded images of relationships unfolding in four broad spans of time. One the most microscopic levels are very brief repeated sequences of interaction—usually containing seven or fewer separate components—and lasting only a few moments. The irritable sequences in unhappy marriages, noted earlier, have now also been observed in mother infant interaction as well interaction between parents and older children. However, interaction also unfolds across longer episodes sometimes lasting from minutes to hours and proceeds through recognizable phases. For example, marital conflict situations can be seen as proceeding through agenda building, arguing and negotiation phases. The patterns of more microscopic interactional sequences changes in each of these three phases. In yet a third span of time, often lasting over days and weeks, are recognizable time-dependent transformations in relationships. These have been studied with particular care in marital as well as friendship dyads; clearly demarcated phases in relationship development are being identified. Finally are changes over months and years, phasic patterns in relationship development, which are only just being demarcated.

Social Reality in Families

A final theme noted by the Consortium, along with other observers of the family field, is concerned not with the analysis of behavior primarily ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. The Family Research Consortium: At the Crest of a Major Wave?
• 2. Developmental Epidemiological Framework for Family Research on Depression and Aggression
• 3. Methodological Issues in the Study of Family Violence
• 4. How Marriages Change
• 5. A Contextual Approach to the Problem of Aversive Practices in Families
• 6. Statistical Methods for Analyzing Family Interaction
• 7. Family Environments of Depressed and Well Parents and Their Children: Issues of Research Methods
• 8. Maternal Depression, Marital Discord, and Children’s Behavior: A Developmental Perspective
• 9. Initiation and Maintenance of Process Disrupting Single-Mother Families
• 10. Method Variance in Structural Equation Modeling: Living with “Glop”
• 11. Reflections: A Conceptual Analysis and Synthesis
• Author Index
• Subject Index